Privacy Statement Animal Heroes

This privacy statement applies to all activities of the Animal Heroes Foundation, based in Amsterdam.

Our Mission and Vision

Our Mission: Providing international emergency aid to Animal Heroes—individuals who rescue, protect, and care for animals during acute emergencies and challenging conditions.

Our Vision: In a world where assisting animals during acute emergencies is standard practice, animal cruelty no longer exists and is proactively prevented.

We carry out projects worldwide, providing emergency aid and education to individual Animal Heroes and communities, enabling them to locally rescue, care for, and protect animals.

We conduct campaigns to raise awareness for animals in emergency situations and regularly inform our supporters about our progress towards our shared mission and how donations are utilized.

Your privacy – in brief

Animal Heroes relies entirely on the support of people like you to perform our work. We deeply value your privacy and handle your personal data confidentially and carefully. Personal data is processed in accordance with legal provisions, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Why do we collect personal data?

Animal Heroes relies fully on the support of financial and non-financial supporters. Financial supporters assist through essential donations. Non-financial supporters help in other ways, like participating in online campaigns, petitions, or volunteering.

It is important for Animal Heroes to continuously attract new supporters, build lasting relationships with supporters and volunteers, and keep them informed about our activities.

How do we collect personal data?

The Animal Heroes Foundation may receive your information through:

• Direct interactions: for instance, becoming a donor, giving a donation, contacting us via email, telephone, or letter, or subscribing to our digital newsletter. We always offer you the opportunity upfront to opt-out of email or telephone communication, called the right to object. You may also notify us later if you prefer no further communication by email or phone. We only use the information you provide directly.
• Our Animal Heroes website: to exercise, improve, and record our services, we collect various data via our website, including using cookies. More details are available in our cookie policy.
• Social media: Your personal data—such as your (user)name, profile photo, location, email address, and gender—are processed when you interact with us via our social media pages, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube. Examples include commenting, uploading media, sending personal messages, or liking and sharing our posts. Data is processed to better understand the interests and needs of our audience.

What information do we collect?

Examples include:

• Contact details – such as your name, address, phone number, and email, to keep you updated on our work.
• Payment and billing details – when you make a donation.
• Donation history and correspondence with us.
• Information entered on our website.
• Technical details of your website visit, such as IP address, traffic and location data, and website usage information.
• Photos or videos if you participate in our events.
• Details from your social media communication with us, including your (user)name and city.
• Other communication details, such as your reasons for supporting us or your communication and donation preferences.
• Additionally, we may collect publicly available information about you.

Our legal basis for data Processing

All personal data processing complies with the law, requiring a valid legal basis, including:

• Contract: We collect and process your personal data to fulfill contracts, such as providing requested services.
• Consent: We collect and process your data when you’ve provided consent.
• Legitimate interest: Necessary for our operations without infringing your privacy.
• Compliance with legal obligations.

How do we securely store your data?

Animal Heroes carefully manages your personal data and implements appropriate physical, administrative, organizational, and technical safeguards against misuse, loss, unauthorized access, unwanted disclosure, and unauthorized alterations.

We ensure data access is restricted to authorized personnel only, used strictly for the purposes collected and compatible uses. Our forms are encrypted, our network is secure and continuously monitored, and our donation page protects your payment details using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

With whom do we share your data?

We never sell or share your data for third-party marketing purposes. We securely provide data to suppliers who perform services supporting our operations (e.g., payment processing). We ensure these suppliers only use your data for providing agreed services under our instructions.

Before engaging external companies to process personal data, we conduct extensive checks and establish clear contracts outlining our expectations. Examples include marketing consultancies, IT, and social media service providers.

How long do we retain your data?

We retain your personal data as long as necessary for the relevant activity, within legal limits.

Your Rights

According to GDPR, you have the following rights concerning your collected data:

• Right of access: Request details about the data we hold about you.
• Right to rectification: Correct or complete your inaccurate or incomplete personal data.
• Right to restrict processing: Limit data processing, e.g., while verifying corrections.
• Right to erasure: Request deletion of your personal data unless legal obligations (like tax records) require us to retain it. If requesting removal from marketing communications, your name may be retained to ensure future exclusion.
• Right to object: Object to data processing; we may ask for details regarding your specific circumstances, and we’ll record your objection in our database.
• Right to opt-out: Opt-out of telemarketing; processing this request may take up to four weeks.
• Right to withdraw consent: Withdraw prior consent, such as unsubscribing from newsletters using the provided unsubscribe link.
• Right to file a complaint: Submit unresolved concerns to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl).

You can exercise these rights by contacting us (info@animalheroes.nl). We respond promptly, typically within four weeks.

Policy changes

This privacy statement was last updated in 2025. We may update this statement at any time to comply with data protection or other legal changes. Significant changes will be posted on this page.