How your application is handled

The charity you are applying to decides who receives a place and holds your application for that purpose. They are responsible for your information.

Capvera provides the software the charity uses to collect and review applications. We handle your information on their instructions and for no other purpose. We do not sell it, and we do not use it to contact you about anything else.

When you apply we collect your name, your email address, the town or city you live in, and your country. You may also give your state or region and a phone number, but you do not have to. The charity needs these to contact you and to run its programme.

Depending on the charity, you may also be asked for your date of birth and your home address. Race organisers require a date of birth for age categories, minimum age rules and insurance, and charities use an address for kit and supporter records. If a charity does not need these, it does not ask for them.

You may also tell the charity about fundraising you have done before, races you have run, your fundraising plan, and a social media handle. You can leave all of these blank and still apply. The charity may add questions of its own, and it decides which of them must be answered.

We do not look you up anywhere else. What the charity sees about you is what you wrote on the form, and what the charity itself already holds or records about your application.

A person at the charity reads your application and decides. We do not decide, and we do not recommend an outcome. Nothing on our side rejects an application automatically or removes one from consideration.

Staff at the charity you applied to see your application. No other charity sees it.

Capvera uses a small number of providers to run the service, and they handle your information only on our behalf: Google Cloud and Neon, which host our servers and database; Vercel, which hosts the website; Resend, which sends the emails you receive about your application; and Google Workspace, which holds our support mailbox if you write to us. Your information is stored in the United States.

When you use the form or your status page, our hosting providers record the request, including your IP address, for security and to stop repeated submissions. Those records are kept by the providers for a limited time, and are not added to your application.

We would also disclose it if the law required us to.

Your date of birth and home address are deleted first, six months after they were collected unless the charity has set a different period.

The rest of your application is kept for as long as the charity sets, which is usually two years. The clock starts on the race date, or, for a race with no date, when the charity archives it. If your application was declined, rejected or withdrawn for every race you applied to, it starts from the last of those instead. Charities run the same races every year and use this to recognise runners who have applied before, and to show that a decision was made properly if they are ever asked. When it ends, your application is deleted. A record that an application was made and how it was decided is kept, with nothing in it that identifies you.

We also keep a code made from each of your email address, phone number, date of birth, home address, and your name together with your date of birth. A code is made with a secret key that we hold, and it cannot be read back as the detail it came from. The code made from your email address lets the charity recognise you if you apply again, after the rest of your application has been deleted. The others are not used today. They are kept because once your date of birth and address are deleted, a code could never be made from them again. If they are ever used, a new version of this notice will say so first. The codes are kept separately for each charity, and are deleted if you ask for your information to be deleted.

Our database is backed up continuously. Anything deleted stays in those backups for up to seven days, and is then gone from them too.

Contact the charity you applied to. You can also write to us at customer_support@capvera.co and we will pass your request to the charity and help them answer it.

If you ask for your information to be deleted, your application, your date of birth and address, and the codes described above are all deleted, whatever period the charity has set.

Contact the charity first, or us at customer_support@capvera.co. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to your national data protection regulator. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.