Privacy Policy

CHILDFUND AUSTRALIA RESPECTS YOUR PRIVACY

ChildFund Australia understands the importance of protecting personal information we receive from supporters and donors. We are committed to handling your personal information in accordance with our obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Commonwealth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. Personal information is collected, held, used and disclosed by ChildFund Australia as set out at below.

INFORMATION WE COLLECT

The kinds of personal information that ChildFund Australia collects and holds typically include:

  • Your name, address, phone numbers, email addresses
  • Your date of birth, gender and occupation
  • Your employer’s details, if you participate in workplace giving
  • Your bank account, or credit card details which are always encrypted once collected
  • A history of your donations, emails, letters and other interactions with ChildFund Australia
  • Your ChildFund Australia website username and password and your interactions with ChildFund Australia related websites

HOW WE COLLECT INFORMATION

ChildFund Australia collects your personal information directly from you when you provide it to us over the phone, in correspondence, in person, via our website and related social media platforms including when you make a donation or sign up to receive information or in response to ChildFund Australia fundraising appeals.

We also collect information from third parties including organisations who conduct fundraising on behalf of ChildFund Australia in person or through telemarketing and/or individuals who personally conduct fundraising for us, or organise workplace giving. Third party organisations based in Australia are also bound by the Privacy Act and Australian Privacy Principles.

If someone makes a donation on your behalf, and asks that you receive information about their gift, we will collect the personal information they provide about you.

We also collect personal information from public records, such as telephone directories, lists and third party surveys which we purchase for direct marketing and telemarketing.

When it is necessary to collect your personal information, including from a third party, we will take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to ensure that you are notified in compliance with the Privacy Act.

It is possible in some circumstances to remain anonymous or use a pseudonym when you deal with ChildFund Australia, for example when you make a donation to ChildFund Australia. However if you choose not to provide us with your personal information, we may not be able to provide you with an official tax-deductible receipt, or assist you fully with your query or complaint.

PURPOSES OF COLLECTION, USE AND DISCLOSURE

ChildFund Australia uses your personal information to carry out our charitable, aid and related activities. For example, we may use your personal information to:

  • Process or confirm your donation and issue a receipt
  • Send you information about how your donation was used
  • Update you if we have information that may affect your support
  • Confirm who you are when you contact us
  • Keep you informed about our work including by mail, email, SMS or telephone
  • Respond to your questions, comments, compliments or complaints
  • Inform you about new opportunities to support our work
  • Analyse donor activity in order to improve our effectiveness including for quality assurance
  • Report on our activities including producing our Annual Report

ChildFund Australia relies on the generosity of our donors to fulfil our mission. Therefore, we may also use your personal information for direct marketing purposes to promote our upcoming events, appeals, projects or other activities. However, where we do use your information for this purpose, we will always provide a simple means for you to opt out of receiving these communications. Occasionally we may share your contact details with other trusted organisations who may contact you with information that might be of interest to you. Those organisations allow us to do the same and this way we can reach more people with information about ChildFund Australia. If you do not wish to receive communications from other organisations please follow the instructions provided on fundraising materials.

ChildFund Australia may also send you information about products or services offered by businesses that support our work. We do not disclose your personal information to these businesses. If you choose to become a customer of one of these businesses, by purchasing these products or services, they may choose to collect your information and send further offers to you.

ChildFund Australia may disclose your personal information to:

  • financial institutions in order to authorise your payments
  • an authorised legal representative nominated by you
  • mailing house, marketing, telemarketing and door-knocking service providers
  • courts, law enforcement agencies and government or other organisations as required by law.

OVERSEAS DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

Due to the international nature of our mission, ChildFund Australia may also disclose your personal information to overseas recipients. This may include external suppliers such as mailing houses and telemarketers that we contract with to assist with the administration and management of our organisation. Before we send your personal information overseas, we will take reasonable steps to ensure that the recipient will not breach the Australian Privacy Principles. Otherwise, we will obtain your consent.

If you sponsor a child or a community, your name and address will be supplied to the ChildFund office in the country where your sponsor child or community is located. If you wish to visit your sponsored child or community in an overseas country, we may also share information to foreign government agencies or organisations as legally required for example for security and police checks.

