Privacy Policy

Who we are

Climate Catalyst (“we”) respects your privacy and are committed to handling your personal information in a safe and responsible manner and protecting it through compliance of this Privacy Policy (“Policy”). Climate Catalyst keeps its privacy under regular review and places updates on this page. This privacy policy was last updated in September 2022.

It is important that you read this Policy, together with any other privacy or fair processing policy we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing your personal information, so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your personal information.

This Policy describes the types of personal information we may collect from you or that you may provide when you visit the website www.climatecatalyst.org (our “Website“), and our practices for collecting, using, maintaining, protecting, and disclosing that information.

When providing us with your details you accept this privacy policy and authorize Climate Catalyst to collect, store and process your personal data in the ways mentioned in this policy and for the purposes you have given it to us. If you would like more information or have any questions, please email us at info@climatecatalyst.org.

What personal information will we collect?

“Personal information” is information relating to you or other individuals from which you can be identified. We collect several types of personal information, including:

• How to contact you, including your name, email address, country of residence and telephone number.
• Your workplace, including position title and employer.
• Your internet connection, the equipment you use to access our Website and usage details – see further in the “Automatic Data Collection Technologies” section below.

How will we collect your data?

We collect your personal information directly from you when you provide it to us. This will include personal information you provide when:

• You sign up to our mailing list,
• You sign up to attend one of our events,
• You become involved in one of our campaigns,
• You apply for a role with us.

We also collect your personal information through our use of automatic data collection technologies – see further in the “Automatic Data Collection Technologies” section below.

We may also collect or receive personal information about you from various third parties and public sources, including but not limited to technical data from the following parties: analytics providers, such as Google and search information providers.

Automatic Data Collection Technologies

As you navigate through and interact with our Website, we may use automatic data collection technologies to collect certain information from and about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns, including:

• Details of your visits to our Website, including traffic data, location data, logs, and other communication data and the resources that you access and use on the Website.
• Information about your computer and internet connection, including your IP address, operating system, and browser type.

“Do Not Track” – Certain laws, including that of California, require that we inform you on our response to Do Not Track signals. As there is not an industry or legal standard for recognizing or honoring these signals at this time, we don’t respond to them.

The information we collect automatically is statistical data we may use to improve our Website and to deliver a better and more personalized service, including by enabling us to:

• Estimate our audience size and usage patterns.
• Store information about preferences, allowing us to customize our Website according to individual interests.
• Speed up searches.
• Recognize you when you return to our Website.

The technologies we use for this automatic data collection may include:    

• Cookies (or browser cookies). A cookie is a small file placed on the hard drive of your computer. You may refuse to accept browser cookies by activating the appropriate setting on your browser. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our Website. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you direct your browser to our Website.
• Flash Cookies. Certain features of our Website may use local stored objects (or Flash cookies) to collect and store information about your preferences and navigation to, from, and on our Website. Flash cookies are not managed by the same browser settings as are used for browser cookies. For information about managing your privacy and security settings for Flash cookies, see the “Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Personal Information” section below.
• Web Beacons. Pages of our Website and our e-mails may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs, pixel tags, and single-pixel gifs) that permit Climate Catalyst, for example, to count users who have visited those pages or opened an email and for other related website statistics (for example, recording the popularity of certain website content and verifying system and server integrity). 

Our website may include links to third-party websites. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements or the content contained on them.

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How will we use your data?                   

The legal basis for processing your data depends on the reasons and circumstances we are collecting it. Our legal basis for processing most personal data is because you have given us your consent to do so. You have the right to withdraw your consent for holding and processing your data and can do so by emailing us at info@climatecatalyst.org.

