Privacy Policy

At Hill Stone Wood we know that the strength of our business depends on the support and confidence of our customers and supporters.

Introduction

At Hill Stone Wood we take your privacy very seriously and we’re committed to protecting your personal information that you’ve shared with us.

Hill Stone Wood is committed to keeping your personal information secure and to being transparent about how we collect and use your data.

This is vital in helping us to ensure that we communicate with our customers and supporters through their preferred channels, and to enable us to share updates about our work, we need to collect different types of information, including personal data. We understand the trust that our customers and supporters place in us when sharing their data, and we will always do our utmost to respect that trust and protect their personal information.

The purpose of this policy is to help you understand what personal information Hill Stone Wood collects, how we use it and what your rights are. We take care to ensure that we use your information in accordance with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal information.

This policy applies to:

Hill Stone Wood Ltd, company number 13673097 and Insure4Nature Ltd, company number 15334625

Spithurst Hub,

Spithurst Road,

Barcombe,

BN8 5EE

The two parts of Hill Stone Wood act as joint data controllers with full transparency of the supporter data that they hold and manage. Responsibility concerning data subjects’ rights and any enquiries that they may have is led by Hill Stone Wood for both organisations. Hill Stone Wood are registered as data controllers with the Information Commissioner for the United Kingdom and are collectively referred to as Hill Stone Wood in this document.

Please read the following policy to understand how your personal information will be treated. It may change from time to time, so please check back periodically.

Contents

1. The Information Hill Stone Wood collects about you and how it is collected and used

  1. People who enquire or buy a product or service or support Us

1.2 Job Applicants

1.3 Visitors to Our Website and Digital Platforms

2. How your data is kept secure

2.1 What Hill Stone Wood does to keep your data secure

2.2 Who has access to your data

2.3 Data Retention

3. How Hill Stone Wood Communicates with you

4. How you can affect the way Hill Stone Wood communicates with you

5. Your Data Protection Rights

6. How to find out more or make a complaint

7. Changes to This Policy

1. The Information Hill Stone Wood collects about you and how it is collected and used.

Hill Stone Wood collects personal information about you in a number of ways:

When you contact us by;

As well as

To comply with UK data protection rules Hill Stone Wood will always ensure we have legal justification for collecting and using your personal information.

The legal basis that we rely on will depend upon the circumstances in which we collect and use your personal information. In almost all cases, our processing of your personal information will fall into one of the following categories:

1.1 People who enquire or buy a product or service or support Us

How we collect your data

Hill Stone Wood obtains personal information from you when you enquire or buy a product, service or support a campaign, engage with our social media and digital advertising or make a donation.

In most circumstances, Hill Stone Wood will only ask for your name and contact details (plus payment details if you are purchasing a product or donating). Sometimes we may ask for additional information where it may either help us in our campaigns or help us keep our communications relevant to you.

We will only collect sensitive personal data where absolutely necessary and with your explicit consent.

How we use your data

Hill Stone Wood uses our customer and supporters’ personal data in a variety of ways which include the following:

Personalised Communication and Profiling

In order to ensure our communication with you is relevant, timely and will ultimately provide a better experience for you, we may build up a profile of you based on the interactions you have had with Hill Stone Wood.

This profiling may include details of your past engagement with Hill Stone Wood together with information gathered from sources detailed elsewhere in this Privacy Policy and may be carried out either by Hill Stone Wood or by a trusted partner. For example, in deciding who to email about a nature based solution project or environmental campaign, we might look at which customers and supporters have supported similar campaigns in the past and which customers live in relevant areas. This enables Hill Stone Wood to most effectively target relevant information and appropriate requests for support. This does not affect any of your rights or limit you in how you can get involved with us. You may opt out of profiling at any time by contacting us using the details at the bottom of this policy.

1.2 Job Applicants

If you apply for a job on our careers site your personal data will be collected and processed by Hill Stone Wood.

We will collect a range of information about you, including:

We initially rely on your consent to process your information as a job candidate. We are legally obliged to process information about your right to work in the UK and we will take a copy of your passport as evidence of your right to work if we interview you. We are legally obliged to make reasonable adjustments for you if you have a disability.

Your information will not be used for any purpose other than processing and managing your job application, and for internal reporting on our recruitment processes. Only people involved in the recruitment process for the role you apply for will have access to your personal data.

Personal information about unsuccessful candidates will be held for one year after the recruitment exercise has been completed and will then be destroyed. We retain de-personalised statistical information about applicants to help inform our recruitment activities, but no individuals are identifiable from that data.

