Legitimate Interests Statement

Under the new data protection law starting 25 May 2018 we have a number of lawful reasons that we can use (or 'process') your personal information. One of the lawful reasons is called 'legitimate interests'. This relates to the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) from 25 May 2018 and any updates made to the UK GDPR on 31 January 2021.

Broadly speaking ‘Legitimate Interests’ means that we can process your personal information if we have a genuine and legitimate reason and we are not harming any of your rights and interests. This means that when you provide your personal details to us we use your information for our legitimate business interests to carry out our work to help people with life-limiting illness live life to the full, and help family friends and carers to continue with life after loss.

Some typical examples of when we might use the approach are for preventing fraud, direct marketing, maintaining the security of our system, data analytics, enhancing, modifying or improving our services, and fundraising.

We believe that people who share our values would love to know how to support us. We will process the personal information you have supplied to us to conduct and manage our business to enable us to give you the most appropriate marketing, information, and service; and provide the best and most secure experience. These are what we consider to be our 'Legitimate Interests'.

Our Legitimate interests

The following are some examples of when and why we would use this approach in our work:

• Direct Marketing: we will send updates on our work – including the challenges and the impact that has been achieved. We will send postal marketing and fundraising asks which further our aims and objectives. We will tailor this information to your interests as far as we are able.
• Your best interest: processing your information to protect you against fraud when transacting on our website, and to ensure our websites and systems are secure.
• Personalisation: where the processing enables us to enhance, modify, personalise or otherwise improve our services/communications for the benefit of our supporters.
• Analytics and research: to process your personal information for the purposes of customer analysis, assessment, and profiling, on a personalised or aggregated basis, to develop our products, services, systems and relationships with you to help us with our activities.
• Due diligence: we may need to conduct investigations on supporters and business partners to determine if those companies and individuals have been involved or convicted of offences such as fraud, bribery and corruption.

We will also hold information about you so that we can respect your preferences for being contacted by us.

Your interests

When we process your personal information for our legitimate interests, we will consider and balance any potential impact on you and your rights under data protection and any other relevant law. Our legitimate business interests do not automatically override your interests – we will not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law).

We will retain the individuals’ data for as long as the active relationship lasts, for fund-raising, business analysis and administration purposes. 

We will retain the individuals’ data for a period after the relationship has ceased, for the same purposes (i.e., no responses; no donations have been received). This will be for a maximum of 8 years after the last recorded activity by the individual. These timings are consistent with statutory responsibilities to retain data for Gift Aid and other tax purposes.

You can change the way you hear from us or withdraw your permission for us to process your personal details at any time by using our contact form on the Contact us page.

For more information about what information we hold and how we use it please refer to our Privacy Policy.

This document was last updated: February 2021