The Dad Shift - Privacy Policy

The Dad Shift is committed to keeping your personal information secure and to being transparent about how we collect and use your data, so you can have confidence when learning about our campaigns and supporting us.The purpose of this policy is to help you understand what personal information The Dad Shift collects, how we use it, and what your rights are. We take care to ensure that we use your information in accordance with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal information, including the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).The Dad Shift is the data controller responsible for determining how and why your personal data is processed. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).This policy applies to all the pages hosted on dadshift.org.uk, action.dadshift.org.uk, and other digital services The Dad Shift runs. It does not apply to other organisations to which we may link and whose privacy policies may differ.Please read the following policy to understand how your personal information will be treated. It may change from time to time, so please check back periodically.

1. The information The Dad Shift collects about you and how it is collected and used

The Dad Shift collects personal information about you in a number of ways:When you support us by:Signing one of our petitionsTaking an action like emailing your MPFilling in a surveySigning up to make a donation to The Dad ShiftEngaging with our digital advertisingBuying merchandise from usAs well as:When you visit our websiteWhen you contact us with questions, queries or feedbackTo comply with UK data protection rules, The Dad Shift will always ensure we have legal justification for collecting and using your personal information.The legal basis that we rely on will depend upon the circumstances in which we collect and use your personal information. In almost all cases, our processing of your personal information will fall into one of the following categories:Where you have provided your consent to allow us to use your data in a certain way.Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to comply with a legal obligation.Where it is in our legitimate interests to contact you in order to achieve our campaign objectives and raise funds. Where we rely on a legitimate interest to use your information, we will always ensure that this is done in a way so as not to be intrusive or cause distress, and that respects your rights.Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to carry out the performance of a contract with you (for example, fulfilling a merchandise order).

1.1 People who support us

Petitions and actions

When you sign one of our petitions or take part in a campaign action, we will usually ask for your name, email address, postcode, and phone number (optional). We use your postcode to help us understand the geographic spread of our supporters, and to identify your Member of Parliament where relevant to a campaign. If you opt in to communications, we use your email address and/or phone number so that we can keep you updated on the campaign you supported, and on related campaigns we think you would be interested in.Sometimes we may ask for additional information where it may help us in our campaigns or help us keep our communications relevant to you — for example, whether you are a parent and the age of your children.We will only collect sensitive personal data where absolutely necessary and with your explicit consent.When you sign a petition or take a campaign action, we rely on your consent to use your contact details to send you campaign updates. You can withdraw this consent at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in any email or SMS we send you, or by contacting us using the details at the end of this policy.Some of our campaign actions involve sending an email to your Member of Parliament or another decision-maker. Where this is the case, we will tell you clearly before you take the action, and the email will be sent in your name, usually from your email address. We may use AI tools, including Anthropic’s Claude, to help personalise these emails based on the information you provide.

Personal stories

Some supporters share personal stories with us about their experiences with paternity leave, fatherhood, or related issues. Stories are usually shared by responding to one of our emails, or by completing a story-sharing form (which we run using Tally) after signing a petition or taking part in a campaign action.We will only use your story publicly — for example on social media, in press and campaign materials, or in emails to other supporters — with your explicit consent. When you share a story with us, we will check whether you are happy to be named or whether you would prefer to be anonymous, and what details you are comfortable sharing.You can withdraw consent for the future use of your story at any time by contacting us at hello@dadshift.org.uk. Where a story has already been published, we may not be able to remove it from existing uses, but we will not use it in any new materials.

How we use your data

The Dad Shift uses our supporters’ personal data in a variety of ways which include the following:Inviting you to campaign with us.Offering you ways to fund our work.Keeping you updated on our campaigning work.Inviting you to participate in surveys or research.Reviewing records such as for financial audits.Analysing and refining our advertising, campaigning and other operations to increase our effectiveness.Monitoring your information to prevent fraud.Providing you with information or products that you have requested from us.Providing you with information that is relevant to your interests.Processing donations received from you and fulfilling merchandise orders.Making enquiries or informing you about your interactions with us.Responding to any complaints from you.