If you are successful in your application, our use of your data will be set out in our policies for Hill Stone Wood Staff.

1.3 Visitors to our website and digital platforms

Cookies

Cookies are small files that are downloaded onto your computer or mobile device from websites that you visit. Cookies contain information that allows websites to recognise that you have used the site before.

How we use cookies on our website

Hill Stone Wood uses cookies to ensure your privacy and security when you visit secure areas of our website, such as transaction pages and registration forms.

Hill Stone Wood will also collect information such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address for monitoring and improving the effectiveness of our website services as well its security.

Third party cookies on our website

Hill Stone Wood uses Google Analytics to compile statistics on how our website is being used, which can help us to improve our website and online services.

Our website also uses Google Analytics advertising features to enable us to better understand the interests of our audience and to tailor our communications to be more relevant to you.

If you do not wish to see these adverts, you can:

Controlling your cookie preferences

All Internet browsers allow you to control which cookies you accept and which you delete. For more information about cookies, please see www.allaboutcookies.org.

Third party cookies and our social media and web advertising

You may also see our advertising online and on some social media sites if you have supported us before, or if your use of these channels suggests that you would find our campaigns relevant.

We use cookies to ensure that any investments we make in online advertising are as cost-effective as possible, by tracking how well individual adverts perform. These cookies are issued by third party service providers that we have assessed as secure.

If you do not wish to see these adverts, you can do so by managing the privacy settings on your social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media and messaging services, you may have given these services permission to share your details with us. For example, if choosing to register for an activity using a ‘Sign up with Facebook’ link, Facebook may share information such as your name and email address with us.

Our Social Media Pages such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter may also use ‘live chat’ services to allow Hill Stone Wood representatives to offer you assistance or the opportunity to engage with Hill Stone Wood in a manner relevant to you.

These services may involve the use of cookies and the transfer of information about your site navigation, such as your IP address, to secure networks for the purposes of storage and analysis. This information will only be used for the purposes of administering these live chats.

Hashed lists and social media and web advertising

We may send a list of ‘hashed’ email addresses to online social media platforms for the purpose of creating a group of people with similar characteristics, for the purpose of targeted advertising for our products, services or projects and campaign activities. For targeted advertising, we may also upload ‘hashed’ files into social media platforms to use as an exclusion list for our ad campaigns, this helps us target new people for Hill Stone Wood, rather than targeting people who have already engaged with us. This is both cost effective, and helps us grow the business.

‘Hashing’ turns these email addresses into an unreadable code for the purposes of security and privacy during data transfer. The hashed data that we share with social media platforms is deleted after a short period of time and not used for any other purpose.

We may use social media platform advertising tools to build audiences matching particular characteristics to serve our advertising campaigns. For example, we might target people who have shown an interest in activism, or environmentalism. This targeting is based on pages and/or posts people have previously engaged with on the platform. These tools allow us to inspire new people to engage with our work, and help us spread awareness about the issues facing our planet.

Pixels

Pixels are tiny 1px-by-1px transparent images that can be embedded in websites, emails and online ads.

Our email server uses pixels to track when people are interacting with our emails. For example, when a user opens an email their browser downloads the transparent image file, sending a signal back to our server letting us know the email has been opened.

We use this information to monitor the performance of our email campaigns, to help ensure we’re sending people emails that are relevant to areas of our work they are interested in, and to remove people who are no longer interested in receiving emails from us from our lists.

We don’t have the ability to turn off email tracking pixels at an individual level. If you would prefer to turn off email pixels, you can adjust your email settings to ‘Ask before displaying external images’ for gmail or a similar setting for other email providers. Preventing email images from loading will stop email tracking pixels from working.

2. How your data is kept secure

2.1 What Hill Stone Wood does to keep your data secure

Hill Stone Wood uses industry-standard tools to safeguard the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information. We make every effort to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control.

We always use a secure connection when collecting personal financial information from you and conform to PCI standards. All forms which request credit card or bank details use Secure Sockets Layers (a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery) for encryption. Most web browsers support Secure Socket Layers.

The link between your web browser and the server is secure if your web browser displays a small padlock or key symbol somewhere in the frame, or the address bar shows a web address beginning https:// (rather than http://)

We endeavour to keep all supporter data inside the European Economic Area (EEA), and ensure that any time data is transferred outside the EEA appropriate safeguards on data security and processing are applied.