We have set out below the purposes for which we use your personal information. Under EU and UK data protection law we are required to identify a legal basis for using your personal information – we have highlighted these in brackets below:                         

• To present our Website and its contents to you (to achieve our legitimate interest in making this content available to you in an effective way).
• To provide you with information, products, or services that you request from us (with your consent).
• To carry out any other of our obligations and enforce our rights arising from any contracts entered into between you and us, including for billing and collection (to perform our contract with you; to achieve our legitimate interests of being able to manage our finances and operations and to comply with our legal or statutory obligations in relation to keeping financial and other business records).
• To notify you about changes to our Website or any products or services we offer or provide through it (to achieve our legitimate interest in ensuring we provide our services to you effectively).
• To allow you to participate in interactive features on our Website (to achieve our legitimate interest in ensuring we provide our services to you effectively).
• To contact you about events, convenings and information that may be of interest to you (with your consent).
• In the manner set out in the “Disclosure of Your Personal Information” section below.

Disclosure of Your Personal Information

In some circumstances, the processing of your personal information  is necessary for the performance of a contract with you or necessary for us to comply with a legal obligation. Sometimes the legal basis for processing your data may be because it is in our legitimate interests to perform our operations. This could include:

• Managing ongoing relationships with our professional contacts;
• Researching new professional contacts within organizations who may be interested in our campaigns;
• Using networking sites like LinkedIn to reach out to professional contacts who we think may be interested in our work.
• Managing our financial transactions and preventing fraud.

Before doing this, we will carefully consider and balance any potential impact on you and your rights. We will not process any data if there is any risk of harm or potential conflict with your interests.

Project Partners

We work with other charities and NGOs on some of our campaigns to share knowledge and resources. We will never share personal information with them without your explicit and informed permission but we may aggregate information in order to share statistical information needed for analysis. We will not include any details that could identify a specific individual.

How do we store and protect your data?

We take good care to ensure that the information we store on our database is kept secure in order to prevent unauthorized access. We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your explicit permission or are required by law to do so.

Like many organizations we use trusted service providers to help our operations be more efficient.

1. WordPress

When you submit information to this website via webform – i.e contact forms and email subscriptions – we collect the data requested in the webform in order to track and respond to your submissions. We share this information with WordPress, our online store hosting provider, so that they can provide website services to us. Read the WordPress privacy policy here.

2. HubSpot

The personal data mentioned is stored in and processed through our Hubspot database. The purpose of this processing is to deliver our objectives. HubSpot’s product infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the United States East region. You can view their privacy policy here.

3. Workable

When you apply for a role with Climate Catalyst, your personal data is shared with Workable, a recruitment software used to help us manage our recruitment and hiring process. Your data will be retained by us as long as we determine it necessary to evaluate your application for employment. Read more about Workables’s security and privacy policy here.

We only allow our service providers to handle your personal data if we are satisfied that they take appropriate measures to protect your personal data. We impose contractual obligations on service providers relating to ensure they can only use your personal data to provide services to us and to you.

We or the third parties mentioned above occasionally also share personal data with:

• Our (and their) external auditors, e.g., in relation to the audit of our (or their) accounts, in which case the recipient of the information will be bound by confidentiality obligations
• Our and their professional advisors, in which case the recipient of the information will be bound by confidentiality obligations
• Law enforcement agencies, courts, tribunals, and regulatory bodies to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations
• Other parties that have or may acquire control or ownership of our business in connection with a significant corporate transaction or restructuring, including a merger, acquisition, asset sale, initial public offering or in the event of our insolvency. Usually, information will be anonymized but this may not always be possible. The recipient of any of your personal data will be bound by confidentiality obligations.

Where Is Your Personal Data Held

Personal data may be held at our offices and those of our agents as described above (see above: “How do we store and protect your data?”).

Some of these parties may be based outside the UK or EEA. For more information, including on how we safeguard your personal data when this occurs, see below: “EU located individuals: International Transfers”.

Choices about how we use and disclose your personal information

We strive to provide you with choices regarding the personal information you provide to us. We have created mechanisms to provide you with the following control over your personal information:

• Tracking Technologies and Advertising. You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when cookies are being sent. To learn how you can manage your Flash cookie settings, visit the Flash player settings page on Adobe’s website. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this site may then be inaccessible or not function properly.
• Offers from Climate Catalyst. If you do not wish to have your email address/contact information used by us to notify you of upcoming events or for our newsletter or other services, you can opt-out by checking the relevant box located on the form on which we collect your data or by sending us an email stating your request to info@climatecatalyst.org. If we have sent you a promotional email, you may send us a return email asking to be omitted from future email distributions or use the unsubscribe feature at the bottom of the email. This opt out does not apply to information provided to Climate Catalyst as a result of a service engagement or other transactions.

