Privacy policy

The Australian Privacy Principles protect your personal information. The Prince Charles Hospital Foundation (Foundation) does collect and store some personal information as provided to us by you. By using this website, you are deemed to be accepting the terms of this Privacy Policy.

What personal information do we collect?

The Foundation only collects personal information that is necessary to carry out our fundraising activities, events and administering our research grants.

Personal information held by us may include your name, address, any previous addresses, telephone or mobile phone number, date of birth, e-mail address, donation history, and a donor number. If you are a donor or have purchased something from us we may also have collected your credit card details, however this information is not retained.

Donors can also choose to opt-in to certain marketing and promotional campaigns such as website testimonials on www.thecommongood.org.au where their image (as uploaded by them), first name, suburb or general location and a short quote (as provided by the donor) about why they support the organisation will be displayed. In addition, donors can choose to opt-in to have their first name, suburb, the number of research hours they have donated to and the research team they donated to (e.g. heart research, lung research) displayed on goa billboards around Brisbane from Mon 21 Oct to Sun 24 Nov 2019. Only those donors who have opted-in will be included in these campaigns.

If you are a research grant applicant, we may also collect information about your career and education.

We also hold personal information including banking and taxation details for employees and research grant recipients. Employee payroll is managed by a third-party supplier.

How do we collect personal information?

We collect information directly from you, through your communications with us via our websites, telephone calls, emails, mail, personal contact and through applications for research funding. We may also receive information from people who have provided us with your details for a specific purpose, for example if someone from your company has registered you for an event or your friend has signed you up to volunteer with them.

Information collected

When you visit one of our websites (www.tpchfoundation.org.au, www.cycleofgiving.org.au, www.cocoon.org.au, www.echo-australia.com.au or www.thecommongood.org.au) the web server will make a record of your visit and it may create cookies. A cookie is a piece of data stored on a user’s computer tied to information about the user. These records do not provide personal contact information however, it may include the IP address of the computer you used to access our sites. You can remove or block cookies using the settings in your browser if you want to disable this convenience feature.

Our websites (www.tpchfoundation.org.au, www.cycleofgiving.org.au, www.cocoon.org.au, www.echo-australia.com.au or www.thecommongood.org.au) use the Facebook pixel which can be used to serve you ads on your social media based on your browsing behaviour. Facebook’s pixel also helps target advertising to try and make sure it only goes to people who are likely to be interested in The Prince Charles Hospital Foundation, The Common Good, ECHO Australia Conference, The Ekka Strawberry Sundae Stalls or Cycle of Giving. You can opt-out of Facebook advertising by changing the settings in your Facebook account.

If you receive an electronic newsletter from us or complete a survey for us, we also collect information about whether you have followed any of the included links or visited a page on our website. This information is used for statistical purposes and to help us improve our communications and find out what type of information is useful to you.

The Foundation does not have access to Queensland Health patient information or your personal health records. However, if you have been a patient at The Prince Charles Hospital you may have signed a form allowing us to contact you. In this instance, we will receive your name and address from the hospital to write to you. We do not receive or use government related identifiers.

Remaining anonymous

In most cases, it is impractical for people to remain completely anonymous when dealing with us. From time to time, we receive anonymous donations, although we are not able to issue tax receipts without a name. We do not publicly name our donors without permission, so you can be assured of public anonymity if you require it.

Donors can choose to opt-in to certain marketing and promotional campaigns such as website testimonials on www.thecommongood.org.au where their image (as uploaded by them), first name, suburb/general location and a short quote (as provided by them) about why they support the organisation will be displayed. In addition, donors can choose to opt-in to have their first name, suburb, the number of research hours they have donated to and the research team they donated to (e.g. heart research, lung research) displayed on goa billboards around Brisbane from Mon 21 Oct to Sun 24 Nov 2019. Only those donors who have opted-in will be included in these campaigns.

For some of our events we require personal information in case you have a medical emergency.

Access to information collected

The Foundation may from time to time provide some of your information to third party suppliers such as a mailing house contracted to produce material for our fundraising appeals. We will never sell, trade or rent your information to any other third parties.

However, we will comply with requests from law enforcement or other government agencies with the legal right to access your information should there ever be a situation warranting such access.

How do we use your personal information?

Our primary purpose is to support medical research by raising money and awarding grants. As part of this, we may use your personal information to contact you about our fundraising appeals, to thank you for your donations or to keep you up to date with our events, activities or volunteering opportunities.

While some of our activities may include direct marketing to the people who have provided us with their own personal information, we will not pass that information to a third party (ie: we will never give or sell our donor list to another charity or company).

Disclosure of personal information

In the course of carrying out our fundraising and grant making activities, we may need to disclose some of your information to third parties. These may include our banks and online payment gateway, our appeal mailing house, and contracted service providers such as an external fundraising website (eg GoFundraise or Everyday Hero).

If you are a research grant applicant, we may also provide your personal information (as contained in your grant application) to our research assessment panels or to our external assessors. Some of these expert assessors may be interstate or overseas. Our research assessors sign confidentiality agreements.

How do we protect your personal information?

We respect your privacy and take measures to protect your personal information.

Online we use industry standard techniques such as firewalls and encryption to ensure any information passed through our website does not fall into the wrong hands. Credit card payments made online are processed by a secure payment gateway and your card details are not provided directly to the Foundation.

Information collected and held by the Foundation is available only to those staff who require access in order to do their jobs. This means that only our finance, events and donor care team have access to information about any payments you make to us or receive from us.

Your personal contact information is kept in our password-protected donor database, accessible only by our donor care staff.

Research grant applications are submitted and assessed via a secure cloud-based grants system. Grant information is password protected and assessors will only see the specific grants allocated to them for assessment.

Social media and external websites

The Foundation may include links to external websites and social media. We are not responsible for the privacy policies and information protection practices of those sites which we do not own and manage.

Opting out

When you make a donation, register for or attend an event, or volunteer for us, you will be automatically added to our database and our electronic newsletter mailing list. You have the option at any time to opt out or unsubscribe from these lists. Once you have unsubscribed online, even if you are added to our electronic newsletter list again (eg by attending another event), you will be on a suppression list that prevents us from sending you our electronic newsletter.

If you do not wish to receive letters from us, but are a donor, you can ask to be marked as ‘no mail’ in our database.

If you have opted-in to be included as a testimonial on our website www.thecommongood.org.au and you would now like to have the testimonial removed, please email us to request removal at info@tpchfoundation.org.au

Accessing your personal information

You are entitled to view the personal information we collect and hold about you.

In order to ensure we are not giving your personal information to someone who is not you, requests to access your own information need to be made in writing to our Privacy Officer. You will not be charged to access your personal information.

Write to:

Privacy Officer
The Prince Charles Hospital Foundation
GPO Box 3175
BRISBANE QLD 4001

In order to keep our database up to date, we may from time to time ask you to complete a survey updating your information. However, in this instance you will also be given the opportunity to be removed from our database if you prefer.

If you would like more information about our privacy policy and how we protect your information, please write to us by post, phone us on 1800 501 269 or email us at info@tpchfoundation.org.au