2.2 Who has access to your data

Within Hill Stone Wood

Within Hill Stone Wood, only those authorised to process your data can access your data. We work hard to ensure our staff and volunteers can only see the data they need to perform their tasks. All our staff are trained to understand data protection and what they need to do to keep your data secure. We review our data awareness training regularly to ensure it is up to date. We ensure volunteers are given appropriate data awareness and protection training where they are responsible for handling data, for example, if they are collecting petition signatures at an event.

Working with Third Parties

We will never sell or swap your details with other organisations unless it is for administrating the products recommended by us.

If you’ve given your specific consent for us to share your data, we may share your contact details with a specified companies or groups that we feel may be of interest to you. 

We will sometimes use approved third party partner agencies to process information on our behalf, such as a mailing house to post communications to customers and supporters. Third parties with which we share your information are only authorised to use that information to fulfil their contractual obligations to us. They are not permitted to use it for any other purpose. We retain full responsibility for how your personal information is used and we conduct comprehensive checks on these companies before we work with them and periodically throughout the duration of our relationship.

2.3 Data Retention

Data collected by Hill Stone Wood will be retained only for an appropriate length of time; We have a data retention policy which sets out how long we will keep information according to the type of record. In some cases, the retention periods are governed by law, while in others we are guided by best practice and our operational needs.

When we no longer need to retain your personal information we will ensure it is securely disposed of.

You have the right to ask us to delete personal information we hold about you in some circumstances, for example, if we are processing the data on the basis of consent and you wish to withdraw that consent.

3. How Hill Stone Wood will communicate with you

For any marketing communications about our products, services, projects or campaign we will only contact you via email and SMS if we have your consent to do so.

We may send you marketing materials by mail or via phone if we have your consent or we believe you would be interested in our campaign unless you have expressed a preference not to receive such content.

To respond to your queries we will contact you either via the medium you used to contact us or by a medium you have indicated you would like us to respond with. If we need to contact you for any administrative purposes then we will usually email you or call you depending on what contact details we have available for you.

4. How you can affect the way Hill Stone Wood communicates with you

The first time you enquire or buy a product or service you will choose how you would prefer to be contacted. We will respect your choices and not make any changes to your preferences unless you change them yourself, or contact us to change them on your behalf.

You can change your mind on how you would like us to contact you or tell us that you would no longer like to hear from us through our preference form, by writing to us or on our Contact Us web form.

If we are processing your data on the basis of consent and we don’t hear from you for five years we will stop contacting you. If this happens and you want to start hearing from us again you can tell us using the methods mentioned above.

5. Your Data Protection Rights

Under data protection legislation you also have a number of additional rights which are outlined below:

Subject Access Requests

You have a right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, which Hill Stone Wood will supply to you within one month. Hill Stone Wood will ask for proof of identity and may charge a fee should any request be unusually complex or time-consuming. If you would like to request a copy of the personal information Hill Stone Wood UK holds on you, please contact us by writing to us or on our Contact Us web form.

6. How to find out more or make a complaint

Hill Stone Wood operates in accordance with all relevant UK data protection laws. If you would like to find out more about these laws and how you could be affected beyond what is mentioned in this privacy policy, please visit the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you have any specific questions about how Hill Stone Wood processes your data which are not answered here or you would like to make a complaint about how we have managed your data then please either write, call or email us via the details below.

The Data Controller

Hill Stone and Wood,

Spithurst Hub,

Spithurst Road,

Barcombe,

BN8 5EE

or Contact Us form on our website.

If you are not satisfied with our response to your enquiry then you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office directly via the details on their website.

7. Changes to this policy

Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. The amended version will be published on our website and any significant changes will be communicated to supporters either on the website or directly.

This will replace any previous privacy policy wording and all conditions and terms of use will be in force from the date of publication.

