Privacy policy

Who We Are

Our vision:
Tree Aid’s vision is of thriving, sustainable communities across the drylands of Africa. We help people unlock the potential of trees to reduce poverty and protect the environment.

Our details:
Tree Aid is a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee, incorporated in England.
Registered office: Tree Aid, Brunswick Court, Brunswick Square, Bristol, BS2 8PE.
Registered charity no: 1135156. Company registration no: 03779545.

Tree Aid is also registered as a charitable organisation in our 6 countries of operation: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Senegal and Niger.

Tree Aid is registered with the Charity Commission, the Fundraising Regulator and is required to adhere to the Code of Fundraising Practice and the Fundraising Promise. The Code requires charities to follow legal guidelines and be open, honest and respectful in its communications at all times.

Contacting us:
If you would like to make an enquiry about data protection, request or update the information we hold about you, request or opt out of receiving marketing communications from us or change the way we process your information, you can let our Supporters’ Team know by:

Writing to us at: Tree Aid, Brunswick Court, Brunswick Square, Bristol, BS2 8PE
Phoning us: 0117 909 6363
Emailing us: info@treeaid.org

Why we collect information

We collect information for many reasons, including:

To provide you with the service or information you have requested.
To process your donations, including tax processing e.g. Gift Aid.
To keep you updated about how your donations are helping people and how you can help Tree Aid continue its work to grow trees, restore land and build lasting livelihoods.
To understand your relationship with us e.g. if you have supported us, and for how long
To keep in touch with you regularly if you have signed up to a fundraising event to ensure you have all of the details you need for taking part. We may also contact you after the event to get your feedback and communicate the total of the funds raised.

We will also use your personal data (your name and email address) to help deliver more relevant advertising about our work on social media platforms (eg Facebook (Meta), Google, and other digital advertising services).

This includes:

Showing ads to you on those platforms (also known as Custom Audiences or Customer Match);

Excluding you from certain ads (for example, if you’ve already donated or signed up);

Creating “lookalike” or “similar” audiences to find more people who might be interested in our work, based on shared characteristics.

Our goal is to send you useful information - not unwanted ads - by showing only what's relevant. This use of your data is based on our legitimate interest in promoting our charitable activities and engaging with our supporters effectively.

Your data is shared securely and only with platforms that agree to use it solely for these purposes. It is encrypted before sharing with the social media platforms and is deleted after the target audiences have been created. We never sell your personal data.

If you prefer not to have your data used in this way, you can:

Contact us at info@treeaid.org to opt out; and/or

Adjust your ad settings directly on platforms like Facebook or Google Data

The legal bases for collecting information

The law on data protection sets out a number of reasons that permits us to collect and process your personal data:

Consent – when you make a gift or contact us you have the option to ‘tick a box’ to give us consent to using the data you supply us. Consent is required for us to contact you by email and text for fundraising and awareness raising purposes.
Legitimate interest – we believe our existing supporters have a legitimate interest to continue receiving updates from us about the impact their gifts are having for communities across Africa. For this reason, we don’t require consent to continue to contact our current supporters by mail, and phone calls (providing the telephone number isn’t registered with the Telephone Preference Service). You can opt-out of this at any time – see below.

We also rely on legitimate interests to share personal data with social media platforms for fundraising and awareness raising purposes. See section below.

Legal compliance – for example HMRC requires us to collect information regarding Gift Aid.

Please also see our Supporter Promise for Tree Aid’s position on fundraising and communicating with you.

We may, on occasion and only with your permission, improve the quality and accuracy of the information you have provided by checking it against external data lists. For example, your data may be matched against telephone or address lists to ensure we have the correct contact details for you. This helps us ensure our records are fully up-to-date and helps us avoid misdirecting our communications. We will only do this if we have your consent.

How we collect information

We will collect information about you when:

You make a donation to us. This includes one-off donations, regular donations via Direct Debit and standing order and purchasing one of our Gifts That Grow. Sometimes, your information may be collected for us by a trusted organisation working on our behalf. Please be assured that when we work via other organisations, we are still responsible for your data and we adhere to our same high standards of data collection.
You sign up to receive our email newsletter
You take part in one of our events or fundraise for us or enquire about doing this.
You contact us through the following channels: online, email, phone or post.
You visit our website. Like most websites, we use “cookies” to help us make our site – and the way you use it – better. They are small text files that allow information about your visit to be recorded, and enable websites to recognise a user (anonymously) to make interacting with a website faster and easier. Please see our cookies policy for more information on this.
You post on our social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Depending on your privacy settings or the privacy policies of these sites, you might give us permission to receive information about you from them.
You use third party sites such as Care2 and JustGiving – but only if you’ve given them permission to share your information with us. These organisations will have their own privacy policies so please do make sure you read them before providing your information.
We may also collect publicly available information about you, including where you live, your potential to give and other demographics such as age. We will use this to tailor communications and our fundraising asks to you based on what we learn. Please let us know if you are not happy for us to do this.

