Our privacy policy

UNICEF UK, the United Kingdom Committee for UNICEF, is a charity, entirely funded by our supporters. We receive no money from the UN budget, so our supporters mean everything to us. We are a registered charity (charity number 1072612) and a company limited by guarantee (company number 03663181). UNICEF UK is also registered in Scotland (charity number SC043677). UNICEF UK’s registered office is 1 Westfield Avenue, London E20 1HZ.

UNICEF UK Enterprises Ltd (“UEL”) is a wholly owned trading subsidiary of UNICEF UK, registered at the same address (company number 02736690). UEL is administered by the staff of UNICEF UK and operates from our premises. If your personal information is collected by UEL, then UNICEF UK and UEL act as joint controllers of your personal information. UNICEF UK and UEL have agreed that your information will be collected, used and stored by UNICEF UK in accordance with this privacy policy. The UNICEF Shop website is operated through UEL.

We always want you to be happy with the communication you receive from us. If you want to change how you hear from us, or update your details, simply get in touch with our Supporter Care team. You can call them on 0300 330 5580, email [email protected], or write to us at Supporter Care team, UNICEF UK, 1 Westfield Avenue, London E20 1HZ. You can also find other ways to get in touch on our contact us page.

For email, SMS and postal marketing, you can also:

• Use the unsubscribe link in an email from us
• Follow the instructions in an SMS message from us to opt out of future messages
• Let us know by completion of any postal forms you return to us

Please be aware if you tell us that you no longer want to hear from us for marketing purposes, that it may take a short amount of time for us to process this request, and you may still receive communications that were in progress at the time of your request. We may also still contact you for administration purposes, such as about any donations you make and Gift Aid, or providing you with information you’ve requested or in helping resolve a query or a complaint.

We may collect personal information about you in the following ways:

Directly from you

• When you interact with us such as when you donate, make a purchase from the UNICEF Shop website, let us know if you’d like to receive marketing communications from us, take a campaign action or attend an event. Sometimes you might be interacting with an organisation working on our behalf, but we are still responsible for your personal information.
• When you interact with us using a messaging service like email, SMS or WhatsApp, or a private direct message sent via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Linkedin.
• When you visit our website including the UNICEF Shop
  • We may gather information via 3rd party cookies and similar tracking technologies, such as which pages you visit or how long you spend reading a page. This information helps us to improve our website and enhance and tailor the experience of our website visitors to inform the choice of words and images that appear on the site.
  • We also work with third-party partners using cookies and similar tracking technologies with your consent to help us measure the effectiveness of our online marketing and advertising. For example, they help us understand whether an advert you saw on another website led you to take action on our website (such as what pages you visited and whether you made a donation). For more information see ‘How we use your personal information/For marketing’.
  • You can find out more in our Cookie Policy below.
• When you engage with or respond to our communications. For example, we measure the effectiveness of our marketing communications by identifying if you have opened an email we have sent to you. See our Cookie Policy below for more information.

Indirectly

• When you interact with third-parties
  • For example, when you donate through a third-party website, such as Just Giving, your personal information may be shared with us according to the terms of the website. This allows us to process your donation and any Gift Aid you add, or to contact you if you consent to receive any marketing from us.
  • Similarly, if you engage with us on social media platforms such as Meta, (Facebook and Instagram), LinkedIn, or TikTok, for example by completing a form, your personal information may be shared with us according to the terms of the platform.
• Using cookies and similar tracking technologies to measure the effectiveness of our marketing activity:
  • This helps us understand whether you have seen or interacted with UNICEF UK content on other websites and online platforms, for example whether you saw a UNICEF UK advert. For more information see ‘How we use your personal information/For marketing’.
• From other information that is available to the public to help us understand more about you and ensure our communications are tailored to you.
  • This may include using third-party products to help us understand things such as the demographic information associated with your postcode, which we may use to create supporter profiles. For more information, see ‘How we use your personal information/For research and analysis’. We may also use third-party preference registers such as the Fundraising Preference Service (FPS) and the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) to understand your communication preferences.
  • For some potential supporters or partners we believe may have the propensity or capacity to give a major gift, we may use personal information from publicly available sources such as Companies House, or information published in the media, as well as that which is commercially available through third-party products, to ensure that our purpose and values are aligned. By understanding more about you, and how you might be interested in supporting us, we can help make our work for children as cost effective as possible.