Last updated: 26 February 2024

  1. The Information Hill Stone Wood collects about you and how it is collected and used
    1.1 People who enquire or buy a product or service or support Us
    1.2 Job Applicants
    1.3 Visitors to Our Website and Digital Platforms
  2. How your data is kept secure
    2.1 What Hill Stone Wood does to keep your data secure
    2.2 Who has access to your data

2.3 Data Retention

  1. How Hill Stone Wood Communicates with you
  2. How you can affect the way Hill Stone Wood communicates with you
  3. Your Data Protection Rights
  4. How to find out more or make a complaint
  5. Changes to This Policy
  6. The Information Hill Stone Wood collects about you and how it is collected
    and used.
    Hill Stone Wood collects personal information about you in a number of ways:
    When you contact us by;

In most circumstances, Hill Stone Wood will only ask for your name and contact details (plus payment details if you
are purchasing a product or donating). Sometimes we may ask for additional information where it may either help us
in our campaigns or help us keep our communications relevant to you.
We will only collect sensitive personal data where absolutely necessary and with your explicit consent.
How we use your data
Hill Stone Wood uses our customer and supporters’ personal data in a variety of ways which include the following:

Your information will not be used for any purpose other than processing and managing your job application, and for
internal reporting on our recruitment processes. Only people involved in the recruitment process for the role you
apply for will have access to your personal data.
Personal information about unsuccessful candidates will be held for one year after the recruitment exercise has
been completed and will then be destroyed. We retain de-personalised statistical information about applicants to
help inform our recruitment activities, but no individuals are identifiable from that data.
If you are successful in your application, our use of your data will be set out in our policies for Hill Stone Wood Staff.
1.3 Visitors to our website and digital platforms
Cookies
Cookies are small files that are downloaded onto your computer or mobile device from websites that you visit.
Cookies contain information that allows websites to recognise that you have used the site before.
How we use cookies on our website
Hill Stone Wood uses cookies to ensure your privacy and security when you visit secure areas of our website, such as
transaction pages and registration forms.
Hill Stone Wood will also collect information such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address for monitoring and
improving the effectiveness of our website services as well its security.
Third party cookies on our website
Hill Stone Wood uses Google Analytics to compile statistics on how our website is being used, which can help us to
improve our website and online services.
Our website also uses Google Analytics advertising features to enable us to better understand the interests of our
audience and to tailor our communications to be more relevant to you.
If you do not wish to see these adverts, you can:

Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media and messaging services, you may have given
these services permission to share your details with us. For example, if choosing to register for an activity using a
‘Sign up with Facebook’ link, Facebook may share information such as your name and email address with us.
Our Social Media Pages such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter may also use ‘live chat’ services to allow Hill Stone
Wood representatives to offer you assistance or the opportunity to engage with Hill Stone Wood in a manner
relevant to you.
These services may involve the use of cookies and the transfer of information about your site navigation, such as
your IP address, to secure networks for the purposes of storage and analysis. This information will only be used for
the purposes of administering these live chats.
Hashed lists and social media and web advertising
We may send a list of ‘hashed’ email addresses to online social media platforms for the purpose of creating a group
of people with similar characteristics, for the purpose of targeted advertising for our products, services or projects
and campaign activities. For targeted advertising, we may also upload ‘hashed’ files into social media platforms to
use as an exclusion list for our ad campaigns, this helps us target new people for Hill Stone Wood, rather than
targeting people who have already engaged with us. This is both cost effective, and helps us grow the business.
‘Hashing’ turns these email addresses into an unreadable code for the purposes of security and privacy during data
transfer. The hashed data that we share with social media platforms is deleted after a short period of time and not
used for any other purpose.
We may use social media platform advertising tools to build audiences matching particular characteristics to serve
our advertising campaigns. For example, we might target people who have shown an interest in activism, or
environmentalism. This targeting is based on pages and/or posts people have previously engaged with on the
platform. These tools allow us to inspire new people to engage with our work, and help us spread awareness about
the issues facing our planet.
Pixels
Pixels are tiny 1px-by-1px transparent images that can be embedded in websites, emails and online ads.
Our email server uses pixels to track when people are interacting with our emails. For example, when a user opens
an email their browser downloads the transparent image file, sending a signal back to our server letting us know the
email has been opened.
We use this information to monitor the performance of our email campaigns, to help ensure we’re sending people
emails that are relevant to areas of our work they are interested in, and to remove people who are no longer
interested in receiving emails from us from our lists.
We don’t have the ability to turn off email tracking pixels at an individual level. If you would prefer to turn off email
pixels, you can adjust your email settings to ‘Ask before displaying external images’ for gmail or a similar setting for
other email providers. Preventing email images from loading will stop email tracking pixels from working.

  1. How your data is kept secure
    2.1 What Hill Stone Wood does to keep your data secure
    Hill Stone Wood uses industry-standard tools to safeguard the confidentiality of your personally identifiable
    information. We make every effort to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our
    control.

