Date of posting: 31.03.2026
This Privacy Policy contains 12 sections. Open up each one to read it in more detail.
Welcome to Crowdfunder. This policy explains how we handle and use your personal information and your rights in relation to that information.
Crowdfunder Limited (we, our or us) is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.
This policy explains why and how we use your personal information, with whom we share it, and your rights in relation to it. It covers all interactions you may have with us, including when you use our websites (including www.crowdfunder.co.uk, collectively our “Site”), interact with our social media pages, or contact us.
Under data protection law, Crowdfunder Limited is the controller of that information and responsible for its use and protection. Individuals or organisations (project owners) run fundraising campaigns from our Site and in doing so may collect personal information from you if you pledge funds to their projects or volunteer your time. Their use of that information during and after their campaign (e.g. to keep in contact with you about progress of their project and their achievements) are uses of your information which those users determine, independently of us. As a result, those users will be separate controllers of your personal information.
We refer to ‘project owners’, ‘supporters’ and ‘pledges’ throughout this document. For more information regarding these, please see our Terms.
We also refer to our ‘partners’ in these Terms. These are commercial partners with whom we work in a variety of ways to expand the features on our Site. Our partners include:
Please see our Partners Privacy Policies page (or in the case of programme partners, the relevant programme/project page) for further information, including details of their own privacy policies that apply to their use of your personal information that they receive from us.
Publicly visible information
Some information on our Site is publicly accessible, including all project page content, user profiles, project owner names, supporter names (unless you pledge anonymously) and amounts pledged, and any comments or content you post. This information may be visible to anyone, including people without a Crowdfunder account, and may appear in search engine results. We encourage you to consider carefully what personal information you include in publicly visible content, particularly in relation to sensitive personal data.
We collect personal information in several ways: directly from you when you interact with us, from third parties such as our partners, and automatically when you use our Site (for example, through cookies and similar technologies). Each of these is described in more detail below.
Information you give us
We collect personal information that you give us voluntarily when you interact with us, including when you register on our Site, post projects, make or cancel pledges, upload content, manage your account, correspond with us, visit our offices, attend events or interact with us on social media or interact with our customer experience team or other staff. We may also ask for identity or other documents such as bank statements for a number of purposes including verification and fraud prevention purposes, when you apply for partner funding, report a problem or exercise your legal rights.
If we do not receive this information, you may be unable to register with the Site, list projects, pledge funds, communicate with other users or allow us to comply with our obligations.
Information we collect automatically
When you use our Site, we automatically collect technical and usage information, including your IP address, browser type and version, time zone, operating system, and details of your visits such as traffic data, location data and the resources you access. We also record when and how you consented to receive marketing communications from us. Please see our Cookie Policy for further information.
We may also view personal information you allow to be shared, such as your Crowdfunder profile and information you share on third party social networks.
When you interact with our social media pages, we may collect the content you post, information about your interactions with our content, and aggregated statistical data about our followers’ activities.
Information we receive from other sources
Other users – Users or members of the public may share personal information about you with us, for example if you misuse the Site or breach our Guidelines.
Our partners – We may receive your personal information from our partners if you have indicated you would like us to contact you about funding opportunities. We will only use this for email marketing if our partners have obtained your prior consent. If your employer is a workplace partner, we may receive your name, email address and business unit to administer the employee engagement programme and set up your account.
Third party applications – We may receive personal information from third party applications we have integrated with, such as Strava. We will only collect and use this data for the purposes stated at the point of your consent.
Public authorities – We may receive personal information from the police, HMRC and other public authorities in connection with their investigations, or indirectly from third parties sharing information originating from courts or relating to legal or regulatory proceedings.
Payment processors
Payments on our Site are processed by Stripe, whether you are setting up an account as a project owner to receive funds or making a pledge as a supporter. As part of this, Stripe collects personal information directly from you — such as identity details, payment information and device data — and may use cookies and similar technologies. Stripe processes this information both on our behalf and for its own purposes, including identity verification, fraud prevention and service improvement. For details of how Stripe handles your personal information, please see stripe.com/privacy.
The personal information we collect and process about you may include your contact details, identity and verification information, financial and payment information, information about your pledges and fundraising activity, your marketing preferences, technical and device information, and records of our communications with you.
Sensitive data
We do not ask you to provide sensitive personal information (known in law as "special category data"). However, if you choose to include such information in your project description or other content you post on our Site — for example, information about your health, religious beliefs or ethnicity — that information will be publicly visible and we will process it on the basis that you have manifestly made it public. We encourage you to consider carefully whether to include sensitive personal information in content you post on our Site.
