Privacy Policy

Who we are

Impact Volunteers Africa ("IVA", "we", "us") arranges conservation and wildlife volunteer placements in Southern Africa. We are the responsible party for the personal information you share with us through this website, our application form, our enquiry forms and our Facebook and Instagram lead forms.

Our Information Officer is Vivienne van Zyl, founder of Impact Volunteers Africa.

What we collect

We only collect what we need to answer your enquiry and arrange your placement:

• Contact details: your name, email address and phone number.
• Enquiry details: the program you are interested in, your rough travel dates and who is travelling.
• Application details: the information asked for on our application form, including your date of birth, nationality, passport details, education and experience, and health, medical and lifestyle information relevant to your safety on a placement.
• Newsletter sign-ups: your email address.
• Website usage: pages visited and how you arrived at our site (for example, which advert you clicked), collected through cookies and similar technology.

Health and medical information is special personal information under POPIA. We collect it only with your consent, only because it matters for your safety and the safety of others on a placement, and we treat it with extra care.

How we use it

• To reply to your enquiry and check availability for your dates.
• To process your application and arrange your placement.
• To share the details a host project needs to confirm and prepare your placement, once you choose to go ahead.
• To send our newsletter, if you signed up for it. You can unsubscribe at any time.
• To measure and improve our advertising.

We never sell your personal information.

Advertising and analytics

We use the Meta Pixel and Meta Conversions API to understand which of our Facebook and Instagram adverts lead to enquiries. When you submit a form, we may send Meta your email address, phone number, name and city in a hashed (scrambled, one-way encrypted) form so the enquiry can be matched to an advert. Your application details, including passport and health information, are never sent to Meta or any advertising partner.

If you submit a lead form on Facebook or Instagram, Meta passes the details you entered on that form to us, and this policy then applies to them.

How we store and protect it

Your information is stored in a secured database and email system. Access to applications is restricted to authorised IVA staff. We keep your information only for as long as we need it to arrange your placement and meet our legal and accounting obligations, after which it is deleted.

Your rights

Under POPIA you have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to ask us to correct or delete it, to object to us using it, and to withdraw your consent at any time. To do any of these, email us and we will respond as soon as we can.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforeg.org.za.