Stamp Out Poverty - Privacy Policy

Last reviewed and updated: August 2026

The Make Polluters Pay campaign is hosted and organised by Stamp Out Poverty, and your data will therefore be processed in line with the Stamp Out Poverty Privacy Policy.

Stamp Out Poverty is committed to keeping personal data secure and being transparent about how we collect and use your data, so you can be confident about supporting our work.

All personal information is held in line with UK data protection law, namely the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. Data on supporters is held in accordance with this privacy policy.

The purpose of this policy is to help you understand what personal information Stamp Out Poverty collects, how we use it, and what your rights are.

This policy applies to all the pages hosted on this site and other sites run by Stamp Out Poverty, including the Make Polluters Pay campaign. It does not apply to other organisations to which we may link and whose privacy policies may differ.

If you have questions about Stamp Out Poverty's data protection policies, or wish to contact us in relation to this privacy policy, you can email us at office@stampoutpoverty.org

The information we collect about you

Stamp Out Poverty collects personal information about you in a number of ways. When you support us by:

Signing up to receive our newsletter
Signing one of our petitions
Making a donation to Stamp Out Poverty
Taking part in activities, both online and offline

As well as:

When you apply for a job at Stamp Out Poverty
When you visit our website
When you contact us via our website

To comply with UK data protection law, Stamp Out Poverty will always ensure we have a legal justification for collecting and using your personal information.

The legal basis that we rely on will depend on the circumstances in which we collect and use your personal information. In almost all cases, our processing of your personal information will fall into one of the following categories:

Where you have provided your consent to allow us to use your data in a certain way.
Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to comply with a legal obligation.
Where it is in our legitimate interests to contact you in order to raise funds and achieve our campaign objectives. Where we rely on a legitimate interest to use your information, we will always ensure that this is done in a way so as not to be intrusive or cause distress, and that respects your rights. We carry out a balancing assessment before relying on legitimate interests, and you can ask us for information about that assessment.
Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to carry out the performance of a contract with you.

How we collect consent via petitions

Stamp Out Poverty requires an email address to be captured on petition forms. This information is used to verify your petition sign up.

On some petitions, Stamp Out Poverty may provide an option for supporters to give additional consent to us to contact them for the purposes stated in the text on this page. Supporters may opt out of this contact at any time, via a link included in every email Stamp Out Poverty sends; or via contacting us through the contact information available on our website. Where petitions do not provide an additional consent option to be contacted, supporters' information will only be used to verify their sign up and the personal data is not processed for any other purpose.

How we collect your data

Stamp Out Poverty obtains personal information from you when you engage with us in the ways outlined above.

In most circumstances, Stamp Out Poverty will only ask for your name and contact details (plus payment details if you are making a donation). Sometimes we may ask for additional information where it may either help us in our campaigns or help us keep our communications relevant to you. We may store relevant information about you that you voluntarily share with us.

How we use your data

Stamp Out Poverty uses our supporters' personal data in a variety of ways which include the following:

Providing you with information you have requested from us
Providing you with information that is relevant to your interests
Processing donations and joining fees received from you
Making enquiries or informing you about your interactions with us (e.g. informing you of changes to events)
Responding to any complaints from you
Offering you ways to fund our work
Inviting you to events or activities
Keeping you updated on our campaigning work
Informing you of volunteering opportunities
Inviting you to participate in surveys or research
Analysing and refining our advertising, campaigning and other operations to increase our effectiveness
Working with authorities in cases of fraud or criminal investigations

Personalised communication and profiling

In order to ensure our communication with you is relevant, timely and ultimately provide a better experience for you, we may build up a profile of you based on the interactions you have had with Stamp Out Poverty.

This profiling may include details of your past engagement with Stamp Out Poverty together with information gathered from sources detailed elsewhere in this Privacy Policy. For example, in deciding who to email about writing to certain MPs, we might look at which supporters have written to their MPs in the past and which supporters live in selected MPs' constituencies. This enables Stamp Out Poverty to most effectively target relevant information and appropriate requests for support. This does not affect any of your rights or limit how you can get involved with us and our campaigns.

We do not make any decisions about you based solely on automated processing that produce legal effects or similarly significantly affect you. You have the right to object to profiling for direct marketing purposes, and you may opt out of profiling at any time by contacting us using the details at the bottom of this policy.

Volunteer community

We may occasionally provide volunteering opportunities for supporters. For some volunteering opportunities, it might be necessary for us to collect special category personal data. For example, if you volunteer with us at one of our events, we might ask you about your accessibility needs or dietary requirements in order to make any reasonable adjustments you might need. When collecting special category data we will always ask for your explicit consent.

Special category data is only shared with staff who need it to carry out their duties: for example, a member of staff responsible for health and safety at an event. We have measures in place to ensure the confidentiality of your data.

Job applicants

If you apply for a job with us, your personal data will be collected and processed by Stamp Out Poverty. We will collect a range of information from you, including:

Your name, address and contact details, including email address and telephone number.
Details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history.
Information about your right to work in the UK.

We initially rely on your consent to process your information as a job candidate. We are legally obliged to process information about your right to work in the UK and we will take a copy of your passport as evidence of your right to work if we offer you a position within the organisation. We are legally obliged to make reasonable adjustments for you if you have a disability.

Your information will not be used for any purpose other than processing and managing your job application, and for internal reporting on our recruitment processes. Only people involved in the recruitment process for the role you apply for will have access to your personal data.

Personal information about unsuccessful candidates will be held for a maximum of six months after the recruitment exercise has been completed and will then be destroyed.

If you are successful in your application, our use of your data will be set out in our policies for Stamp Out Poverty staff.

