Complaints policy
Our policies
We rely on kind supporters, people like you, to protect animals around the world. We want you to be happy and feel confident in how we work. That’s why we always want to hear your feedback.
World Animal Protection UK
our policies
At World Animal Protection we rely on kind supporters, people like you, to protect animals from cruelty and suffering around the world. Your support is so important. That’s why we are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what we will use it for. This policy sets out how and why World Animal Protection collects and uses your personal data, and how we keep it private and secure.
Personal data is information that identifies you or can be used to identify you. The policy relates to World Animal Protection’s use of personal information collected on our websites that link to this privacy policy, on social media or official World Animal Protection content on other websites. It also relates to our use of any personal information you provide to us by phone, SMS, email, in letters, in person and any personal information we may collect about you indirectly.
If you have any questions about this policy or how we use your personal data, please call 0800 316 9966, email privacy@worldanimalprotection.org.uk or write to Global Data Protection Manager, World Animal Protection, 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB.
A cookie is a small text file passed from your internet browser on to your computer's hard drive, allowing websites to remember who you are when you return. Cookies also track information such as how you arrived on sites, your time of arrival, the pages you viewed and how long you stayed.
We use cookies to ensure you receive the best experience on our website. By continuing to use our site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.
Cookies help World Animal Protection improve our website and ensure our advertising is as effective and efficient as possible. Cookies help World Animal Protection improve our website and make it more efficient for our users. Like many other website providers, we use cookies to make a link between you and the information you have provided to our website. The information we collect through cookies is anonymous and not personally identifiable. It does not contain your name, address, telephone number, or email address.
World Animal Protection sometimes use third party advertising companies to serve adverts to visitors of our site. These companies may use cookie information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) to provide you with advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you.
These cookies are necessary for the website to function properly. Some of the following actions can be performed by using these cookies: save your cookie preferences for this website; store articles in a shopping cart for online purchases.
These cookies are used to gather statistical information about the use of our website, also called analytics cookies. We use this data for performance and website optimisation.
These cookies enable more functionality for our website visitors. These cookies can be set by our external service providers or our own website. The following functionalities may or may not be activated when you accept this category: online videos, social media sharing buttons.
These cookies are set by external advertising partners and are used for profiling and tracking data across multiple websites. If you accept these cookies, we may show our advertisements on other websites based on your user profile and preferences. These cookies also save data about how many visitors have seen or clicked on our advertisements in order to optimise advertising campaigns.
You can choose to opt out of all but the necessary cookies. In the settings of the browser, you can change the settings to ensure that cookies will be blocked.
Most web browsers’ help documentation provide you with an explanation on how to do this. However, if you block the cookies, it is possible that you will not be able to enjoy all the technical features our website has to offer and it may negatively affect your user experience.
Our website users’ cookies preferences are captured through the Cookie First Consent Management Platform.
Purpose: This is a session cookie used for session state management.
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Purpose: This cookie allows targeted advertising through the AppNexus platform - collects anonymous data on ad views IP adddress, page views, and more.
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Purpose: Cookie set by Facebook. The gathered information is used in their advertising products, for example real time bidding from third party advertisers.
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Purpose: This cookie is widely used by Microsoft as a unique user ID. It can be set by embedded Microsoft scripts. It is widely believed to synchronize between many different Microsoft domains, allowing users to be tracked.
Domain: .bing.com
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Purpose: This cookie is set by TVsquared - a platform measuring impressions, reach and outcomes for TV attribution. This cookie is used to enable optimisation of TV advertising by tracking sessions and conversion timings in relation to TV ad spot air times.
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Purpose: This cookie is set by Google Adsense for experiments with 'cross-website' advertising.
Domain: .worldanimalprotection.org.uk
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Purpose: This is a cookie associated with Quantcast, a digital advertising company. They provide website rankings, and the data they collect is also used for audience segmentation and targeted advertising.
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Purpose: Cookie from Double Click (Google) which helps us to analyze and optimize our advertising campaigns.
Domain: .doubleclick.net
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World Animal Protection is registered as a Charity in England and Wales (Registered Charity 1081849) and as a Company Limited by Guarantee in England and Wales (Registration No. 4029540). The Company has two subsidiary companies: World Animal Protection Trading Company Limited (Registration No. 2880146) and World Animal Protection Executor Service Limited (Registration No. 3106147). The registered office of all these entities is 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB.
In this policy, whenever you see the words ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’, it refers to both our Charity, the company and the subsidiary companies.
Our International office is in London and we work with World Animal Protection offices around the world. Our offices are linked through collaboration agreements that ensure we work in a unified and consistent way, supporting a strategy developed by staff worldwide.