Children's data
Our Site is designed for users aged 18 and over. If you provide us with information about a person under 18, you confirm that you are their parent or legal guardian (or have their parent or legal guardian's consent) and accept responsibility for the personal information provided.
If you believe that we hold personal information about a child under 18 that was provided without appropriate parental consent, please contact us using the details in Section 12 and we will take steps to delete it.
We use your personal information for a variety of reasons. We rely on different legal grounds to process your personal information, depending on the purposes of our use and the risks to your privacy. You will only receive unsolicited marketing communications from us if you have consented and can opt-out of receiving them at any time. We do not share your personal information with companies that would send their marketing to you.
We use your personal information in the following ways:
4.1 Where you have provided CONSENT
We may use and process your personal information for the following purposes where you have consented for us to do so (whether by giving that consent to us directly or indirectly, for example to one of our partners):
You may withdraw your consent for us to use your information in any of these ways at any time. Please see ‘Your rights over your personal information’ for further details.
4.2 Where necessary for us to carry out PRE-CONTRACT STEPS you have requested or for the performance of our CONTRACT
We will use your personal information where this is necessary for us to perform our contract with you or to carry out any pre-contract steps you’ve asked us to so that you can enter into that contract, for the following purposes:
4.3 Where necessary to comply with our LEGAL OBLIGATIONS
We will use your personal information to comply with our legal obligations:
4.4 Where necessary for us to pursue a LEGITIMATE INTEREST
We may use and process your personal information where it is necessary for us to pursue our legitimate interests as a business for the following purposes:
Processing necessary for us to promote our business, brand and activities and measure the reach and effectiveness of our campaigns
Processing necessary for us to support users with their enquiries
Processing necessary for us to respond to changing market conditions and the needs of our guests and visitors
Processing necessary for us to operate the administrative and technical aspects of our business efficiently and effectively
Marketing communications: If you give your consent, we may use your personal information to contact you by email to send you newsletters or to notify you with details of projects, services and competitions. We try to adapt any marketing material that we send to you, for example by notifying you of projects that apply to your interests and in your location. If you do not wish to receive email communications from us, please inform us by using the unsubscribe link inside the email messages we send, by using our comments form or, if you have a registered account on our Site, by changing your Profile settings from within your account.
We provide tools that allow project owners to send supporters news and updates on their projects. However, we do not permit project owners to send fundraising requests or any other type of marketing communications using these tools. Project owners can access contact details for the supporters relating to their projects. Any communications they send using these details will be sent solely based on their decisions and for which they will be acting as the controller of your personal information.
If you opt-out of receiving marketing communications from us, we keep your email address on our suppression list for a defined period to ensure that we comply with your wishes. Please see further ‘The periods for which we retain your personal information.’
4.5 Our use of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools and automated systems to support our operations, including content moderation, fraud detection, customer support and data analysis. Where AI tools process your personal information, we rely on the same legal bases described in this policy.
Some of our processes may involve automated decisions that could significantly affect you, such as decisions relating to your account or your use of our Site. Where we make such decisions, you have the right to request human review, to make representations to us and to contest the decision. To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details in Section 12.
We only disclose and share your personal information outside our business in limited circumstances. If we do, we will put in place a contract that requires recipients to protect your personal information, unless we are legally required to share that information. Any suppliers that work for us will be obliged to follow our instructions. We do not sell your personal information to third parties.
We are the controller of your personal information and responsible for how it is used and protected. Where we share your information with other organisations who make their own decisions about how to use it — such as project owners, our payment processor Stripe, or social media platforms — their own privacy policies will apply.
Project owners and programme partners
If you make a pledge to a project or volunteer, we will share details of your pledge and the information you have provided (such as name and email address) with the project owner and, if applicable, the programme partner — for them to administer your pledge and gift aid (if applicable), and to contact you in connection with your pledge or their project in accordance with our Terms.
Supporters
We also share information with supporters to allow them to identify the project owners responsible for the projects to which they pledge.
Our funding, workplace and loyalty partners
We share your information with
Donations management organisations
We may share your information and details about your donation with Swiftaid or The Charities Trust when you choose to claim Gift Aid on a donation.
If the project you pledge to uses Swiftaid to process gift aid claims (which is stated on the donation page), an account profile will be created with Swiftaid for you and you may receive service emails from them. Swiftaid is a third party and uses your personal data in accordance with its own privacy policy and donor terms. To edit your account details or close your account, you will need to contact Swiftaid directly.
Social media platforms
We share your information with social media platforms to communicate with you and to deliver targeted advertising. Please see Section 6 for more detail.
Our suppliers
We use third party service providers, agents and subcontractors to provide services to us or directly to you on our behalf, including the operation and maintenance of our Site. Our suppliers can be categorised as follows:
Our Suppliers are located in various countries, including the United Kingdom, European Economic Area and the USA. Where Suppliers are located outside the UK, please see Section 7 for information about how we protect your personal information.