Your rights with respect to your personal information

Climate Catalyst would like to send you information about services and campaigns. If our processing of your personal information is subject to EU and UK data protection law, you have a number of rights.

• You have the right to ask us not to process your personal information, including where we are using it for direct marketing purposes.
• You have the right to request that Climate Catalyst provides copies of your personal data in order to check we are processing it lawfully.
• You have the right to request that Climate Catalyst updates information deemed inaccurate, or complete information you believe to be incomplete. If your details change, please let us know and we can update them on our system.
• You can also change your mind about the way in which we contact you, or withdraw your consent for us to process your data and have the right to request that Climate Catalyst erase or restrict the processing of your data. You can do this by emailing info@climatecatalyst.org. Most emails we send you will also include a link you can click on to unsubscribe from that particular type of communication.
• You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain situations (such as where there is an outstanding question you have raised regarding its accuracy).
• You have the right to ask us to transfer your personal information to another party, where we have collected it from you to perform a contract or are processing it on the basis of your consent.
• You have the right to withdraw your consent where you have provided it for Climate Catalyst’s collection or use of your personal information for a specific purpose, subject to certain conditions.

If you tell us that you no longer want to be contacted we will keep limited amounts of information (usually your name and email address) and add this to our suppression lists to ensure you do not receive any future communications from us. We will not use this data for any other purpose. In certain circumstances you also have the right to have your personal data erased from our databases completely and you can ask us to do this at any time.

We regularly monitor your engagement with our communications and will periodically send emails to ask if you still wish to receive updates about Climate Catalyst’s work. We will continue to hold your personal data while you are actively engaged with us until you ask us not to. If you have not engaged (either opened, replied, taken the requested action, or clicked through) with any of our emails then we will remove your personal details from our database after two years.

You may exercise these rights at any time by emailing info@climatecatalyst.org.

We may not be able to accommodate a request relating to your personal information in certain circumstances prescribed by law. Please contact us using the details in the “Contact Information” section of this Policy if you would like more information.

Data retention

We will only retain your personal information for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfill the purposes for which we use it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal information for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.

EU located individuals: International Transfers

We may share your personal information with contractors, service providers and other third-parties supporting our business when needed. Many of these third parties are based outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) and the UK, whose laws are not deemed to provide a level of protection for personal information that is of the same standard as enjoyed under data protection law in Europe and the UK. As such processing of your personal information will involve a transfer of data outside of the EEA and UK.

Whenever we transfer your personal information out of the EEA or UK whether internally or externally to other parties, we ensure proper protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

• We will only transfer your personal information to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal information by the European Commission.
• We may use specific standard contract clauses approved by the European Commission or UK Information Commissioner’s Office (also conducting any required transfer impact assessment and, if necessary, implementing supplementary measures) to make sure that the transferred personal information is given an appropriate level of protection in accordance with applicable data protection law when being processed outside the EEA or UK.

Data security

We have implemented measures designed to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. For example, all information you provide to us is stored with secure third-party providers (see above). In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information transmitted to our Website. Any transmission of personal information is at your own risk. To the fullest extent legally permitted, we are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Website. 

Changes to our privacy policy               

We may revise and update this Policy from time to time in our sole discretion. All changes are effective immediately when we post them, and apply to all access to and use of the Website and handling of your personal information thereafter. It is our policy to post any changes we make to our Policy on this page. If we make material changes to how we treat our users’ personal information, we will notify you through a notice on the Website home page. The date the Policy was last revised is identified at the top of the page.

Making a complaint

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us by emailing info@climatecatalyst.org.              

If we are unable to resolve your issue, you have the right to make a complaint to the supervisory authority in your place of work or residence or the place in which the relevant infringement has taken place.