We use “World Animal Protection Group" in this policy to refer collectively to all global entities (branches, subsidiaries and affiliates). Our branches, subsidiaries and affiliates must operate to World Animal Protection standards but please make sure that you also check the privacy policy of the relevant national office so that you know how they will use your data.
When you donate, sign one of our petitions, ask to receive our email-newsletter, email or write to us with an enquiry, place an order through our online shop, or interact with us in any other way, World Animal Protection may collect personal information about you, such as your:
Where it is appropriate we may also ask you for:
We may also collect details of your visits to our website*, including:
*For more details, please see our policy on Cookies.
We may obtain information about you from other sources, such as from:
In order to run our Weekly Lottery, World Animal Protection is subject to various legal and regulatory obligations and standards. It's our legal obligation to ensure our Lottery is not subject to underage gambling. If you are part of our Weekly Lottery, we therefore will process your personal information using third party software to verify your age. Age verification checks may leave a soft footprint in your credit history.
We take great care to protect and respect the rights of individuals in relation to their personal data, especially in the case of children. When we collect information from you that could be used for direct marketing purposes (including profiling or digital advertising) purposes, we will ask you to verify your age. Where children under the age of 16, wish to fundraise on behalf of World Animal Protection, we will ask for a parent or guardian's consent to process any personal information relating to the child.
Important note: Persons under the age of 16 are not permitted to enter World Animal Protection's raffle and persons under the age of 18 are not permitted to enter World Animal Protection's subscription Weekly Lottery. Underage gambling is an offence and any person found to be underage forfeits the rights to any prize.
We use your information:
Direct marketing includes any communications we send you promoting the aims, ideas and work of World Animal Protection, including: news, campaign updates, fundraising appeals and other ways you can support our work.
We will only contact you by email, telephone and SMS if you have given us your consent to do so for direct marketing purposes.
If you have donated to us, pledged to leave a gift in your Will or have supported one of our campaigns within the last three years, we may use your postal address (if you supplied it to us) to send you occasional information about our work that we believe may interest you, including our magazine, annual catalogue and vital fundraising appeals to help fight cruelty and suffering.
You can opt out of receiving direct marketing from us at any time. Simply follow the ‘unsubscribe’ links on our emails, call us on 0800 316 9966 or email hello@worldanimalprotection.org.uk.
We use profiling techniques to ensure our communications are relevant and timely. We track the types of animal welfare topics that you respond to, and the frequency and value of your support. When inviting you to make a subsequent donation we may take your previous giving history into account to aid personalisation and help ensure we’re not asking you to donate an amount that is inappropriate. We may use additional information from third party sources, including consumer classification tools that use postcodes to segment the UK population, to tailor our communications to you better.
We are grateful for all donations we receive, of any amount. In certain circumstances, we may research information about individuals to understand how likely it is that they will be interested in supporting our work and how we can match them with campaigns that align with their interests. In a small number of cases, this includes research to gain a better understanding of potential supporters who may be able and willing to give more than they already do. This enables us to personalise our funding requests and to raise more funds, sooner, and more cost-effectively, than we otherwise would.
This “prospect” research is carried out in house and is compiled using publicly available information, for example, news items that mention other charities an individual has supported, addresses, listed directorships, typical earnings or house prices in a given area. We carry out special assessments, called data protection impact assessments, to ensure prospect research doesn’t undermine the rights of individuals.
We have a legal entitlement to any gifts left in Wills to our charity and are accountable to the Charity Commission under Charity Law to ensure the money is received and used according to their charitable purposes. To fulfil these obligations, we may need to use personal data of living individuals, for example to write a letter to the executor to communicate about the administration of the estate.
Where we collect personal data from
Whose personal data we collect
What data do we collect for gifts in Wills?
What lawful basis do we collect this information on?
How do we use gifts in Wills data?
How do we store gifts in wills data?
Where you have given your consent for us to use your email address or phone number for marketing, we may use this information to match to your account on Facebook or other social media sites to show you World Animal Protection content while you use these services. We keep your data secure by encrypting it and no data we hold about you is retained by the third party.
In addition, we may also use your email address or phone number to link to Facebook or other social media sites to identify other users of these sites who we believe would be interested in World Animal Protection, and we may then show them World Animal Protection content. No data we hold about you is retained by the third party when we do this.
If you would prefer for us not to use your personal data in this way, you can either contact us to opt out of phone or email (call us on 0800 316 9966 or email hello@worldanimalprotection.org.uk) or you can follow these instructions to alter your settings on Facebook.
Please note that this will not guarantee that you never see World Animal Protection content on social media, since the social media site may decide to show you content based on other criteria and without your data having been provided by World Animal Protection.
We will not sell or swap your information to or with any third party.