When we use Suppliers, we only disclose to them any personal information that is necessary for them to provide their services and only where we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information safe and secure.
You may be required to create an account with certain Suppliers to use their services, for example, Stripe. These Suppliers will process your personal information in the ways described in their privacy policies (not ours).
Competitions
We administer and promote competitions and other promotions with some of our partners from time to time. When we do so, we and the relevant partner may make joint decisions about how your personal information is used, and we will provide further notice to you at the time.
Other disclosures
We may also disclose your personal information to any third party in connection with a restructure, sale or acquisition of some or all of our business or assets; or where we are required to do so to comply with any legal or regulatory obligation or request, including by the police, courts, tribunals or regulators.
We use social media platforms in a variety of different ways, including by publishing pages through which you can interact, running competitions or advertising to you using information you have provided those platforms or which has been provided by us or collected from this Site. Our legal relationship with each platform varies with the particular way we use that platform.
We process your personal information using social media platforms in a variety of ways, as follows:
Social media
We maintain official pages on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and LinkedIn. For certain processing related to these pages — such as the provision of page analytics by Facebook and LinkedIn — we and the relevant platform are joint controllers of your personal information.Where this is the case we have entered into arrangements with the platform setting out our respective data protection responsibilities.
Targeted advertising
We use social media platforms, search engines and other online platforms to deliver targeted advertising to you. This may be based on information we have provided to the platform, information collected via cookies or tracking technologies on our Site (such as Facebook Pixel and LinkedIn Insight Tag), or because the platform has identified you as having similar attributes to our existing audience. We and Facebook are joint controllers of the processing involved in collecting and transmitting data using these technologies. For more detail about cookies and tracking technologies, please see our Cookie Policy.
Further information
For information about how these platforms process your personal information, please refer to their respective privacy policies, available on their websites.
Project owner advertising tools
Where we make advertising tools available to project owners (such as the ability to add a Meta Pixel or other approved tracking tool to their project page), these tools will only activate if you have consented to marketing cookies via our cookie consent tool. Data collected by these tools is transmitted to the relevant third-party advertising platform (such as Meta). Please see our Cookie Policy and the ‘Targeted advertising’ and ‘Cookies’ subsections above for more information about how these platforms process your data. You can withdraw your consent to marketing cookies at any time using our cookie consent tool.
All the personal information collected about you by us or on our behalf may be transferred to countries outside the United Kingdom (UK) European Economic Area (EEA). By way of example, this may happen where any of our suppliers are located in a country outside of the UK and EEA or if any of our servers or those of our third party service providers are from time to time located in a country outside of the EEA. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK and so they may not protect the use of your personal information to the same extent.
If we transfer your information outside of the UK in this way, we will take steps to ensure that your personal information remains appropriately protected. These steps include ensuring that the recipient is in a country where the standard of data protection is not materially lower than that provided under UK law, or imposing contractual obligations on the recipients of your personal information using the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. Please contact us using the details at the end of this policy for more information about the protections that we put in place.
We take the security of your personal information seriously and use a variety of measures based on good industry practice to keep it secure. We employ security measures to protect the personal information you provide to us, to prevent access by unauthorised persons and unlawful processing, accidental loss, destruction and damage. Nonetheless, transmissions over the internet and to our Site may not be completely secure, so please exercise caution.
Our Site may contain links to websites operated by third parties. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those websites, and we encourage you to read their privacy policies. Similarly, if you reached our Site via a third party link, we are not responsible for that third party’s practices.
We will not hold your personal information in an identifiable format for any longer than is necessary for the purposes for which we collected it. For certain purposes we retain your personal information for a very short period whilst for others we retain it for a period of 7 years after the information is no longer required for business reasons so that we can deal with any legal proceedings that could arise.
We retain your personal information for the following periods:
The only exceptions to the periods mentioned above are where:
You have a number of rights in relation to your personal information under data protection law. In relation to certain rights, we may ask you for information to verify your identity and, where applicable, to help us to search for your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within 30 days after we have received this information or, where no such information is required, after we have received full details of your request. You have the following rights, some of which may only apply in certain circumstances:
10.1. To be informed about the processing of your personal information
(This is what this policy sets out to do.)
10.2. To have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate and to have incomplete personal information completed
The accuracy of your information is important to us and we make it easy for you to review and correct the personal information that we hold about you in your Profile. If you change your name or address/email address, or you discover that any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, you can let us know by contacting us in any of the details described at the end of this policy but we ask you to first check that you cannot correct your details using the tools in your Profile.
