Ferncliffe NPC Privacy Policy

Privacy is important in this online world. We work to meet the data protection obligations recently made law in South Africa. The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) is designed to keep your personal information safe.

Why we ask for your personal details

We gather information from you to allow you to make your donations to Ferncliffe, and for you to receive the gifts and communications promised in return.

This includes your name and contact details, as well as addresses to allow us to ship our certificates and prints to yourself or the person/s you have chosen to receive these as a gift. Shipping via courier requires contact numbers and emails to make sure that the goods arrive at your door with the minimum of trouble.

Addresses are also required as proof of identity by some payment / financial institutions internationally, which is why they are included in our billing fields.

By making a donation, you also supply some device information such as your computer’s IP address, which helps us screen and prevent fraud.

By continuing to use the site to make a donation, adopt a tree, plant a tree, add an artist’s print or pay a day’s wage, you agree to us gathering such personal information.

We will stop communicating with you following the expiry of your donation period for Adopt a Tree or Plant a Tree donations, unless you indicate a willingness to renew the donation or to sign up to a newsletter.

We will hold your details in company records of donations made for historical, research and statistical reasons (to help us identify patterns in donor regions, for example, and to retain the information of how many individuals contributed to the project’s growth and survival).

We may have to hold on to records that reflect your identity but that must be retained by law for certain periods of time, such as tax invoices.

Data collection via our website

Our website is built using WordPress and custom-built coding, and uses WooCommerce for the billing details. Actual payment is made via PayFast, South Africa’s well-known online payment gateway, so we do not collect any banking details or data.

Woocommerce sets functional cookies to keep items in your cart while you browse and “shop”. Our billing fields set a Cookie to recognise returning donors so they don’t have have to reenter their details.

Woocommerce extensions may collect personal data, such as city and postal codes to calculate shipping rates. It may share data with external services, such as the billing address to process a payment.

WooCommerce stores like Ferncliffe may connect to third party email services, analytics and reporting tools, accounting software, and other services to serve their customers. In doing so, we may share certain data with those third party services.

We may use Google analytics to assess how our site is used by our supporters. They explain how they use your personal information here: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/. You can also opt-out of Google Analytics here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Security

All WordPress sites are encrypted, by default. They run Firewalls to alert WordPress about attempts to access sites without authorisation.

Ferncliffe takes reasonable precautions to keep our work devices and records safe and secure so as to protect your data.

Embedded content from other websites

Links to other websites on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

This Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time.

You may ask Ferncliffe to delete your personal data or stop communicating with you at any point by writing to the information officer, connor@ferncliffe.org. However, we may be obliged to keep data for administrative, legal, or security purposes.