Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy (Policy) sets out The Sister2sister Foundation’s (Sister2sister) policy on the management of personal information and how we handle the personal information you provide to us. This policy may be updated from time to time.

What is the Privacy Legislation?

In Australia, the main piece of legislation governing privacy is the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). This Act requires organisations to comply with 13 Australian Privacy Principles ("APPs") which regulate the way in which private sector organisations collect, use, keep secure, disclose and handle your personal information. The APPs also give individuals the right to know what information an organisation holds about them and to correct that information if it is out of date or inaccurate.

What is Personal Information?

Personal information is any sort of information about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable. A sub-category of Personal Information is sensitive information. Sensitive information includes information of a particularly sensitive nature, including information relating to an individual’s health (physical and mental) and genetics and information about an individual’s racial or ethnic origins, political opinions, sexual preferences or criminal record (Sensitive Information).

What we collect and how we manage it

Sister2sister will only collect the personal information about you that we need in order to provide our services or, that you have provided when making a donation, applying for volunteering opportunities or otherwise. For example, we collect personal information from you in order to:

• process applications for service or assistance
• assist with billing and invoicing
• establish and maintain donor relationships
• ensure the appropriateness of our services
• meet Government funding, professional and legal requirements

The personal information that we collect will depend on the type of relationship we have with you. Examples of the types of information collected include:

• your contact information such as name, address, email address and phone number
• your financial details for payment of services or events
• sensitive information (for example, health information, criminal history, information relating to your working with children checks, your ethnicity to ensure a culturally appropriate service) directly relating to a service we provide.

Occasionally, Sister2sister Foundation uses de-identified Personal Information derived from our volunteer and clients to provide Sister2sister Foundation with anonymous demographic and usage information.

We collect most of this information directly from you, from the forms you fill out, in emails you send us, or via our website. We will only collect sensitive information about you where you consent. Depending on your relationship with us, we may collect information from third parties.

Sister2sister takes active measures to ensure the security of all Personal Information it holds. All Personal Information is stored securely and is protected by controls including passwords and firewalls. When we no longer require your Personal Information it is securely destroyed and disposed of.

Disclosure of your Personal Information

Sister2sister will not disclose any information about you for a purpose other than the purpose for which it was collected without your consent or other than in accordance with this privacy policy, unless:

• we are permitted or required to do so by law
• we believe the disclosure is necessary to provide you with a service which you have requested
• to protect the rights, property or personal safety of you, another client, any member of the public or Sister2sister
• the disclosure is required in order to assess your application for volunteering opportunities, to accept your donations, or to reply to a specific request that you might have.

In all the above circumstances, Sister2sister will only disclose your personal information in accordance with the applicable law.

From time to time, Sister2sister uses third party service providers to help us in our operations. This means individuals and organisations outside of Sister2sister may sometimes have access to your personal information and may use it on behalf of Sister2sister. We require our service providers to adhere to APPs and only use the information to provide services to us.

What happens if you don’t want to provide the information requested?

Sister2sister will only ask for information that is necessary for the purposes outlined in this privacy policy. You have a right not to identify yourself or to use a pseudonym when dealing with us. You do not have to give the information that we request from you, but not giving us the information requested may affect our ability to provide you with a service.

Online donations

Our donations page is hosted by a secure third party payment gateway. Donations are processed utilising 128-bit SSL encryption to protect the transfer of personal and financial information between your browser and our server and credit card details are NOT stored at any time by us. The only information collected and retained by us is the amount of the donation, transaction date, name and contact details as completed on the donation form.
Information collected from our website

When an individual visits our website, personal information may be collected automatically through cookies including your IP address and/or domain name; operating system (type of browser and platform); and the date, time and length of the visit to the website. This information primarily is used for the compilation of statistical information about the use of the website. Cookies may also be used to assist Sister2sister and our third-party service providers present targeted and customised advertising to an individual on our website and/or on third party websites.

Direct Marketing

Sister2sister will only engage in direct marketing practices in accordance with the law.
We may contact you at the email, phone or other address which you provide to us in order to provide you with updated information about our services (including other products and services you might be interested in). If you are receiving promotional information about Sister2sister and do not wish to receive this information any longer, you may remove your name from our distribution list by emailing office2sister2sister.org.au. For email and other modes of communication, Sister2sister Foundation provides a simple opt-out (unsubscribe) mechanism that individuals can easily submit at any time.

Requesting your personal information

You have a right to request access to your personal information and to request its correction. At any time, you can request access to the personal information we have about you by emailing us directly. We will give you reasonable access to the personal information we hold about you as soon as reasonably practicable after receiving your request. If at any time you wish us to change your personal information that we hold on record please contact us at office2sister2sister.org.au.

Data breaches

If your personal information held by us is ever inadvertently lost, disclosed or improperly accessed and that loss, disclosure or access results in serious harm to you we are required by law to report the data breach to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and notify you.