Privacy Policy

Last updated 12 May 2023

The UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub (UKHIH) is committed to protecting your privacy and personal information and complies with the principles of the relevant data protection regulations. This privacy policy explains how and why we collect your personal information and how we use it.

How do we collect your information?

We may collect information about you directly whenever you interact with us. For example, when you contact UKHIH regarding our activities, sign up to an event, apply for funding or engage with our social media, you may provide us with your personal information.

We may collect aggregated or anonymous information when you visit our website or interact with our content. For example, we may collect information about the services you use and how you use them, like when you visit our website or view and interact with our ads and content.

What information do we collect?

The information we collect from you directly may include:

• Name
• Address
• Email address
• Telephone number
• Contact preferences
• Occupation
• Organisation you work for
• Your humanitarian interest and background

We may also collect and process information about your interactions with us, including details about our contact with you through email, post, on the phone or in person (e.g. the date, time, and method of contact), details about events that you register or attend and any other support you provide to us. We may also collect and record any other relevant information you share with us, including your interests. 

Do we process ‘sensitive’ personal information?

Under data protection law, certain categories of personal information are recognised as sensitive, including health information and information regarding race, religious beliefs, and political opinions. This is known as ‘sensitive personal data’. We do not routinely collect sensitive personal data, but we will collect this information where there is a clear reason for doing so, such as where we need this information to ensure we provide appropriate facilities  or support to enable you to participate in an event. 

How do we use your information?

We use your information in a number of ways, including:

• In relation to correspondence you have with us (whether by letter, email, text, social media, message board or any other means);
• For internal record keeping;
• To fulfil contracts you have entered into with UKHIH;
• To contact you about any content you provide;
• To invite you to participate in surveys or research about UKHIH or our work (participation is always voluntary);
• To provide you with information, products or services that you have requested from us or that we feel may be of interest to you;
• To provide you with information about our work or our activities;
• For administrative purposes (for example, we may contact you regarding an event for which you have registered);
• To contact you where you have been identified as a contact person for an organisation, such as a humanitarian non-governmental organisation (NGO) (if we obtain your contact details in this way, we will only use them to contact you in your capacity as a representative of that organisation);
• To analyse and improve the content and operation of our website;
• To analyse and improve our internal business processes;
• To tailor advertising that is presented to you on the Internet according to your interests, preferences and other characteristics (as described below);
• To assess your personal information for the purposes of credit risk reduction or fraud prevention; and
• Where we are required by law to disclose or otherwise use your information.

In particular, we may contact you for marketing purposes by email if you have agreed to be contacted in this manner.

If you have provided us with your postal address or telephone number, we may send you information about our work or other communications of the kinds described above by direct mail or contact you by telephone unless you have told us that you would prefer not to hear from us in this way. We provide information about how you can change your marketing preferences below.

How do we disclose information we have collected to outside parties?

We will never sell your details and, except as indicated below, will only share your details with third parties (who are not service providers working at our direction) if you ask us to. We do not make cold telephone calls to members of the general public and, therefore, will not purchase your data in order to do so.

We may disclose your personal information if we are requested or required to do so by a regulator or law enforcement or in order to enforce or apply our rights (including in relation to our website or other applicable terms and conditions) or to protect UKHIH, for example in cases of suspected fraud or defamation, or in order to comply with any other applicable legal obligation.

If you receive funding from UKHIH, we may share relevant personal information with our donors, evaluators or auditors if we are contractually or legally obliged to, or to support evaluation and learning from our work. For example, we may share the information contained within a funding application you submitted to us for an external evaluation of our work.

If you have ever applied to UKHIH for funding but the application was unsuccessful, we may still share the information held within an application for the purposes outlined above.

How do we protect your personal information?

We take appropriate physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your information secure, accurate and up to date, and that we only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary.

Although we use appropriate security measures once we have received your personal information, the transmission of information over the internet is never completely secure. We do our best to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted to our website, so any transmission is at the user’s own risk.

For financial and technical reasons, we may, on occasion, need to use the services of a service provider outside the European Economic Area (EEA) – this may include a country which does not have the same level of data protection as in the United Kingdom. However, unless they are located in a country which has been assessed by the European Commission as ensuring an adequate level of protection for personal data, we will only use a service provider outside the EEA on the basis of an agreement with the service provider, designed to protect your data, in the appropriate form approved for this purpose by the European Commission. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is processed securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

How do you change your marketing preferences?