COOKIES, OUR WEBSITE AND YOUR PRIVACY

In order to understand how people arrive at the ChildFund Pass It Back website and related social media platforms and how they use it, we rely on cookies provided by third parties. This enables us to assess the effectiveness of our online advertisements. Cookies do not reveal personal information, such as your name, address, phone numbers or email address. You can adjust your browser to disable cookies, but this may restrict your ability to access certain areas of our website.

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Save you having to login every time you visit the site
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

Website function cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Making our donations and checkout process work
  • Determining if you are logged in or not
  • Remembering your search settings
  • Allowing you to add comments to our site

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

  • YouTube
  • Google

Social website cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Site improvement cookies

We regularly test new designs or site features on our site. We do this by showing slightly different versions of our website to different people and anonymously monitoring how our site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps us to offer you a better website.

We use:

  • Google Analytics and Kissmetrics to see which content work better with our supporters when they engage with our website
  • VWO (Visual Website Optimizer) Which we use to understand which parts of our pages are of more interest to you so that we can improve the content of our pages in the future.

Anonymous visitor statistics cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us if, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

We use:

  • Google Analytics
  • Kissmetrics

Remarketing cookies

You may notice that sometimes after visiting a site you see increased numbers of adverts from the site you visited. This is because advertisers, including ourselves pay for these adverts. The technology to do this is made possible by cookies and as such we may place a so called “remarketing cookie” during your visit. We use these adverts to offer special offers to encourage you to come back to our site. Don’t worry we are unable to proactively reach out to you as the whole process is entirely anonymised. You can opt out of these cookies at any time as explained above.

ChildFund Pass It Back does not govern the settings or use of these third-party cookies. Please visit these websites for more information about their cookies and applicable privacy policies.

Turning cookies off

You can control how websites use cookies by configuring your browser’s privacy settings. Please refer to your browser’s help function to learn more about cookie controls. Note that if you disable cookies entirely, ChildFund Pass It Back website may not function properly.

HOW WE HOLD AND PROTECT INFORMATION

ChildFund Australia understands the importance of protecting your personal information from misuse, interference and loss and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

We use security encrypted response forms to protect the personal and financial information you provide us over the Internet. To confirm that your browser supports our encryption system, check for a security icon (usually a padlock) at the bottom of your screen.

We have secured our in-house IT system with a firewall and anti-virus scanners. We also ensure that all personal information is removed from computers before disposal or sale.

Hard copy files are kept in secure cabinets and staff are trained in our privacy procedures. Only authorised staff have access to your information and only when it is required.

ChildFund Australia will destroy or de-identify your personal information when we no longer need it for the purpose for which it was collected, unless the law requires otherwise.

HOW YOU CAN PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION

If you sponsor a child, please ensure you follow ChildFund Australia’s guidelines on communicating with, and visiting, sponsored children, to ensure your privacy is maintained. All communication between you and your sponsored child must go through a ChildFund office in Australia or overseas. This includes but is not limited to post, electronic communication, on-line and face to face visits.

ACCESSING AND CORRECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

You are entitled to access and request correction of your personal information held by ChildFund Australia. To request access or correction, please contact us using the details provided below and include your name, postal and email address and phone numbers, as well as your ChildFund Australia supporter number (A00 number).

OPTING OUT OF FUTURE COMMUNICATION

If you don’t want to receive communications or marketing materials, please contact us using the contact details below.

MAKING A COMPLAINT

If you wish to make a complaint about our privacy practices, please submit a written complaint to the email or mailing address provided below. In general, we will respond to your complaint within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may make a written complaint to the Australian Information Commissioner. For more information about the Australian Information Commissioner visit www.oaic.gov.au.

ChildFund Australia updates this privacy policy from time to time. The most up to date version is published on our web site at www.childFund.org.au/privacy and is also available by post or email on request.

CONTACTING US

If you want to contact us for any reason in relation to ChildFund Australia’s privacy policy, or have a complaint about a privacy breach, you can contact us as below:

info@childfund.org.au

Write to us at:

ChildFund Australia

Level 8

162 Goulburn Street

Surry Hills, NSW 2010

Call 1800 023 600