Data protection

19 May 2011

Your responsibilities

The law requires all Friends of the Earth local groups to comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 and associated legislation.

Read our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to understand what your group needs to do to achieve this. All groups should use this document to identify any areas of improvement on an ongoing basis.

The FAQs apply the data protection principles to scenarios your group is most likely to encounter. However, it's important to note that this document offers guidance only and is based on our interpretation of the current legislation.

There is also some useful information available on the Information Commissioner's website or you can read the Data Protection Act 1998 in full.

If you have any further queries, please contact our Activism Support Officer or your Network Developer.

About Friends of the Earth's data protection statement

In 2011 we introduced a new data protection statement on all of our materials which ask people to sign or add their contact details. It says:

We would like to keep in touch with you about our work through email and other electronic means. Please provide your email address. EMAIL: __________

If you would prefer us not to send you information about our campaigns, events and fundraising activities, please let us know by emailing us at changes@foe.co.uk or calling us on 0800 581051

Sometimes, on materials where there's space, we also include an option to provide telephone and mobile phone numbers.

What does this statement mean?

It means that someone gets the choice to opt-in to receive emails (and sometimes texts or phone calls) from us by providing their details. If they give us their address details, we can also get in touch with them about what we do and how they can get involved.

If people want to opt out of receiving any information from us (by post, email or phone), they need to get in touch with us and let us know (following the instructions in the statement). There is not an option to tick a box to opt out of being contacted.

Why have we done this?

We know from our databases that if people take an action with us once they're much more likely to want to hear from us again and are more likely to want to get involved with us more.

With our old data protection statement, we were unable to contact lots of people that we wanted to contact and who appeared to want to hear from us. This new statement allows us to be in touch with people that we think we will want to hear from us.

We're looking over the coming years to substantially build the number of people that get involved with Friends of the Earth. We want more individuals taking action on our campaigns and more people getting involved with local groups too.

If someone takes an action with us, we'd like to be able to get back in touch and invite them to be involved with us in a variety of ways. We believe this will help us bring more people on board and increase our impact on some really vital campaigns and challenges.

What should you do if this affects your campaigning?

If someone says they do not want to sign a campaign postcard because of the lack of a tick box to opt out of further information from us, please tell them that they can simply write "No contact from FOE" on the card and we won't contact them at all.

If you're experiencing this or any other problems as a result of the new data protection statement, we want to hear from you. Please contact your Network Developer and explain your experience.

We'll be keeping records of any problems we hear about to inform a review later in the year. During this review, we'll decide whether the new statement is working well or if it's causing any problems for staff or local groups. If there are problems, we'll seek to resolve these.