Our privacy policy

The mission of Dogs Trust is to bring about the day when all dogs can enjoy a happy life, free from the threat of unnecessary destruction. We commit to being accountable and transparent so that donors and prospective donors, volunteers, and anyone who uses our services can have full confidence in Dogs Trust. 

Dogs Trust processes personal data about people who help us fulfil our mission including:

• Supporters and prospective supporters (which includes people who have demonstrated an interest in our cause by contacting us for information about our products, services, or campaigns)
• People who have pledged their lifetime interest
• Dog Adopters
• Dog Fosterers
• Dogs Trust Dog School Attendees
• People who use the services Dogs Trust offers
• Employees and Staff
• Suppliers
• Veterinarians
• Volunteers
• Visitors to Dogs Trust
• Other supporters and advocates for Dogs Trust 

 This list is not exhaustive and may be added to from time to time as the nature of our services or operations change.

We get data about you from you when: 

• You contact or visit us (in person, via mail, email, social media e.g. facebook, X),
• for purposes such as adopting, fostering a dog,
• donating to Dogs Trust or sponsoring a dog,
• engaging with our campaigns (via mail, email, social media e.g. facebook, X),
• buying from our shop,
• engaging with Dog School training, educational or community outreach services or other advocacy,
• engaging with fundraising outreach services,
• or when we complete a business transaction with you as a supplier of products or services,
• or when you apply for a position or come to work or volunteer for this organisation.

We also get some limited lists of postal addresses of people likely to be interested in helping us fulfil our mission from business list providers.

We may compare information we have from our supporters with publicly available or other legally obtained information. If we receive your details from a 3rd party list, we will tell you. If you want to be removed from these lists or have other questions about how we process your data, contact us and we can address your questions or give you information on how to have your information removed. Dogs Trust will only process (use and store) your personal information if we have asked you and have a record of your express, recent consent for us to do so.

We process people’s data for several purposes including:

• Dog adoptions: processing and managing applications to find new homes for our dogs, including home visits.
• Dog Fostering: processing and management of our fosterers and applications to foster our dogs, including home visits.
• Registering microchipped dogs with a national database (FIDO).
• Human Resource Management for Employees and volunteers, including payroll and training records
• Communication and donor care: communicating with and maintaining our relationships with our donors, sponsors, supporters, and clients, including processing tax relief information for donors.
• Campaign management, communicating with and recruiting new donors, sponsors, and other supporters.
• Analysis and segmentation to identify supporters who may want to make significant contributions to support our mission. We may compare this information with publicly available or otherwise legally obtained information. We also carry out analysis and segmentation to help us communicate with you in the most cost effective manner.
• Managing relationships with people who wish to leave a legacy to Dogs Trust and their estate.
• Managing Dogs Trust Shop transactions.
• Contract and invoice management.
• Research purposes to help understand how to support dogs and their owners better in line with our mission
• Scheduling Dog School classes, public education and managing outreach services.
• CCTV and video recordings for security, safety and dog welfare.

This list is not exhaustive and may be added to from time to time as the nature of our services or operations change.

Data Analysis: To communicate with you more effectively, better understand your preferences and ability to support our work, we may analyse your data.

We like to find out about your personal motivation for supporting Dogs Trust and your experience as a supporter. This helps us to give you the information about products and services relevant to you. In some instances, we may carry out research and/or analysis of the personal information that you have provided to us and add publicly available information (such as public records or social media) to help us tailor our communication to you, this may include wealth screening. We do this to create a fuller picture of our supporters to improve our service and to manage our contact with you in an appropriate way and cost-effective way. This information could include things like your interests, preferences and the level of any potential donations.

We also do statistical analysis and profiling of aggregated data to help us understand how to improve and better support our mission. This uses aggregated data that does not identify any individuals. If you have any questions about what we do with your data, contact us and we can give you more information. 

Dogs Trust does not engage in any form of automated decision making with respect personal data.

For our various activities, we process a range of categories of personal data. The categories of data we process as an organisation are:

• Contact information (such as name, email address, phone number, postal address, home address, work address)
• Information about your household (for rehomers, to help us ensure suitability of dogs for their new homes)
• Information relating to health (for rehomers and for volunteers and staff where required for health and safety purposes)
• Videos and images from CCTV
• Videos and images recorded for marketing and publicity purposes at events.
• Financial information (for the purposes of processing donations)
• Tax information, including your PPSN, for the purposes of enabling you to allow Dogs Trust to take advantage of tax relief on your donations.
• Cookies – our sites make use of cookies for a variety of purposes, some of which are necessary for the operation of our sites and others which provide features and services which are non-essential such as for analytics or to support social media sharing plugins. See the section on Cookies below.
• IP addresses – we process IP addresses in our website for access logging and other technical administration and security purposes. In normal circumstances we cannot identify an individual from their IP address, but we could potentially link an IP address to a named person from a transaction on the website, so we consider IP addresses to be personal data where such analysis is being done (usually at the request of law enforcement or as part of fraud detection and prevention controls). We also process IP addresses as part of our marketing email management processes to identify when emails are delivered, opened, and acted on.