The types of personal information we might hold about you

Your name, address, email address and phone numbers
Your date of birth
Your bank or credit card details (only if you are making a donation)
Your previous donation history
Your tax status if you have given us permission to claim Gift Aid on your donation or told us you are not eligible
Notes on when we have been in touch with you, or you with us.

How long we will keep your information for

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as it is necessary for the relevant activity, for example to comply with HMRC rules we will keep a record of donations that are eligible for Gift Aid for at least seven years.

If you request that we stop sending you fundraising materials we will need to keep a record of your contact details and appropriate information to enable us to comply with your request not to be contacted by us.
Legacy income is vital to Tree Aid. We may keep data you provide to us for up to 80 years after the end of your support to enable us to carry out legacy administration and communicate effectively with the families of those supporters that leave us a gift in their Will. This also enables us to identify and analyse the source of legacy income we receive.

We will ensure that, 10 years after the end of a relationship with a supporter, we only retain the minimum amount of data that is necessary in order for us to identify a reactivating supporter or legacy giver.

How we protect your information

We will never sell your data. We will only share your data with carefully selected partners who do work for us and have guaranteed to keep your details confidential and secure. This will include organisations that send mail, process financial transactions, contact supporters or enquirers on our behalf for fundraising or administrative purposes. We also send Gift Aid data to HMRC. We will only pass personal data to these organisations if they have signed a contract that requires them to:

Abide by the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation
Treat your information as carefully as we would
Only use the information for the purposes it was supplied

We would also share your data if we are legally required to do so, e.g. by a law enforcement agency legitimately exercising a power or if compelled by an order of the Court.

We ensure that there are appropriate technical and organisational security measures in place to protect your personal details in accordance with current data protection legislation. This means:

We secure access to all transactional areas of our websites using ‘https’ technology.
Access to your personal data is password-protected, and sensitive data (such as payment card information) is secured and tokenised to ensure it is protected.
We regularly monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks.
We undertake regular reviews of who has access to information that we hold to ensure that your information is only accessible by appropriately trained staff, volunteers and contractors.

We always strive for best practice in our fundraising and communications and adhere to our legal obligations, including the General Data Protection Regulation, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, Fundraising Preference Service and the Telephone Preference Service. We adhere to the regulations set by the Fundraising Regulator who actively regulates charities carrying out fundraising activities.

How we use your data if you apply for a role at Tree Aid

We collect information from anyone who applies to work or volunteer at Tree Aid. We only use this information for our recruitment or employment purposes.

Applicants

When you apply to work or volunteer at Tree Aid we will ask for information about you and your work history to understand how your skills and past experience matches the requirements of a role. There are two circumstances where we might disclose details outside of Tree Aid as we process your application:

We will ask for details of referees, and we will contact them to verify the information that you have given us – when we contact them, we will share your name and the role that you have applied for. We contact referees on the basis of our legitimate interests as an organisation to understand applicants and their suitability for the roles they apply for.
Some roles also require us to obtain a disclosure from the Disclosure & Barring Service. This will be clearly marked in the job advertisement, and so we will not give you further notice before we apply for this disclosure.

The personal data you provide as part of the recruitment process will be held and processed for the purpose of the application only and kept securely on our system during the recruitment process and up to 6 months after. After that, unless you agree otherwise, it will be deleted from our system.

You should know that we always keep anonymous statistical information about applicants to develop our recruitment processes and for equality and diversity monitoring, but this does not contain any information that could be used to identify individual job applicants.

Employees

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

We provide all of our employees with our data protection policy, which explains exactly how we process their data as an employee.

If you would like further information about how we use your information when you apply for a role at Tree Aid, please email recruitment@treeaid.org.

How you can control your data

You have the right to change the way we use your data at any time or ask to us to stop using it in a certain way. You can also request to see the information we hold about you and ask us to correct or delete it. On occasions we may search for publicly available information about our supporters to help us focus future communications and fundraising asks. You can opt out of this at any time.

To change your mind about how you would like to be contacted or for any other enquiry relating to the personal information we hold about you, please write to Supporters & Fundraising Team, Tree Aid, Brunswick Court, Brunswick Square, Bristol, BS2 8PE, email info@treeaid.org or you can call us on 0117 909 6363.

Please note, it may take up to six weeks for your request to take effect as we update our systems accordingly.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make any significant changes in the way we treat your personal information we will make this clear on the Tree Aid website or by contacting you directly. For further information, see the Information Commissioner’s Office website for guidance.

This Privacy Policy was updated in October 2025.