Personalised communication and profiling

In order to ensure our communication with you is relevant, timely, and will ultimately provide a better experience for you, we may build up a profile of you based on the interactions you have had with The Dad Shift.This profiling may include details of your past engagement with The Dad Shift together with information you have voluntarily shared with us. For example, in deciding who to email about a campaign aimed at self-employed parents, we might look at which supporters have indicated they are self-employed, or which supporters have engaged with related content in the past. This enables The Dad Shift to most effectively target relevant information and appropriate requests for support. This does not affect any of your rights or limit you in how you can get involved with us and our campaigns. You may opt out of profiling at any time by contacting us using the details at the bottom of this policy.

1.2 Visitors to our website and digital platforms

Cookies on our website

Our website uses cookies to help it run smoothly, to understand how supporters use the site, and to support our advertising on social media platforms. Some cookies are strictly necessary for the website to function. Others help us understand how the site is used, or support our advertising activities.

The platforms we use

We use a small number of trusted platforms to run our website and our supporter operations. These platforms are providers that act on our behalf as data processors, and they do not use your data for their own purposes. They include:Squarespace, which hosts our main website (dadshift.org.uk).Blueprint, which powers our action and petition pages (action.dadshift.org.uk).Movement (Movement Industries CRM), which we use as our supporter database to manage email and SMS communications.FundraiseUp, which we use to process donations.Tally, which we use to run surveys and gather supporter feedback.Zapier, which we use to connect our different platforms together so that information flows between them automatically.Plausible, which we use for website analytics. Plausible is a privacy-first service that does not use cookies and does not collect personal data.These platforms set only the cookies necessary to operate the services we use them for. They do not set advertising or third-party tracking cookies on our behalf.

Third-party cookies and our social media and web advertising

You may see our advertising online and on social media platforms if you have supported us before, or if your use of these channels suggests that you would find our campaigns relevant. We currently advertise on Facebook and Instagram, both operated by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited.To support this advertising, we use the Meta Pixel on our website. The Meta Pixel sets cookies in your browser to help us measure the effectiveness of our adverts and to show our adverts to people who have visited our site.If you do not wish to see our adverts on social media, you can manage your advertising preferences in the privacy settings of your Facebook or Instagram account.

Hashed lists and social media advertising

We may send a list of “hashed” email addresses to Meta for the purpose of creating a group of people with similar characteristics, in order to target advertising for our campaigning and fundraising activities. We may also upload “hashed” files to use as an exclusion list for our ad campaigns — this helps us target new people, rather than people who have already engaged with us. This is both cost-effective and helps us grow the movement of supporters calling for better paternity leave and active fatherhood.“Hashing” turns email addresses into an unreadable code for the purposes of security and privacy during data transfer. The hashed data we share with Meta is deleted after a short period of time and is not used for any other purpose.In addition, we may use the Meta Conversions API. This is a technology that sends information about supporter actions on our website (for example, signing a petition) directly from our servers to Meta, in a way that complements the cookie-based Meta Pixel. As with the Pixel, any personal information sent is hashed before transmission.We may also use Meta’s advertising tools to build audiences matching particular characteristics to serve our advertising campaigns. For example, we might target people who have shown an interest in parenting, fatherhood, or family policy. This targeting is based on pages and posts people have previously engaged with on the platform.Where we share data with Meta in this way, we do so under the joint controller and data processing terms provided by Meta, which include UK-approved international data transfer safeguards (such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses).

Pixels in emails

Pixels are tiny 1px-by-1px transparent images that can be embedded in websites, emails, and online ads.Our email system uses pixels to track when supporters interact with our emails. For example, when a supporter opens an email, their email client downloads the transparent image file, sending a signal back to our system letting us know the email has been opened.We use this information to monitor the performance of our email campaigns, to help ensure we’re sending people emails that are relevant to areas of our work they are interested in, and to remove people who are no longer interested in receiving emails from us.We don’t have the ability to turn off email tracking pixels at an individual level. If you would prefer to turn off email pixels, you can adjust your email settings to “Ask before displaying external images” in Gmail, or use a similar setting in other email providers. Preventing email images from loading will stop email tracking pixels from working.

2. How your data is kept secure

2.1 What The Dad Shift does to keep your data secure

The Dad Shift takes care to safeguard the personal information you share with us.Our website and action pages use a secure connection. The link between your web browser and our servers is secure if your web browser displays a small padlock symbol somewhere in the frame, or if the address bar shows a web address beginning https:// (rather than http://).We do not store your payment card details. Donations are processed by FundraiseUp, which handles payment information directly.We endeavour to keep supporter data inside the UK or European Economic Area (EEA), and we ensure that any time data is transferred outside the UK or EEA, appropriate safeguards on data security and processing are applied, including UK-approved international data transfer mechanisms.