Dogs Trust will only process (use) your personal information if we have:

• asked you and have a record of your specific and recent consent for us to do so;
• a ‘Legitimate Interest’ to do so in order to support our charitable purposes. Our use will be fair and balanced and never unduly have an impact on your rights;
• a contract with you that we can only fulfil by using your personal information, e.g. to send you something you have ordered from the website;
• a legal obligation to use or disclose information about you, e.g. for tax purposes, or if we are required by the Gardaí or other authorized bodies to disclose information such as under the Microchipping of Dogs Regulations 2015.

 When it is necessary, we will contact you for administrative purposes, e.g. to contact you regarding a payment. We will also hold the minimum personal information required to support our ability to respect your preferences for communications with us. In extreme situations, such as an accident or medical emergency, we may share your personal details with the emergency services if it is essential for the preservation of life (yours or another person’s) for us to do so. This is the ‘vital interest’ ground for using your personal information. After the emergency, we will always try to inform you about how we had to use your information in that extreme situation.

From time to time, we would like to send you exciting updates about our work, products, services and how you can support us, including fundraising activities and research.

Our websites Dogstrust.ie, Dogstrustshop.ie and Learnwithdogstrust.ie use cookies (small files that are written to your computer by websites and other online services). Some of these cookies are essential for the purposes and functioning of the site. Others are used by third party services to provide analytics or social media sharing capabilities on the site. This will result in data being shared with third parties.

See full list of our cookies

Dogs Trust use Facebook Pixel, Facebook Custom Audiences and Facebook Lookalike audiences to connect with you our supporters in more relevant ways, so you can help us fulfil our mission, to bring about the day when all dogs can enjoy a happy life, free from the threat of unnecessary destruction. We balance our legitimate interest to use Facebook in this way with your data rights and encourage you to explore Facebook further: 

When you open or log into your Facebook account you see the following :
By clicking Sign Up, you agree to our Terms. Learn how we collect, use and share your data in our Data Policy and how we use cookies and similar technology in our Cookie Policy. You may receive SMS notifications from us and can opt out at any time.

From here you can follow links to Facebook’s account terms, data policy and cookie policy. Following the policy links allows you to customise your account for example to see and control who you share your information with. For more information see: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation

We will only email or phone you with information and updates on our work, products, services and how you can support us including fundraising activities and research if we have a record of your recent freely given consent to do so. There are times when it is not practical to obtain and record consent, or where consent is not the appropriate basis to rely on for processing (e.g. where we need to process your data to fulfil a contract with you). At those times, we will only process personal information if that processing would meet another legal ground e.g. Legitimate Interests, in which case we would only process in accordance with the law’s strict rules on Legitimate Interest in processing.

You can withdraw your consent at any time by completing the Keep In Touch online form or phoning Lo Call 1800 25 29 28 (Option 2), or by following instructions that are provided in any communications we send to you.
 

We respect your rights, which is why we carry out a balancing exercise of the rights of the charity with the rights of our supporters. 

To help you understand when and why Dogs Trust would use Legitimate Interest to process your personal information we provide the following examples:

• To send postal communications, (as explained above). If you don't want to receive postal communications, let us know at any time by completing the Keep In Touch online form or phoning Lo Call 1800 25 29 28 (Option 2), or by following instructions that are provided in any communications we send to you.
• To enhance, modify, personalise and improve our services and communication for the benefit of our supporters.
• To improve security of our websites and systems.
• To prevent fraud when transacting on our website.
• To analyse your personal information to ensure that our communications are relevant to you

We will keep the personal data of supporters and customers for no longer than is deemed necessary, so this will depend on the purpose for which we process your data. Some of these time limits are listed above with the descriptions of purposes for processing data. We retain the personal data of suppliers for as long as is deemed relevant and legally necessary. We will retain the personal details of past, current or future employees in line with employment law.

We believe that Dogs Trusts supporters are connected to our mission and want to know how they can continue to help us to achieve our charitable aims. Unless you tell us not to, we think you are content for us to process (keep and use) your personal information for the following lengths of time. As of May 2018, we promise not to keep your information for longer than we specify below. We keep information on people whose data we process in line with our retention policy, which is guided by statutory requirements for certain data (e.g. financial records or health and safety records), our own internal risk assessments, or established standards and practices.

• Lifetime interest in Dogs Trust
  For supporters who have indicated a Lifetime Interest in Dogs Trust by becoming Canine Card owner; or having pledged to leave us a gift in your will – we need to keep your information to ensure that your wishes are fulfilled.
  
