The Word for the World (UK) Privacy Policy

Introduction and general terms:

The Word for the World (UK) is committed to taking great care with your personal data and we will always do our very best to protect any personal information we obtain about you, whether you are a fundraising supporter, a recipient of our e-newsletters or if you follow us on social media. This Privacy Notice sets out how and why we obtain, use and protect personal information if you interact with us in one of these roles.

Who we are:

In this Privacy Notice, “The Word for the World (UK)”, “TWFTW”, “we” or “our” means:
The Word for the World (UK), a charity, registered in England by the Charity Commission for England and Wales (Charity Number 1098498) whose head office is located at Hartham Park, Hartham Lane, Corsham, Wiltshire, SN13 0RP.

What we do:

The vision of The Word for the World UK is to bring God’s Word (The Bible) to all people in his/her heart language. The mission of The Word for the World is to empower indigenous persons and organisations for Bible translation. This is to enable persons, ministries and organisations from language communities that do not yet have the Bible in their own language to take responsibility for Bible translation and related activities and to ensure its availability and accessibility.

About this notice:

Your personal information (for example, your name, contact details, and religious views), otherwise known as your personal data, is protected by specific legislation:

  • United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR)
  • The Data Protection Act 2018
  • Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) 2003

The laws in this area continue to develop quickly and we take every care to ensure that we comply with our obligations regarding personal data. Your privacy is important to us, and we have policies to ensure that we collect only the data that we need to effectively carry out our business and that we don’t keep it any longer than we need to.

This policy explains how we collect, manage, use and protect your personal data, including how we work with third parties. We never sell or swap your details with any other organisation for their marketing purposes.

If you would like more information on anything in this Privacy Notice, please do get in touch with us at: admin-uk@twftw.org

The types of information we collect:

It will depend on how you interact with us as to what information we may need to collect from you. However, in general, we may collect some or all of the following information about you:

  • Your name
  • Your postal and email addresses
  • Your telephone number or numbers
  • Details of any correspondence that we have had with you
  • How you would like to hear from us, and when you told us this
  • Details of any donations that you have made to us
  • Whether or not you have signed up to the Gift Aid Scheme, and when you did so
  • Any fundraising appeals that you may have responded to
  • Events that you have taken part in or enquired about

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide us with any of the personal data above, but, if you choose not to provide us with information when requested we may not be able to deal with you properly and provide our services.

How we collect this personal data:

We collect this personal data from you in a variety of ways. These include:

When you provide it to us directly

You may give us your information in order to sign up to our e-newsletter, make a donation, pledge a legacy, or to simply communicate with us.

When you provide it to us indirectly

Your information may be shared with us by Stewardship or PayPal if you make a donation in this manner. These independent third parties will only do so when you have indicated that you wish to support The Word for the World, and with your consent.

When you give permission to other organisations to share it, or it is publicly available. 

The information we get from other organisations may depend on your privacy settings or the responses you give, so you should regularly check them. This information comes from the following sources:

  • Third party organisations – includes other charities to which you may also donate, or other organisations with whom you may have signed up. The data we receive depends on your agreement with the third-party organisation.
  • Social media – this will depend upon the settings and/or privacy policies of platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, or WhatsApp.
  • Our website – We assign web browser cookies to enhance each visitor’s use of our website. Cookies are used for saving small amounts of information such as user settings. We do not link IP addresses to individuals. IP addresses are used for internal research and promotion purposes and are not provided to third parties. Cookies issued by us only contain a unique number and therefore contain no personal data. We do not link cookies to individuals other than to recognize repeat visits.

If you do not wish to have cookies stored on your computer, you can change your web browser to refuse cookies or to let you know when you get a new cookie. Alternatively, you can use the cookie banner on our website to set your cookie preferences.

Why we collect this personal data.

We collect personal data to help us to process your requests, keep in touch with you and to help us to interact with you in the most effective way.

We will use your personal information to:

  • To provide you with the services, products or information you have asked for
  • To process your donation including the processing of gift aid
  • To support your fundraising efforts
  • To ask you to help us raise money or to donate through our appeals
  • To invite you to events
  • To manage and administer any legacies that have been pledged or left to us
  • To keep a record of our relationship with us
  • To ensure we know how you prefer to be contacted
  • For internal record keeping, such as the management of feedback or complaints
  • Where it is required or authorised by law

Our lawful basis for processing your data

Under the UK GDPR, we must be able to demonstrate that we have a ‘lawful basis’ for processing your personal data. The lawful bases that we have identified are:

Consent – where you have given us your consent to process your information for a clear, defined purpose. For example, you may have given us your consent to send marketing emails to you. However, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.

Legal obligation – We are able to use your personal information where we need to do so to comply with one of our legal or regulatory obligations.  For example, in some cases we may need to share your information with our various regulators such as the Charity Commission, Fundraising Regulator, or the Information Commissioner.

Contract – We may process your data if we need to do so in order to complete a contract with you.

Legitimate interest – We may also process your data where we are furthering our legitimate aims and have assessed that the processing is not likely to be too intrusive, or to unduly infringe on your rights and freedoms. In legal terms, this is called the “legitimate interests” basis.

Who we share your information with:

The Word for the World (UK) have offices all over the world, including our headquarters in South Africa, and the United States. However, we do not share your personal data with these branches, as we only share anonymous statistics.

Data transfers outside the UK

Occasionally, we may need to share your personal data with third party service providers based outside the UK, such as Mailchimp, who send out our newsletters on our behalf, and manage your consent for us so that we only send information to those who wish to receive it.

Whenever we transfer UK or EU residents’ personal data out of the UK or EU, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented: 

  • We will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the Information Commissioner’s Office, including using the UK Extension to the EU/ US Data Privacy Framework.
  • We may rely on the European Commission approved standard contract clauses (and their UK equivalent) together with a transfer impact assessment to identify any additional safeguards required to give personal data the same protection it has in the UK and EU.

Please contact us if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data outside of the UK and EU. Currently, the only instance where this is relevant, is in relation to the data that is processed via Mailchimp.

How long we hold your data for:

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. 

If you tell us that you no longer wish to receive communications from us about events and other promotional information, your personal data will be removed from our marketing lists.

In some circumstances, we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you. 

Your rights:

You have the following rights over your data: 

Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”).  This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.  

Request rectification of the personal information that we hold about you.  This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.  

 Request erasure of your personal information.  This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it.  You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing.  

Submit a data portability request. This enables you to receive personal data you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine readable format, or to transfer this information to another organisation.

Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest and there is something about your situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground.   

Request the restriction of processing of your personal information.  This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you.  

You can withdraw your consent for processing your data at any time. Where the processing of your personal data relies on the consent lawful basis you can withdraw your consent.  

If you would like to exercise any of these rights in the UK, please contact us at admin-uk@twftw.org

Changes to this notice:

From time to time we may make changes to this Privacy Notice, and you will always be able to see here when it was last updated. If we make significant changes, such as in how or why we process your personal data, we will also publicise these changes on our website or may contact you directly with more information. Please do revisit this Notice each time you consider giving your personal data to The Word for the World (UK).

The last significant changes to this policy were in March 2024.

Contact us:

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let us know by contacting at admin-uk@twftw.org or by phone on +44 (0)7388 268895

You may also wish to write to us at:

The Word for the World (UK), Hartham Park, Hartham Lane, Corsham, Wiltshire, SN13 0RP.

If you are a located in the UK you also have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner Office https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/