2.2 Who has access to your data

Within The Dad Shift

Within The Dad Shift, only those authorised to process your data can access your data. Any member of staff or volunteer must sign a Data Protection Agreement with The Dad Shift before accessing your data.

Working with third parties

We will never sell or swap your details with other organisations.We use trusted platforms (including Squarespace, Blueprint, Movement, FundraiseUp, Tally, Zapier, and Plausible, as listed above) to administer our digital and supporter operations. These platforms act as data processors and use your details only for the purposes for which we have engaged them.We share hashed email addresses with Meta for advertising purposes, as described in section 1.2.We sometimes collaborate with other campaigning organisations on joint campaigns. Where we share supporter data with such partners, we will only do so with appropriate data-sharing agreements in place, and we will tell you up front — for example, where we are jointly running a petition that will be handed in to government.

2.3 Data retention

Data collected by The Dad Shift will be retained only for an appropriate length of time. We are guided by best practice and our operational needs, and in some cases retention periods are governed by law.We review our supporter list periodically and stop contacting people who have not engaged for an extended period.When we no longer need to retain your personal information, we will ensure it is securely disposed of.You have the right to ask us to delete personal information we hold about you in some circumstances — for example, if we are processing the data on the basis of consent and you wish to withdraw that consent.

3. How The Dad Shift communicates with you

For any marketing communications about our campaigning, fundraising, or volunteering, we will only contact you via email and SMS if we have your consent to do so.To respond to your queries, we will contact you either via the medium you used to contact us, or by a medium you have indicated you would like us to respond with. If we need to contact you for any administrative purposes, we will usually email you.

4. How you can affect the way The Dad Shift communicates with you

The first time you sign up to one of our campaigns or make a donation, you will choose how you would prefer to be contacted. We will respect your choices and not make any changes to your preferences unless you change them yourself, or contact us to change them on your behalf.You can change your mind on how you would like us to contact you, or tell us that you would no longer like to hear from us, by clicking the unsubscribe link in any email or SMS we send you, or by emailing us at hello@dadshift.org.uk.

5. Your data protection rights

Under UK data protection legislation, you have a number of rights, which are outlined below:You have the right to be informed about how The Dad Shift uses your data.Where we are processing data based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw this at any time.You have the right to change your personal information if it is incomplete or inaccurate.You have the right to request the deletion or removal of your personal information in certain circumstances, including where it is no longer necessary for us to hold it for the purposes for which we are processing it.You have the right to restrict our processing of your data if there is disagreement about its accuracy or legitimate usage.You have the right to object to our processing of your data, including for direct marketing.You have the right to data portability — to receive a copy of your data in a structured, commonly used format.

Subject Access Requests

You have a right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, which The Dad Shift will supply to you within one month. We will ask for proof of identity, and may charge a fee should any request be unusually complex or time-consuming. If you would like to request a copy of the personal information The Dad Shift holds on you, please contact us using the details at the end of this policy.

6. How The Dad Shift protects children’s privacy

The safety of children is very important to us. The Dad Shift’s campaigns and digital services are aimed at adults. If you are aged under 16 and would like to support or get involved with The Dad Shift, please make sure you have your parent or guardian’s permission before sharing any personal information with us.All applicable laws are followed with respect to data collection from children. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13, and we do not target advertising at children.

7. People in vulnerable circumstances

The Dad Shift recognises the importance of protecting people in vulnerable circumstances. We do not use fundraising or campaigning tactics that exploit vulnerability or apply undue pressure, and we take care in how we communicate with anyone who may be vulnerable.

8. How to find out more or make a complaint

The Dad Shift operates in accordance with all relevant UK data protection laws. If you would like to find out more about these laws and how you could be affected beyond what is mentioned in this privacy policy, please visit the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.If you have any specific questions about how The Dad Shift processes your data which are not answered here, or you would like to make a complaint about how we have managed your data, please email us at hello@dadshift.org.uk.If you are not satisfied with our response to your enquiry, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office directly via the details on their website at ico.org.uk.

9. Changes to this policy

Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. The amended version will be published on our website, and any significant changes will be communicated to supporters either on the website or directly.This will replace any previous privacy policy wording, and all conditions and terms of use will be in force from the date of publication.

Last updated: 28 April 2026