Depending on how you interact with us, the personal information that we collect may for example include your name, postal address, email address, telephone or mobile number, social media name, your contact preferences, bank or payment card details, taxpayer status (to understand if we can claim Gift Aid), and the date and/or year of your birth.

We may also collect personal information about the donations you make to us, your purchases from the UNICEF Shop website, any actions you take as part of a campaign for us, events that you register for or participate in, your interactions with our communications with you (such as opening an email or answering a telephone call), and details from any interactions with our Supporter Care team.

If you choose to participate in surveys or other research, we may ask you questions about your experience of supporting UNICEF UK or other questions about you.

For some existing or potential supporters or partners we believe may have the propensity or capacity to give a major gift, we may also gather personal information that is publicly available to build up a better picture of you and your interests so we can consider how best to ask for your support. To do this we undertake research, which may include using third-party products, to help us understand things such as the demographic information associated with your postcode, an estimate of your age, and information relating to wealth indicators such as directorships and shareholdings, employment and earnings as well as your charitable interests and giving history. We do this to try to ensure our communications to you are appropriate, tailored and optimised – something we know means a lot to our supporters. For further information see ‘How we use your personal information/For philanthropy and partnerships’.

We may sometimes use third-party suppliers to support us in this work. To understand more about this please see the section below, “Sharing your personal information”.

• To keep a record of your relationship with us.
• To respond to you when you have contacted our Supporter Care team with queries or feedback.
• To contact you with a query about a donation or order.
• To send a thank you or let you know about the option to add Gift Aid to your donation.
• To process your donations or other payments and verify financial transactions.
• To process orders, deliver products and communicate with you about orders such as card and gift purchases from the UNICEF Shop website, or community fundraising materials.
• To carry out the administration of a competition or prize draw, including selection of a winner/winners and fulfilment of the prize.
• To send you items such as a t-shirt for taking part in an event you have registered for.
• To process an internship, volunteer application or job application.
• To document our complaints handling in line with regulatory requirements.

• To collect pledges of support for campaigns to stand up for children’s rights, like petition signatures.
• To connect you with your MP so that you can contact them directly to act.

• To let you know by email, telephone, SMS or post the latest news about our work for children and share with you how else you can help, where we have a lawful basis to do so. These updates may include information on fundraising or campaigning for us, our range of cards and gifts including inspired gifts, information on leaving a gift in your will, specific appeals as well as updates on our work with children.
  • Where we don’t specifically ask for your consent to do this, we believe it is in UNICEF UK’s legitimate business interest to let our supporters know about the latest news about our work for children and share with you how else you can help. This may be by email, SMS, telephone or post where you have not objected to this. We only do this where we believe sending these won’t impact your privacy or cause you harm or distress. You can always let our Supporter Care team know if you’d prefer us not to contact you in any of these ways – you can call us on 0300 330 5580, email us at [email protected] or find other ways to get in touch on our contact us page.
• To reach you and others with UNICEF UK advertising on third-party platforms including websites, apps, digital streaming platforms and TV platforms (targeted advertising).
  • To do this we may provide selected third-parties (for example, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Google, Sky, ITV and Netflix) with some of your personal information (e.g. name, email address, mobile phone number, postcode) in an encrypted format, meaning the third-party will only see data that matches an account already on its platform. The third-parties then match this to personal information they hold about you to:
    • show you relevant UNICEF UK advertising or exclude you from UNICEF UK advertising that we believe isn’t of interest to you.
    • identify people they believe will have similar interests to show them UNICEF UK advertising.
    • provide us with general anonymised characteristics of our supporters.
  • We may also ask third-parties to present UNICEF UK advertising to you if, based on the personal information they hold about you, they believe you may find UNICEF UK advertising relevant to you.
  • We may also work with third-parties to show you UNICEF UK advertising if you have previously visited our website. This is based on information collected through 3rd party cookies and similar tracking technologies on our website with your consent, which is shared with those third-parties for this purpose. See our Cookie Policy below for more information.
  • If you don’t want to see targeted advertising from us on third-party platforms, please refer to the instructions provided by the specific provider, social media website or app, for example on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Google, Sky, ITV and Netflix.
  • Please be aware that even without the activity described above, you may still see UNICEF UK adverts online, but these will not be connected to our use of your personal information or your previous online activity.
• To measure the effectiveness of our online marketing and advertising, using cookies and other similar tracking technologies with your consent. These help us understand how you interact with UNICEF UK content across third-party websites and online platforms. For example, whether you have seen a UNICEF UK advert on Facebook and what actions you may then take on our website (such as visiting specific pages or making a donation), or telling us if you watched a UNICEF UK YouTube ad, but later searched on Google and donated via our website. See our Cookie Policy below for more information.
• To screen your personal information against information from third-party preference registers such as the Fundraising Preference Service (FPS) and the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).
• To verify if the email or postal address we hold about you is correct, using a third-party service.