If you do not wish us to use your personal data for marketing purposes as outlined above, you can update your preferences at any time (including telling us that you don’t want us to contact you for marketing purposes) by:

• Contacting us here or via email at information@ukhih.org with the subject line ‘marketing preferences’.
• If you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted for marketing purposes, we will maintain your details on a suppression list to help ensure that we do not continue to contact you for marketing purposes. However, we may still need to contact you for administrative purposes, including (but not limited to):
  • Sending correspondences regarding a live funding grant where you are the grantee and UKHIH is the funder
  • Providing you with the information you need in order to participate in an event for which you have registered
  • Explaining and apologising where we have made a mistake

How can you update, correct, or delete your personal information?

The accuracy of your information is really important to us. We want to ensure that we are able to communicate with you in ways that you are happy with, and to provide you with information that is of interest. If you wish to change how we communicate with you, update the information we hold, or have questions about this Privacy Policy then please contact us.

You can do this via email at information@ukhih.org, by clicking here or by writing to us at:

UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub
1 St Johns Lane
London
EC1M 4AR 

Why are we allowed to process your personal information?

Our Privacy and Cookie Policies take into account several laws, including:

• The Data Protection Act 1998
• The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003
• General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679, which came into force in the UK on May 25 2018 and replaced the Data Protection Act 1998.

How long do we hold your personal information?

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity.

Where you contribute material to us, e.g. user generated content or in response to a particular campaign we will generally only keep your content for as long as is reasonably required for the purpose(s) for which it was submitted unless otherwise stated at the point of generation.

Job applications and former employees

If you apply to work at UKHIH, we will only use the information you give us to process your application and to monitor recruitment statistics. If we want to disclose information to someone outside UKHIH – for example, if we need a reference, plan to use an external supplier to run background checks or need to get a ‘disclosure’ from the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) – we will make sure we tell you beforehand, unless we are required to disclose this information by law.

When recruiting for a post based in another country, UKHIH will sometimes need to transfer your personal information to that country to progress the recruitment. It may be that that country does not provide the same level of data protection as in the European Economic Area.

If you are unsuccessful in your job application, we will hold your personal information for 6 months after we’ve finished recruiting for the post you applied for. After this date we will destroy or delete your information.

If you begin employment with us, we will put together a file about your employment. We keep the information in this file secure, and will only use it for matters that apply directly to your employment.

Once you stop working for us, we will keep this file according to our record retention guidelines. You can contact us to find out more about this by emailing us.

Grantees and applications for funding

If you apply for grant funding, we will process your personal data for the purposes of assessing your application.

If you are successful in obtaining funding, we will process your personal data for the purpose assessing the grant for financial and other risks (we call this our Due Diligence process). We will also hold and process your personal data for the duration of your grant, as defined in our contract with you, for the purpose of administering and monitoring the grant. Once the grant is closed, we will retain any personal information related to it to allow for audits and for programme monitoring purposes.

If you are unsuccessful in obtaining funding, we will retain personal information related to the grant application for the purposes of monitoring the grant funding programme.

Children’s data

When you register with us, you are stating that you are 18 years of age or over, or are a minor acting with parental consent. You agree that any information you provide to us about yourself upon registration or at any time is true.

What are your rights?

You have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected.

You can make a complaint or raise a concern about how we process your personal data by contacting information@ukhih.org. In some circumstances, you have the right to object to our processing of your personal data or to stop us from continuing to make active use of personal data that we retain in our records.

If you are not happy with how we have handled your complaint, you can contact the Office of the Information Commissioner, which oversees the protection of personal data in the UK, or the Fundraising Regulator, which is responsible for overseeing fundraising activities carried out by charities in the UK.

Other websites

We cannot be held responsible for the privacy of data collected by websites not owned or managed by UKHIH, including those linked through our website.

Email terms of use

Emails aren’t always secure, and they may be intercepted or changed after they’ve been sent. UKHIH doesn’t accept liability if this happens. The contents of emails reflect their author’s views and not necessarily those of UKHIH.

Please do not send unsecured financial data to UKHIH. If you are required to send UKHIH financial information via email, for example, as part of a funding agreement, please ensure files are password protected, with passwords sent separately to the data.

The information in emails is confidential, so if you’ve received one by mistake, please delete it without copying, using, or telling anyone about its contents.

Cookie consent

By using our website, our social media pages (such as Twitter and LinkedIn), or subscribing to our mailing list, you agree that, unless you have set your computer’s browser to reject them, we can place the types of cookies set below on your device and use that data in accordance with this policy.

In order to remember that you have accepted our use of cookies, we will place a temporary cookie to remember your consent for 3 months.

For more information about how we use cookies on this site, please review our Cookie Policy.