Who we are. The Charity Office is run as a sole trader based in the United Kingdom, so there is no company number to give. For anything about your data, write to hello@thecharityoffice.co.uk.

Two different relationships

It matters which one applies to you, because it decides who is answerable for what.

When you use The Charity Office as a person. Your name, your email address, your sign-in: we decide what is held and why, so we are the data controller.
When your charity puts records into the system about trustees, volunteers, beneficiaries or donors, the charity decides what goes in and why. The charity is the controller and we are its processor: we hold and protect that data on the charity's instructions and do nothing else with it.

What we hold about you

Your account. Name, email address, a one-way hash of your password, and any two-factor or passkey settings.
Your role. Which charities you belong to, and what you are allowed to do at each.
Use of the service. Sign-in times and basic technical logs, kept so we can keep the service secure and working.
Billing. If your charity subscribes, the payment is handled by our payment provider. We hold the subscription record and never see or store card numbers.
Anything you send us. Emails and support messages, kept so we can answer them.

Why we are allowed to hold it

To provide the service your charity has asked for: performance of a contract.
To keep the service secure and working, and to tell you about changes that affect you: our legitimate interests.
To meet our own legal and accounting obligations: legal obligation.

We do not sell personal data, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use your charity's records to train machine learning models.

Who else is involved

We use a small number of suppliers to run the service: hosting, email delivery and payment processing. They act on our instructions and may not use the data for anything of their own. There are three. DigitalOcean hosts the servers and the database, in its London data centre. Stripe takes card payments, so we never see or store a card number; it operates in the United Kingdom and the United States. Resend delivers the emails the service sends, such as invitations and reminders, and is based in the United States.

Where it is kept, and for how long

Data is held on servers in the United Kingdom. The servers and their backups are in London. The only personal data that leaves the United Kingdom is what Stripe needs to take a payment and what Resend needs to deliver an email: a name, an email address and the message itself. Your charity's records do not.

We keep an account for as long as the charity uses the service. When a charity closes its account we delete its data after a short grace period, except anything we are required to keep for accounting purposes. The grace period is 90 days, so that a charity which leaves and changes its mind does not lose everything. Invoices and payment records are kept for six years, because tax law requires it.

Your rights

You can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, have it corrected, have it deleted, object to how we use it, or receive a copy in a portable form. Write to us and we will answer within one month.

If the data in question is your charity's record of you, your trustee record for instance, ask the charity first, because it decides what is held there. We will help the charity answer you.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled a request, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Cookies

The public pages of this website set no tracking or advertising cookies. Once you sign in we set the cookies needed to keep you signed in and to protect forms against cross-site request forgery. There is nothing to consent to because there is nothing optional.

Changes to this notice

If we change anything that matters, we will say so on this page and tell account holders by email before it takes effect.

Contact

Write to hello@thecharityoffice.co.uk, or use the contact page.

Privacy notice