You can change how you hear from us at any time simply by getting in touch with our Supporter Care team – please see the section above “How to change the way we contact you”.

• To ask you to leave a gift in your Will and to analyse our legacy promises alongside our future financial planning.
• To enable us to collect a legacy gift in your Will, sometimes working with other named beneficiaries in the administration of this.
• To invite you to events where you can find out more about UNICEFs work and how your legacy donation will be used.

• To collect the following types of supplementary personal information on individuals: job title(s), affiliated organisation(s), previous charity affiliations/donations, education, career history, relationships/networks, relevant interests, level of potential engagement or donation including wealth indicators, and an estimate of a person’s age. This information is collected from the public domain such as from professional networking sites, company websites, news archives, third-party paid-for sources, the Charity Commission and Companies House.
• This additional information we collect enables us:
  • To tailor our communications and make the most appropriate requests to supporters who may be able and willing to make a major gift
  • To carry out research to identify individuals who have an affinity, propensity or capacity to make a major gift to our cause but with whom we are not already in touch. We use sources from the public domain as outlined above, and our volunteer campaign boards and committees, to identify other individuals who may be able to support us or introduce us to others at a major gift level.
  • To carry out research on individuals attending our events to tailor our engagement with supporters and prospective supporters at the event.
  • To use profiling techniques or third-party wealth analytics and insights services to provide us with information about your capacity to make a major gift that will help us communicate in a relevant way with you when we approach you about potential philanthropic support.
  • To conduct due diligence on all major gifts, partnerships, high-profile relationships or supporters, and prospective supporters and partners, in accordance with our legal and regulatory obligations and internal risk management policies and procedures. This is to comply with regulatory requirements and safeguard our reputation and to help us mitigate any associated risk, so if you choose to opt-out of this, we may not be able to process your donation.

• To provide you with the services, products or information you have requested, or that we feel would be of interest to you, and reasonably expected by you.
• To send email, telephone and postal marketing to individuals at corporate addresses (‘business to business’ marketing) about UNICEF UK’s Programmes, products and services aimed at organisations.

• To invite you to participate in surveys or other research we are carrying out.
• To carry out research and analyse the findings.
• To understand our supporters better, allowing us to develop products and tailor our communications to you. We may do this by creating supporter profiles which involves analysing your personal information or combining it with additional information from other sources including publicly available information (e.g. third-party products that help us understand things such as the demographic information associated with your postcode).
• To analyse and report on trends in our supporters’ behaviour that helps us to understand our supporters better, and predict future behaviour, so that we can engage with you in an appropriate and efficient way.
• To analyse and improve our offerings including our website, services, products or information that we provide to you.
• To measure the effectiveness of our online marketing and advertising, we use cookies and similar tracking technologies to help us understand how you interact with UNICEF UK content across third-party websites and online platforms – for further information see ‘How we use your personal information/For marketing’.
• For further information about research for philanthropy and partnerships see ‘How we use your personal information/For philanthropy and partnerships’.