When downloading a list of supporters on their project, project owners will see the address details of their supporters. If you change your address after the project owner has downloaded this data (this usually happens once their project is successful) the details the project owner may become out of date, until the project owner downloads a new list of data – so we recommend also contacting the project owner to inform them of a change to your contact details.
10.3. To object to processing of your personal information
Where we rely on our legitimate interests as the legal basis for processing your personal information for particular purposes, you may object to us using your personal information for these purposes by emailing or writing to us at the address at the end of this policy. Except for the purposes for which we are sure we can continue to process your personal information, we will temporarily stop processing your personal information in line with your objection until we have investigated the matter. If we agree that your objection is justified in accordance with your rights under data protection laws, we will permanently stop using your data for those purposes. Otherwise we will provide you with our justification as to why we need to continue using your data.
However we strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, you can therefore ask us to stop sending you project updates at any time by following the opt out links on any project updates sent to you or by updating your preferences in your profile.
You may object to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes and we will automatically comply with your request. If you would like to do so, please follow the opt out links on any marketing email sent to you or by updating your preferences in your profile.
10.4. To withdraw your consent to processing your personal information
Where we rely on your consent as the legal basis for processing your personal information, you may withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us using the details at the end of this policy. If you would like to withdraw your consent to receiving any direct marketing to which you previously opted-in, you can also do so using our unsubscribe tool.
You can choose to opt out of receiving marketing from project owners whose projects you have pledged on. You can do this through your account settings. As project owners may already hold your contact details, we also recommend contacting them directly to ensure your preferences are respected.
Please note that our standard receipt emails and notifications or a Project closing successfully or unsuccessfully contain important financial information regarding your pledge and so cannot be turned off.
If you withdraw your consent, our use of your personal information before you withdraw is still lawful.
10.5. To restrict processing of your personal information
You may ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in the following situations:
In these situations, we may only process your personal information whilst its processing is restricted if we have your consent or are legally permitted to do so, for example for storage purposes, to protect the rights of another individual or company or in connection with legal proceedings.
10.6. To have your personal information erased
In certain circumstances, you may ask for your personal information to be removed from our systems by emailing or writing to us at the address at the end of this policy. Unless there is a reason that the law allows us to use your personal information for longer, we will make reasonable efforts to comply with your request.
10.7. To request access to your personal information and information about how we process it
You have the right to ask for a copy of the information that we hold about you by emailing or writing to us at the address at the end of this policy. We may not provide you with a copy of your personal information if this concerns other individuals or we have another lawful reason to withhold that information.
Remember, you can access a lot of your personal information through your account: You can see a record of the pledges you have made in the My pledges section (login, click your name at the top right of the website then choose My pledges).
You can access and review much of your personal information directly through your account settings on our Site.
If you wish to make a subject access request please first check you cannot get the data from the areas listed above. If you wish to access data not listed there please be specific in your request. We will then, in adherence with the ICO guidelines, respond to your request.
10.8. To electronically move, copy or transfer your personal information in a standard, machine-readable form
Where we rely on your consent as the legal basis for processing your personal information or need to process it in connection with a contract in place directly with you, you may ask us to provide you with a copy of that information in a structured data file. We will provide this to you electronically in a structured, commonly used and machine readable form, such as a CSV file.
You can ask us to send your personal information directly to another service provider, and we will do so if this is technically possible. We may not provide you with a copy of your personal information if this concerns other individuals or we have another lawful reason to withhold that information.
10.9. Rights relating to automated decision making, including profiling
Where we make a solely automated decision that significantly affects you, you have the right to:
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details in Section 12.
10.10 Right to complain
You have the right to make a complaint directly to us about how we have handled your personal information. To do so, please contact us using the details in Section 12. We will acknowledge your complaint and aim to respond substantively within 30 days.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data protection regulator, if you believe your personal information has been handled in a way that does not comply with data protection law. The ICO’s contact details are available at ico.org.uk. If you are located outside the UK, you may complain to the equivalent regulator in your country.
Please check this page regularly for changes to this policy. We will email you with changes if we hold a valid email address for you.
We may review this policy from time to time and any changes will be notified to you by posting an updated version on our Site and, where appropriate, by contacting you by email. Any changes will take effect 7 days after we post the modified terms on our Site or after the date we notify you by email. We recommend you regularly check this page for changes and review this policy each time you visit our Site.
You can contact us with your queries in relation to this policy or for any other reason using our webform or by post or email.
To contact us in relation to this policy, including to exercise any of your rights in relation to your personal information, please contact us via our form.
Crowdfunder Limited’s company registration number is 07831511 and registered office address is Crowdfunder, 3 Southview House St Austell Enterprise Park, Carclaze, St Austell, Cornwall, United Kingdom, PL25 4EJ