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Privacy Policy

Last updated: 12 July 2026

Please note: this notice accurately reflects how the site currently works, but has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer.

This policy explains what information we process when you use Find a Charity, and why.

Who we are

Find a Charity is operated by an individual (a sole trader) based in the United Kingdom. For the purposes of UK data protection law, the operator is the data controller. For any privacy question, please use the Contact page.

What we process

You do not need an account or to provide any personal details to use the site. The information involved is:

  • Your searches. The text you type is used to return results. For the Ask feature it is sent to our AI providers — Anthropic and Voyage AI (both in the United States) — to interpret your query and match it to charities. Place names and postcodes are sent to postcodes.io (UK) to work out the location. We do not store your searches.
  • Use my location. If you choose this, your browser shares your device coordinates. They are sent to our server as part of the search request, used to rank nearby charities, and passed to postcodes.io to resolve your area. We do not store them, though they may appear briefly in routine server access logs.
  • Analytics. We use a cookieless analytics tool (PostHog, hosted in the EU) that records anonymised, aggregated usage — for example which pages are viewed and how many results a search returned. It never records the text you typed, does not store your IP address, and is not linked to you or your device.
  • Contacting us. The Contact page provides an email address (there is no web form). If you email us, we receive your name, email address and the content of your message, and use them only to respond to you.
  • Charity contact details. We display contact information taken from the public charity registers. Where this identifies an individual (for example a trustee’s email or phone number), it is personal data obtained from the public register, not from that person directly.

Legal basis

We process your searches, location, analytics and security data on the basis of our legitimate interests in providing, understanding and securing the service, in a privacy-preserving way. We respond to email enquiries on the basis of our legitimate interest in replying to someone who has contacted us.

Who else processes your data

We use the following providers, each acting on our behalf or under its own terms. We do not sell or rent your data, or share it for marketing.

  • Anthropic (United States) — interprets your Ask search.
  • Voyage AI (United States) — converts your search into a vector so it can be matched to charities.
  • PostHog (EU) — cookieless, anonymised analytics.
  • postcodes.io (UK) — turns place names, postcodes and coordinates into locations.
  • Google Maps (United States) — loads only if you click “Show map” on a charity page.
  • Our hosting provider — runs the website and keeps routine server logs.

International transfers

Some of the providers above (Anthropic and Voyage AI) are based in the United States, so the text of an Ask search is transferred there. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, we seek to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place, as required by UK data protection law.

How long we keep it

Your searches and location are processed transiently and are not stored by us. Analytics are held by our analytics provider in anonymised, aggregated form. Enquiry emails are kept for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and our records, and we aim to delete them when they are no longer needed.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access, correct or erase personal data we hold about you, to restrict or object to processing, and to data portability. To exercise any of these rights, please use the Contact page. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top of the page reflects when it was last changed.