Visitors to our website and digital platforms

Cookies are small files that are downloaded onto your computer or mobile device from websites that you visit. Cookies contain information that allows websites to recognise that you have used the site before.

We use cookies to analyse website traffic and optimise your website experience. Where cookies are not strictly necessary for the website to function, we will ask for your consent before setting them, in line with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). When you enter our website for the first time, you can choose which categories of cookies to accept or decline, and you can change your preferences at any time via the cookie settings on our website.

Third party cookies, social media and web advertising

You may see our advertising online and on some social media sites if you have supported us before, or if your use of these channels suggests that you would find our campaigns relevant.

We use cookies to ensure that any investments we make in online advertising are as cost-effective as possible, by tracking how well individual adverts perform. These cookies are issued by third party service providers that we have assessed as secure.

If you do not wish to see these adverts, you can change this by managing the privacy settings on your social media accounts.

Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media and messaging services, you have given these services permission to share your details with us. For example, if choosing to register for an activity using a “Sign up with Facebook” link, Facebook may share information such as your name and email address with us.

How your data is kept secure

Stamp Out Poverty uses industry-standard tools to safeguard the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information. We make every effort to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control.

We always use a secure connection when collecting personal financial information from you and conform to PCI DSS standards. All forms which request credit card or bank details use TLS encryption (a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery). All modern web browsers support TLS.

The link between your web browser and the server is secure if your web browser displays a small padlock symbol somewhere in the frame, or the address bar shows a web address beginning https:// (rather than http://).

International transfers

We endeavour to keep all supporter data within the UK or the European Economic Area (EEA). Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, we ensure that an appropriate safeguard recognised under UK data protection law is in place. Depending on the destination and the service provider, this will be one of the following:

A UK adequacy decision, where the Secretary of State has determined that the destination country provides an adequate level of protection.
The UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (the “UK-US data bridge”), where the receiving organisation in the United States is actively self-certified to the Data Privacy Framework and has opted into the UK Extension.
The ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA), or the UK Addendum to the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, supported by a Transfer Risk Assessment where required.

We keep the transfer mechanisms we rely on under review, and will update them if the legal framework changes.

Who has access to your data

Within Stamp Out Poverty

Within Stamp Out Poverty, only those authorised to process your data can access your data. We work hard to ensure that our staff can only see the data they need to perform their tasks. All our staff are trained to understand data protection and what they need to do to keep your data secure. We review our data awareness training regularly to ensure it is up to date.

Working with third parties

We will never sell or swap your details with other organisations without your explicit permission.

We do use trusted third party service providers to help us run our website, communications and campaigns, for example email platforms, campaigning and petition platforms, and payment processors. These providers act on our instructions as data processors, are bound by written contracts, and may only use your data to deliver the service we have asked them to provide.

Data retention

Data collected by Stamp Out Poverty will be retained only for an appropriate length of time. In some cases, the retention periods are governed by law, while in others, we are guided by best practice and operational needs.

When we no longer need to retain your personal information we will ensure that it is securely disposed of.

You have the right to ask us to delete personal information we hold about you in some circumstances, for example, if we are processing the data on the basis of consent and you wish to withdraw that consent.

How we will communicate with you

For any marketing communications about our campaigning, fundraising or volunteering, we will only contact you via email if we have your consent to do so.

To respond to your queries, we will contact you either via the medium you used to contact us, or by a medium you have indicated you would like us to respond with. If we need to contact you for any administrative purposes then we will usually email you or call you depending on what contact details we have available for you.

How you can affect the way we communicate with you

The first time you sign up to one of our campaigns or make a donation you will choose how you would prefer to be contacted. We will respect your choices and not make any changes to your preferences unless you change them yourself, or contact us to change them on your behalf.

You can change your mind on how you would like us to contact you, or tell us that you would no longer like to hear from us by using the contact details provided.

If we are processing your data on the basis of consent and we don't hear from you for five years we will stop contacting you. If this happens and you want to start hearing from us again, you can tell us using the contact details provided.

Your data protection rights

Under data protection legislation you have a number of rights, which are outlined below:

The right to be informed about how Stamp Out Poverty uses your data.
The right of access - to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
The right to rectification - to change your personal information if it is incomplete or inaccurate.
The right to erasure - to request the deletion or removal of your personal information in certain circumstances, including where it is no longer necessary for us to hold it for the purposes for which we are processing it.
The right to restrict processing - if there is disagreement about the accuracy or legitimate use of your data.
The right to data portability - to receive the personal data you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, and to have it transmitted to another organisation where technically feasible.
The right to object - including an absolute right to object to the processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes at any time.
The right to withdraw consent - where we are processing data on the basis of your consent, you may withdraw it at any time.
Rights in relation to automated decision-making and profiling.

Exercising these rights is free of charge. We will respond to any request within one month, though this may be extended by up to two further months for complex requests, in which case we will let you know.

Subject access requests

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, which Stamp Out Poverty will supply to you within one month. If you would like to request a copy of the personal information Stamp Out Poverty holds on you, please contact us via the details provided.

How to make a complaint

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, you have the right to complain to us directly. Please email us at office@stampoutpoverty.org with the details of your complaint.

We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it, and will keep you informed of the progress and outcome of our investigation.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's independent regulator for data protection:

Website: ico.org.uk
Helpline: 0303 123 1113
Post: Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

You may complain to the ICO at any time, and you do not have to raise your complaint with us first, though we would always welcome the chance to put things right.

Changes to this policy

Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. The amended version will be published on our website and any significant changes will be communicated to supporters either on the website or directly.

This will replace any previous privacy policy wording and all conditions and terms of use will be in force from the date of publication.

This policy was last reviewed and updated in August 2026.