Our fundraising promise and your privacy

At Parkinson's UK, we hugely value the support of people like you, so your personal data and privacy is extremely important to us.

We promise to respect any personal data you share with us, keep it safe and not do anything you wouldn't reasonably expect with it.

Our work is entirely reliant on voluntary donations which means we do have to ask for money. When we do, we always try to ask responsibly and respectfully.

Our fundraising promise to you

We will never:

  • sell your data to another organisation
  • share your information with another charity, without your specific and explicit consent.

We will always:

  • do our best to keep your personal details safe
  • listen to you, and ensure that we communicate with you in the way that you want
  • treat you fairly and reasonably
  • act with transparency – if you have questions, we will answer them in an open and honest way
  • be accountable – if you don't like what we're doing we want to hear from you.

Fundraising and use of supporter details

The safety and appropriate use of supporters' data is important to us and we will never share or sell personal details to another organisation for their own use.

As a founding charity of the Fundraising Regulator, we follow the Code of Fundraising Practice guidelines, on best practice and are compliant with current data protection legislation, which you can read on the gov.uk website.

Building profiles of supporters and targeting communications

At Parkinson’s UK, we aim to make sure that the information we send to you is relevant and timely. We also wish to use our resources effectively, something supporters tell us is important too. We use profiling techniques because they help us to make appropriate fundraising requests to supporters and importantly, enable us to raise more funds sooner, and more cost-effectively, than we otherwise would.

A profile is primarily based on information that you have given through previous interactions with us. This may include broad information relating to you, such as geographic and socioeconomic data (for example age, postcode etc), in order to have a better understanding of your potential interests and preferences. This helps us to only contact you with the most relevant communications.  If you have made a gift to us, we would bear in mind its value and your gift patterns to help us be as relevant to you as we can. For example if you have made a donation towards our research work we will prioritise sending you further information relating to our scientific research.

At times and when it is available, we may also seek additional information from third party sources. This includes things like wealth screening and economic profiling.  Such information is compiled using publicly available data about you, for example addresses, listed directorships or typical earnings in a specific commercial sector or profession. We will only do this where we have obtained specific consent from you to do so and only to ensure that we share information about our work that is relevant. We will never share this with anyone else outside of Parkinson’s UK.

If you have any questions or concerns about how we communicate with you, how we use your data or would like to change any of your preferences in these areas, please call our Supporter Care team on 0800 138 6593 between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, or by email at [email protected].

Frequently asked questions

Your information is kept on a secure system within the charity, following best practice of data storage and data protection legislation.

We sometimes use external agencies to deliver our work, such as for calling campaigns or printing of our appeals. When we do, measures are put in place to ensure that your personal information is safe, secure and not shared with anyone else for their own purposes.

We also sign contracts with those agencies to ensure they only ever use your data on our behalf in accordance with our instructions, and adhere to the same high levels of data security as Parkinson's UK following the Data Protection Act.

No, Parkinson's UK never sells personal information about supporters to any other organisation.

We never call people who have had no prior contact with the charity to ask for money.

We never call people who have had no prior contact with the charity to ask for money or who have asked us not to call them. We only contact people who would reasonably expect to be contacted because they have recently supported the charity in some way.

We will not call people who are registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) or companies registered with Corporate TPS, unless those people or companies have consented to be called by us.

We contact our supporters based on how they have engaged with us in the recent past, what channels they have given consent for us to contact them by (for example email or SMS) or how they have informed us they wish to be contacted.

If you wish to change how we communicate with you or opt out of receiving further communications, please contact our Supporter Services team on 0800 138 6593 or email them at [email protected] and they'll update your record.

The Fundraising Regulator

We are a member of the Fundraising Regulator. We're signed up to the Code of Fundraising Practice and are committed to fundraise in accordance with the Code and in a way that is legal, open and honest.