Your information, including emails and other correspondence, may be passed internally within the World Animal Protection Group to ensure you are connected with the most appropriate resources. This is usually to connect you with your local World Animal Protection office. This may involve your personal data moving outside the United Kingdom. When this happens, we ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect your personal information and to keep it secure. If appropriate safeguards do not exist we will only transfer your personal data with your explicit consent, after informing you of the possible risks of such transfer.
We sometimes use trusted third parties to process your information on our behalf because it is more economical to outsource some processing than to do it in house. The kind of work we may ask them to do includes: processing, packaging, mailing and delivering orders, sending postal mail, fundraising by telephone, text or face-to-face, carrying out research or analysis, data cleansing and processing card payments.
These third parties are bound by contract requiring them to keep your details safe and secure, and to use your information only to fulfil the service we have specifically asked them to provide. When they no longer need your data to fulfil this service, we ask them to dispose of your details securely, in line with our procedures.
Otherwise, we will only share your information when obliged to disclose it by law, or the disclosure is ‘necessary’ for purposes of national security, taxation and criminal investigation, or if we have your consent.
The length of time that we store your information may vary depending upon the type of information it is, the reasons that we need to use it or other factors, like legal requirements. For example, we are required by law to keep declarations and store all records of Gift Aid transactions for at least six years in case of an audit. We regularly review the personal information that we store, including our paper records, so that we only store it for as long as we need to.
Some of our electronic storage systems are located outside the United Kindom. We may transfer your personal information to other offices in the World Animal Protection Group and to other trusted third party organisations as explained in this policy. They may be situated or use computers and storage systems that are located outside the UK. Where data is transferred or stored outside the UK, we ensure that safeguards are in place to protect your information.
We have security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal data. For example, our employees are only authorised to see and use the personal data they need to see to do their jobs and we use secure server software (SSL) to encrypt financial and personal information you input before it is sent to us. While we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur while it is under our control, we use our best efforts to try to prevent this.
Your personal information belongs to you and we want you to feel in control of it. Here’s how you can exercise your rights.
You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. Please put your request in writing to the Data Protection Manager, World Animal Protection, 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB, together with two forms of identification (current passport (the page with your personal details); driving licence; birth certificate; utility bill from last 3 months; current vehicle registration document; bank statement from last 3 months; rent book from last 3 months. We don’t store this identification. It’s used solely to verify the requester’s identity.) It’s helpful if you explain what particular records you’re seeking, but you don’t have to say.
You have a right to ask us to correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete. To do this, please send details of the changes you want us to make to hello@worldanimalprotection.org.uk or call us on 0800 316 9966 or email. We may ask you to quote your supporter number or ask for another form of identification.
In certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records or transferred to another organisation. Where certain conditions apply, you have a right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information. You also have the right to object to certain types of processing such as direct marketing (see Direct marketing section above) or automated processing or profiling.
If you would like further information on your rights or wish to exercise them, please write to our Data Protection Manager, World Animal Protection, 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB or email privacy@worldanimalprotection.org.uk. If we are unable to fulfil your request, we will provide you with a reason as to why.
If you wish to make a complaint about how your personal data is being processed by World Animal Protection (or any third parties we use to help process your data), or how your complaint has been handled, please see our complaints policy.
You have the right to lodge a complaint directly with the Information Commissioner's Office.
Our website may contain links to other websites that are outside our control and are not covered by this privacy policy. If you access other sites using the links provided, the operators of these sites may collect information from you that will be used by them in accordance with their privacy policy, which may differ from ours.
What it is AI: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, particularly computer systems, enabling them to learn, reason, and adapt to perform tasks autonomously. Examples of AI include advanced language models, image-generation, data manipulation, recommendations on streaming platforms, route navigation suggestions, and spam filtering.
Why do we use AI: World Animal Protection recognises that AI can contribute to higher levels of productivity and reach in the service of its mission.
How do we use AI: World Animal Protection is committed to ethical business practices. AI systems will never be used to break or circumvent laws or regulations or violate the privacy and rights of people or organisations.
How we ensure your privacy is protected:
Copyright: World Animal Protection would ensure all AI-generated content adhere to proper citation and attribution guidelines and shall give credit wherever possible.
Any changes we make to this privacy policy will be posted on this page, so please check it regularly. When we make significant changes, we’ll notify you.
Last updated: 8/11/2023
Our policies
We rely on kind supporters, people like you, to protect animals around the world. We want you to be happy and feel confident in how we work. That’s why we always want to hear your feedback.
Our policies
Our online communities – including those on Twitter and Facebook – are for our supporters and like-minded people to come together. Read more on our community guidelines.
Our policies
As a charity, World Animal Protection is dependent on donations. Read more on our refund policy.