• To enable you to take part in our competitions and prize draws.
• To carry out the administration of the competition or prize draw, including selection of a winner/winners and fulfilment of the prize.

• To send you an email to check and see if there is any help we can give or any problems you encountered, for example when you enter information into a form on our website and start but don’t complete a form, make a donation or complete a purchase.
• To ask you to participate in surveys or feedback on our website.
• To gather information, such as which pages you visit or how long you spend reading a page, to help us improve our website, including enhancing its accessibility (for example by adding new features, improving clarity and usability, or removing elements that make the website difficult to use). We also use this information to tailor the experience of our website visitors, such as the choice of words and images that appear on the site. This helps us to improve your online experience, ensure the site is accessible to a wider range of users, and improve the response to our campaigns.
• To use web-chat on our website so our Supporter Care team can guide you to appropriate content.

• If you wish to change how we use your personal information please contact our Supporter Care team on 0300 330 5580 or email us at [email protected].

We make sure that appropriate physical, technical and human controls are in place to ensure we take good care of your personal information.

However, the transmission of information over the internet is never completely secure and as a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, UNICEF UK cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your personal information, we make every effort to try to ensure its security both on our systems and while in transit between our systems and our partners who work on our behalf.

Staff who have access to your personal information understand the importance of keeping your information safe and secure at all times, are required to follow our internal privacy and security policies, and are given training to support them in this.

We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other websites, even if you access them by using links from our websites and we recommend that you check the policy of each site you visit.

We ensure that additional controls are in place for financial, sensitive and special categories of personal information (for example information about health or religion), which meet regulatory and legal requirements for managing these types of information.

We may need to transfer your personal information to other countries outside the United Kingdom (UK) (for example if we use a service provider located outside the UK), which may include a country that does not have the same level of data protection as the UK. Where we transfer your personal information outside the UK we ensure the required safeguards are in place to ensure it remains secure and adequately protected.

We will only use and store personal information for as long as it is required for the purposes it was collected for and as specified in our Retention Policy. How long personal information will be stored for depends on the personal information in question and what it is being used for, as well as whether there is any legal or regulatory requirement for retaining the personal information. For instance, we hold personal information relating to:

• Supporter transaction and interaction history including for UNICEF Shop for seven years from the last supporter interaction with UNICEF UK. (Supporters are individuals who have had contact with UNICEF UK in a capacity which supports our outcomes for children.)
• Legacy pledgers. If you indicate that you’d like to leave us a legacy gift, we will retain personal information for up to 50 years in recognition of the relevance of that information up to the fulfilment of the legacy pledge.
• Philanthropy and partnership supporters. If you provide UNICEF UK with partnership or philanthropic giving, we will retain personal data for 20 years in recognition of the long-term interactions with these supporters.
• Individuals who have requested we no longer contact them for direct marketing. We will retain minimum personal information indefinitely in order to comply with the request (name, address, contact details and suppression details) but with increased restricted access to that personal information by UNICEF UK staff.
• Financial records which may include personal information. We are legally required to hold some records to fulfil statutory obligations.
  • Gift Aid records are held while the Gift Aid declaration is active. Once the declaration is no longer active the records are kept for six years from the end of the financial year in which the last Gift Aid claim was made to HMRC.
  • Other Financial records are held for six years from the end of the financial year they relate to, unless there is legal or regulatory reason to keep longer (e.g. an HMRC requirement).
• Safeguarding concerns. Ten years from the completion of a UNICEF UK safeguarding incident report form, unless the incident involves UNICEF UK staff where a concern or incident is proven which will be retained until the staff member reaches normal retirement age or 10 years from the date of closure of the file, whichever is the later.

UNICEF UK is committed to processing children’s personal information legally and ensuring that children’s rights regarding the use of their personal information are upheld. At UNICEF UK, a child is defined as anyone under 18 years of age. Where consent is required to process children’s personal information, we will ask the person with parental responsibility for the child to provide consent on behalf of the child if the child is under 16 years of age. When a child becomes 18 years of age, we will re-seek consent from the individual or cease processing the personal information. Sometimes we will not seek consent if we rely upon another lawful basis, such as when we believe UNICEF UK has a legitimate interest to process children’s personal information, or to protect the vital interests of children; in those situations, we will always ensure we have carefully assessed whether our use would be fair and not override the child’s right to privacy.