We always use a secure connection when collecting personal financial information from you and conform to PCI
standards. All forms which request credit card or bank details use Secure Sockets Layers (a security protocol that
provides communications privacy over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering,
or message forgery) for encryption. Most web browsers support Secure Socket Layers.
The link between your web browser and the server is secure if your web browser displays a small padlock or key
symbol somewhere in the frame, or the address bar shows a web address beginning https:// (rather than http://)
We endeavour to keep all supporter data inside the European Economic Area (EEA), and ensure that any time data is
transferred outside the EEA appropriate safeguards on data security and processing are applied.
2.2 Who has access to your data
Within Hill Stone Wood
Within Hill Stone Wood, only those authorised to process your data can access your data. We work hard to ensure
our staff and volunteers can only see the data they need to perform their tasks. All our staff are trained to
understand data protection and what they need to do to keep your data secure. We review our data awareness
training regularly to ensure it is up to date. We ensure volunteers are given appropriate data awareness and
protection training where they are responsible for handling data, for example, if they are collecting petition
signatures at an event.
Working with Third Parties
We will never sell or swap your details with other organisations unless it is for administrating the products
recommended by us.
If you’ve given your specific consent for us to share your data, we may share your contact details with a specified
companies or groups that we feel may be of interest to you.
We will sometimes use approved third party partner agencies to process information on our behalf, such as a mailing
house to post communications to customers and supporters. Third parties with which we share your information are
only authorised to use that information to fulfil their contractual obligations to us. They are not permitted to use it
for any other purpose. We retain full responsibility for how your personal information is used and we conduct
comprehensive checks on these companies before we work with them and periodically throughout the duration of
our relationship.
2.3 Data Retention
Data collected by Hill Stone Wood will be retained only for an appropriate length of time; We have a data retention
policy which sets out how long we will keep information according to the type of record. In some cases, the
retention periods are governed by law, while in others we are guided by best practice and our operational needs.
When we no longer need to retain your personal information we will ensure it is securely disposed of.
You have the right to ask us to delete personal information we hold about you in some circumstances, for example, if
we are processing the data on the basis of consent and you wish to withdraw that consent.

  1. How Hill Stone Wood will communicate with you
    For any marketing communications about our products, services, projects or campaign we will only contact you via
    email and SMS if we have your consent to do so.
    We may send you marketing materials by mail or via phone if we have your consent or we believe you would be
    interested in our campaign unless you have expressed a preference not to receive such content.

To respond to your queries we will contact you either via the medium you used to contact us or by a medium you
have indicated you would like us to respond with. If we need to contact you for any administrative purposes then we
will usually email you or call you depending on what contact details we have available for you.

  1. How you can affect the way Hill Stone Wood communicates with you
    The first time you enquire or buy a product or service you will choose how you would prefer to be contacted. We will
    respect your choices and not make any changes to your preferences unless you change them yourself, or contact us
    to change them on your behalf.
    You can change your mind on how you would like us to contact you or tell us that you would no longer like to hear
    from us through our preference form, by writing to us or on our Contact Us web form.
    If we are processing your data on the basis of consent and we don’t hear from you for five years we will stop
    contacting you. If this happens and you want to start hearing from us again you can tell us using the methods
    mentioned above.
  2. Your Data Protection Rights
    Under data protection legislation you also have a number of additional rights which are outlined below:
  1. How to find out more or make a complaint
    Hill Stone Wood operates in accordance with all relevant UK data protection laws. If you would like to find out more
    about these laws and how you could be affected beyond what is mentioned in this privacy policy, please visit the
    Information Commissioner’s Office.
    If you have any specific questions about how Hill Stone Wood processes your data which are not answered here or
    you would like to make a complaint about how we have managed your data then please either write, call or email us
    via the details below.
    The Data Controller
    Hill Stone and Wood,
    Spithurst Hub,
    Spithurst Road,
    Barcombe,
    BN8 5EE
    or Contact Us form on our website.

If you are not satisfied with our response to your enquiry then you can contact the Information Commissioner’s
Office directly via the details on their website.

  1. Changes to this policy
    Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. The amended version will be published on our website and any
    significant changes will be communicated to supporters either on the website or directly.
    This will replace any previous privacy policy wording and all conditions and terms of use will be in force from the
    date of publication.
    Last updated: 26 February 2024

Who We Work With

Hill Stone and Wood, Spithurst Hub, Spithurst Road, Barcombe, BN8 5EE

Our Mission

To enable individuals, businesses and communities to divert existing spend to benefit local people and their natural environment.