   
• Dogs Trust Rehomer
  These are supporters that have rehomed a dog through Dogs Trust. We think that you and the dog you rehomed from us would like to remain in contact with us throughout their lifetime and we will therefore keep your personal information for 16 years to allow for this.
  
   
• Dogs Trust Dog School Attendee
  These are supporters that attend our Dog School training classes. We think that you and the dog you are training with us would like to remain in contact with us throughout their lifetime and we will therefore keep your personal information for 16 years to allow for this.
  
   
• Financial supporters of Dogs Trust
  These are supporters that help or have helped us with financial gifts. A supporter’s pattern of giving can often change over time. We have found that a financial supporter’s cycle of giving is an average of 4 years, during which time they may stop giving entirely or change how they choose to support our activities. However, financial supporters can restart their financial support during that 4 year period. Therefore, we retain data of financial supporters for 4 years to align with this cycle, and also to align with taxation accounting and reporting rules.
  
   
• Demonstrated an interest in Dogs Trust via an enquiry
  These are supporters of our mission, who have demonstrated an interest in our cause by contacting us for more information e.g. to find out more about one of our products, services or campaigns. We think someone that has reached out to us to find out more about Dogs Trust and what we do, would like us to provide that information; perhaps a little more information; and even some support in fulfilling their initial query or request. To support this, we keep your personal information for a period of 2 years.
  
  Supporters demonstrate their support in a number of ways and so could be in more than one, or even all of the above categories. We will review and refresh these categories and the timescales on a rolling basis to ensure that as times and needs change we continue to do the very best by our supporters. 

To help us communicate the work we are doing and provide these services. Categories of trusted service providers we use include fundraising agencies, electronic data analysis and marketing agencies, direct marketing agencies and direct mailing providers. 

Dogs Trust do not share, sell or swap your information with other organisations for their own marketing outside of our group, however some of the cookies written by our websites support targeted online advertising and some data about you may be shared with those services through the operation of those cookies (e.g. your IP address and the fact you visited our site or shared some of our content online).

In some circumstances it is necessary for Dogs Trust to give relevant staff at our service providers access to your personal information. This access is only granted to the extent necessary for them to perform their services for us. We require all service providers to comply with strict rules to protect the information you have given us.

Individuals have rights over their personal data under EU law. These rights are not absolute, and some qualifications and restrictions do apply, particularly in relation to data that is required to be retained for audit or taxation purposes or where data falls into one of the categories that is excluded from data subject access requests. In summary your rights in relation to your data held by Dogs' Trust are as follows:

• The right to withdraw consent at any time;
• Right of access – you have a right to access a copy of the data held about you by Dogs Trust;
• The right to know how long your personal data will be stored;
• The right to know the purposes of processing and the legal basis for same, and if any further processing is to be undertaken by the Controller for purposes other than that which the data was originally collected;
• Right to rectification/erasure/objection/portability/restrict processing – unless it is determined that Dogs Trust has an overriding need to retain your data, for example if we require it to meet tax audit requirements; you have a right to have errors corrected in the data we hold about you, you have the right to object to processing or restrict processing undertaken by Dogs' Trust, you have the right to data portability, and upon request we shall erase all your personal data that we hold on you
• Right to refuse automated decision making and/or profiling. 
• Right to lodge a complaint with the Data Protection Commissioner (or equivalent supervisory authority in your country of habitual residence) – You can complain to the Data Protection Commissioner where you feel your rights have been infringed. Contact details are provided at the end of this Privacy Notice.
• Dogs Trust is committed to helping individuals exercise their rights. We will always balance our interests with your rights. If you have a query you can email us or contact us though the other contact details above.

All information given on this site is to the best of our ability.

Whist Dogs Trust is happy to supply any assistance and guidance regarding canine welfare to Dogs Trust members and members of the public, it must be appreciated that such guidance is based on information supplied to Dogs Trust and Dogs Trust will NOT be liable for injury, loss or damage arising from such guidance supplied.

You may print any fact sheet on this site for your own information, but you may NOT sell it, reproduce it on the internet, distribute it, alert it, or reprint it in any publication without permission from the Dogs Trust. 

Please note that all material on this website is the copyright of Dogs Trust or third parties. You may print any Dogs Trust factsheet on this site for your personal use, private study or for teaching purposes in schools, colleges or universities provided all material used is marked “By kind permission of Dogs Trust” and the material cannot be adapted for use in any other publication, used for profit or used in any way that will bring the charity into disrepute.

The name and logo of Dogs Trust are registered Trade Marks. Any use of these Trade Marks, other than for private study or teaching purposes as stated above, must be made with the prior express permission of Dogs Trust. If you are unsure what material you can or cannot use please contact us. 

This information was last updated in February 2024. From time to time, we will make changes to the information on this page. The amended information will apply from the date it is posted on the site and will govern the way in which we collect and use personal information from then on.