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your device that help us improve our websites, that help provide you with the best experience when you visit our websites and when we communicate with you, and to deliver UNICEF UK adverts relevant to you and your interests when you visit other websites. We may use both 1st party and 3rd party cookies. 1st party cookies are set by UNICEF UK, 3rd party cookies are set by a partner on our behalf.

Cookies and similar tracking technologies (such as web beacons (pixels), device fingerprinting or server logging) help us to carry out a number of activities, for example:

• Personalise the website to your requirements. If, for example, on a previous visit you went to a specific appeal page, then we might find this out from your cookie and highlight particular information related to that or similar appeals which you may find interesting, on a second visit.
• Avoid asking you to register or complete details twice.
• Estimate the number of visitors to our site, including the source and patterns relating to this traffic.
• Understand how visitors use the site, and how we can enhance this experience.
• Measure the effectiveness of our marketing communications, for example by telling us if you have opened an email we have sent you.
• Display relevant advertising to you when you visit other websites.

You can choose to accept all cookies on our website, reject all non-essential cookies, or manage the types of cookie we can use. You can do this using the banner that will appear when you first visit our website (after which our website will remember your cookie choices for a period of time for subsequent visits), or at any time in the cookie settings preference centre, by clicking on the cookie icon on the bottom left of your screen on our website, or by clicking on the ‘Cookie Settings’ link in the footer of our website.

You are also able to set your devices to manage cookies from all websites – to accept all cookies, to choose the types of cookies you accept, to notify you when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time.

Please find below a description of the types and purposes of cookies used on our website.

We may use both 1st party and 3rd party cookies. 1st party cookies are set by UNICEF UK, 3rd party cookies are set by a partner on our behalf.

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called 1st party cookies. We also use 3rd party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the purposes listed below. You can see the specific list of cookies we use for each purpose by following these steps:

• Click the cookie settings preference centre, or click on the cookie icon on the bottom left of your screen on our website, or click on the ‘Cookie Settings’ link in the footer of our website.
• Click on the ‘+’ sign next to the purpose/type of cookie
• Click on ‘Cookie Details’
• Click on ‘View Cookies’ to see each list

Essential Cookies

These cookies are primarily 1st party (controlled by UNICEF UK) cookies and are essential in order to enable you to move around our website(s) and use its features. Without these cookies, services like making a donation or signing up to an event, cannot be provided. We do not ask for your permission to set these cookies as we believe that it is in UNICEF UK’s legitimate interests to set essential cookies and we do not believe that this affects your privacy rights; however, you can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies; if you do, please remember that some parts of our site may not work.

Functional Cookies

These are 3rd party (controlled by our partners) cookies that allow our website to provide enhanced, more personal, or more effective features, such as embedded videos, live chat or web forms.

Analytics Cookies

These cookies are primarily 3rd party (controlled by our partners) and collect information about how visitors use our website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies you personally. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

Marketing Cookies

These 3rd party cookies (which are set by our partners) are used to measure the effectiveness of our online marketing activity and advertising. They do this by collecting information about the actions you may take on our website (e.g. visiting a specific page or making a donation) and associating this with UNICEF UK content you may have seen or interacted with on other third-party websites and online platforms (e.g. that you saw a UNICEF UK advert on Facebook). These cookies are also used to deliver advertising more relevant to you and your interests, to limit the number of times you see an advertisement, and to help measure the effectiveness of our advertising campaigns. They are usually placed by advertising networks with UNICEF UK’s permission. These cookies remember that you have visited our website and this information is shared with other organisations (such as advertisers), so that you may see adverts relating to UNICEF UK’s work on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies, you will not experience our targeted advertising across different websites; you may still see UNICEF UK adverts elsewhere online, but these will not be connected to your previous activity on our website.

You can also find out more about cookies at All About Cookies and Your Online Choices.