Policies & privacy

Website privacy policy

This policy explains what happens to personal information when you visit our website or use it to get in touch with us. It's separate from the privacy notice we give to people we support directly, which covers the case-management information we hold about clients and carers in more detail.

1. Who we are

This website is run by Halesworth Dementia Carers' Fund (HDCF), a volunteer-led local charity supporting people living with dementia and their carers in and around Halesworth. We are the "data controller" for the information described in this policy.

Post: Halesworth Dementia Carers' Fund, Patrick Stead Day Care Centre, London Road, Halesworth, Suffolk IP19 8LR
Phone: 07990 199632
Email: info@halesworthdementia.co.uk
Registered charity number: 1170477
ICO registration reference: 00015057144

2. If you contact us through this website

Volunteer enquiry form

Our volunteer enquiry form asks for your name and email address, and optionally your phone number, what you'd like to help with, when you're usually free, and a message. When you send it, your enquiry is emailed straight to our inbox at info@halesworthdementia.co.uk. It is not stored on the website. We use it only to reply to you about volunteering.

To stop the form being misused by automated spam, the website briefly keeps a scrambled (hashed) version of the IP address an enquiry came from, and the time it was sent. We can't use this to identify you. Records more than an hour old are deleted the next time the form is used.

Our newsletter is sent using Brevo, an email service based in France. When you sign up on this website, your email address goes straight to Brevo, which sends you an email asking you to confirm. You're only added to our list once you click the link in that email. We then send you our newsletter with news, events and activities, about once a month.

Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, or you can ask us to remove you at any time by emailing us. There's no need to give a reason.

Emailing or phoning us

If you email or phone us using the details on this website, we use what you tell us only to reply and to help you.

Legal basis: replying to your enquiry is based on our legitimate interest in communicating with people who contact us. Adding you to the newsletter list is based on your consent, which you give by asking to join.

3. Making a referral online

You can refer someone to HDCF, or ask us to support you, using the "Make a referral" link on this site. This takes you to a secure form on our separate HDCF Support system (app.halesworthdementia.co.uk), where you can tell us about yourself as the referrer and about the person you're referring.

The form asks for: your name and contact details as the referrer; the name, date of birth, address and contact details of the person being referred; the name and contact details of their main carer, and whether that carer lives at the same address (this helps us understand whether the person lives alone); and a brief description of their situation and any support already in place.

A referral can include health information, which the law treats as "special category" data and protects more strictly. We only use it to assess and provide care and support.

To help stop the form being misused by automated bots, we use Cloudflare Turnstile, a check that runs in the background. It doesn't set advertising cookies. The form also sets one essential security cookie, and its page styling loads from a service called jsDelivr, which sees your IP address as any website would. We keep the IP address a submission came from with the referral, to help us spot spam.

A member of our team reviews every submission before it becomes part of anyone's support record. Once someone becomes a client, our client privacy notice (available on request) covers how we look after their information from that point on.

Legal basis: reviewing and acting on referrals is based on our legitimate interest in accepting referrals for our support services. Checking that submissions aren't automated, and keeping a record of the submitting IP address, is based on our legitimate interest in preventing abuse of this form.

4. Cookies and technical information

This website does not use cookies. (The separate referral form described in section 3 sets one essential security cookie.) We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, advertising cookies, or any other tracking technology. If that ever changes, we'll update this policy and ask for your consent first, where the law requires it.

If you use the "Turn animations off" button at the bottom of each page, your browser remembers that choice on your own device, so the website stays still next time you visit. This setting is never sent to us.

Our fonts, photos and video are all stored on our own website, so visiting it doesn't send your information to other companies. The newsletter sign-up form only contacts Brevo when you press "Sign me up". Some pages link to other websites, such as Google Maps or our Facebook page. If you follow those links, the other website's privacy policy applies.

Like most websites, our hosting provider automatically records some technical information for every visit, such as your IP address and browser type, in security logs. This is used only to keep the site running securely, and not to identify individual visitors.

5. Donations

Donations made through the "Donate" buttons on our site are handled by Give as you Live Donate, an independent donation platform. You'll leave our website to make a donation. We don't see or store your card details, and Give as you Live Donate is responsible for the information you give them as its own data controller. Their privacy policy is available on their website.

We only receive summary information about donations made this way (such as the amount and your name, if you choose to share it with us), which we use to thank donors and keep our financial records.

We have a Facebook page. If you interact with us there (for example, by commenting or messaging), that's covered by Facebook/Meta's own privacy policy, not this one. We don't control how Facebook handles your information.

Kualo, our website hosting provider, who host this site and send volunteer enquiries to our inbox on our behalf, under their free charity hosting scheme.
Brevo (France), which keeps our newsletter mailing list and sends the newsletter on our behalf.
Give as you Live Donate, for donations made through our site (see section 5). They act as an independent controller, not on our instructions.
Railway, our secure hosting provider for the HDCF Support system where online referrals are stored, Resend, who send our staff the email telling them a referral has arrived (it includes the name of the person referred and of the referrer), Cloudflare, who provide the anti-bot check on our online referral form, and jsDelivr, which delivers that form's page styling.

We don't sell website visitors' information, and we don't share it for third-party marketing.

Information sent outside the UK: the HDCF Support system currently runs on Railway's servers in the United States, and Resend and Cloudflare are also US companies. These providers handle your information under their data protection agreements, which include safeguards for international transfers. You can ask us for details using the contact information in section 1.

8. How long we keep it

Volunteer enquiries and emails: kept for up to 12 months, then deleted, unless they lead to you volunteering with us or to a referral (in which case our volunteer or client privacy notice and retention policy apply instead).
Referrals: when someone becomes a client, the referral is kept with their record under our retention policy.
Anti-spam records on the website: deleted the next time the form is used once they are more than an hour old.
Newsletter mailing list: kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove you.

9. Your rights

Under data protection law, you have the right to:

See a copy of the information we hold about you.
Ask us to correct anything that's wrong or out of date.
Ask us to delete your information.
Withdraw your consent at any time (for example, to stop receiving our newsletter).
Ask us to restrict how we use your information, or object to certain uses.
Ask us to transfer your information to you or another organisation, in some circumstances.

To use any of these rights, contact us using the details in section 1. We'll aim to respond within one month.

10. Children

This website is aimed at adults: carers, family members, and professionals looking for support or information. We don't knowingly collect information from children through this website.

11. How to complain

If you have concerns about how we've handled your information, please contact us first (see section 1). If you're not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO):

Website: ico.org.uk
Phone: 0303 123 1113
Post: Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time, for example if we add new features to the website. The version on this page is always the current one.

Approved by the HDCF trustees. Last updated October 2026.

Our other policies

Our trustees review and approve the key policies that guide how we work.

You can ask for a copy of any of our policies by emailing info@halesworthdementia.co.uk or calling 07990 199632.