Privacy Policy

The Sustainable Cities Challenge is being run by the Toyota Mobility Foundation and is being managed by Challenge Works and 89up. You can find full details below. This privacy policy explains how we use personal information we collect via this site. We are committed to protecting your privacy and we take all reasonable precautions to safeguard personal information. ​​This website is hosted by 89up, Ltd. and is being operated and managed for the purpose of the Sustainable Cities Challenge.​​ ​This website contains links to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. 

1. What kind of information do we collect?

Sign-up details: If you register or sign up for events, newsletters or publications on the site, we will ask you for personal information such as your name, email address, occupation and other contact details such as a contact phone number.

Application details: If you apply to enter the Sustainable Cities Challenge, we may ask for more detailed information which we will use to process your application, including details of your team if relevant, and you will be asked to agree to specific terms and conditions at the time of making the application.

Feedback and surveys: We may also ask you for feedback about The Sustainable Cities Challenge or Nesta or to complete surveys.

Research: If you agree to work with us in relation to any research we are conducting we will ask you for your name and contact details, occupation and may ask for further information about you as may be relevant to the particular research you are participating in.

Online activity: When you use our website, we obtain information about the devise from which you accessed it, your visits and use of the website including your IP address, location, browser type and version, referrer and activity. We record your activity and preferences when visiting the sites through the use of cookies (see "Cookies", below).

Your posts and communications: If you post content or communicate via the site, we may also ask for your name, occupation and the organisation you may work for. We also store and monitor your content and communications.

2.  What do we do with information we collect and what is our legal basis for this?

Third party processors: As is indicated below, we may use third party platforms and processors to deliver newsletters, process applications, event registrations, process payments, process surveys, and process any request to update your data contact preferences. In using these third parties we are pursuing our legitimate interest to use third party technology to achieve greater efficiency within our organisation. To balance our interests against yours, we have taken steps to ensure these third parties maintain appropriate technical and organisational measures to keep your personal information secure.

Sign-up details: If you sign-up for us to send you newsletters, publications and other information about the Sustainable Cities Challenge or us, our partners and activities (see “Marketing” section below), we will use your personal information to send these to you.  Our legal basis for doing this is your consent.  You have the right to withdraw this consent at any time, as explained in the “Marketing” section below. If you are given the opportunity to sign-up, register for an event, or program, or to create a personal profile via Facebook or Twitter, Facebook and Twitter will make your email address registered to your Facebook or Twitter account available to us, and we will use the email address to enable you to log in to the particular platform. Our legitimate interest in doing this is the use of third party platforms for business efficiency and ease of registration for users. 

Events: If you register to attend a Sustainable Cities Challenge or our event we will use your personal information to process your application to attend the event, take payment, if any, for our administration and management of the event and to send you any updates or information regarding the event. Our legal basis for doing so is to fulfil the agreement with you for your attendance.

We use Zoom, Calendly, CVent and Eventbrite as registration systems for many of our events and their servers are based in the United States (U.S.) and may store and process your information outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Zoom, Calendly, CVent and Eventbrite all comply with the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework. If you wish to know more please see https://explore.zoom.us/en/privacy/, https://calendly.com/privacy,  http://www.cvent.com/en/privacy-policy-global.shtml, https://www.eventbrite.com/support/articles/en_US/Troubleshooting/eventbrite-privacy-policy?lg=en_US 

If you buy a ticket for an event, or make a purchase via the website, we will use third party payment processing organisations to take your payment. These organisations will be the data controller of your information for the purpose of processing the transaction, and may involve your information being processed outside of the EEA. Please read the terms and conditions before completing your payment. 

Application details: We will use your personal information to process your application for the Toyota Sustainable Cities Challenge. We undertake this processing because it is necessary to fully assess your application, and if successful, to take steps for you to enter into an Agreement with the Toyota Mobility Foundation (this is our legal basis for the processing). 

If the application process requires you to submit personal information relating to your team, the information you have provided may be displayed publicly on the website for other users and applicants to see.

If you apply to enter the Sustainable Cities Challenge, you will be redirected to Submittable to process that application.  Submittable operates in the US and comply with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. If you wish to know more please see https://www.submittable.com/privacy/ Please ensure you read the terms and conditions of the platform, as when you submit an application you will be agreeing to their terms and conditions. However, we remain the controller of your personal information in this arrangement – these third parties only process your personal information in line with our instructions.

Feedback and surveys: If you agree to give Sustainable Cities Challenge or our feedback or complete a survey, we will use the information to improve our work and activities. We usually use Alchemer to process surveys, and they only process your information on our instructions. Alchemer operates in the US and comply with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. For more information see https://www.alchemer.com/privacy/ If you agree to participate in any survey that will form part of any research project, we will tell you at the time you take part how your information will be used for the particular research project or program, and how long it will be kept for. 

Research: If you agree to take part in any research we will use your information for the purpose of that research project or program. Full details of how your personal information will be used will be given to you at the time you agree to participate; this could include to inform the development of a new prize, project, program or other initiative, being incorporated into reports or other research outcomes, and may include being publicly displayed on web pages relating to the particular research project or program.   

Online activity: The information that we obtain about your devise helps us to monitor the website and keep it secure and prevent fraud. The cookies we use tell us how you use the site and what pages you have visited. In pursuing these activities, we use our legitimate interest of monitoring and improving the performance of the site and its security, and to help us understand more about our customer’s interests and preferences, and to inform our marketing strategy.  Some of these cookies are used for remarketing purposes and, if you agree, will be used to send you tailored advertisements. For more information, see “Cookies” below. 

Posts and Communications: If you post any comments on the website, any personal information you agree to provide will be displayed publicly on the website along with your comments.

Social media interaction: We may use a third party providers to check whether the people whose contact email addresses we have collected have registered with those email accounts on social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter including statistical information about how many of our contacts are on Facebook. We do not receive any information as to who is on Facebook.  We may also have a third party provider provide us with the Twitter handle for our contacts who are on Twitter.  We use this information to follow our contacts on Twitter.  In pursuing these activities, we are pursuing our legitimate interests to understand more about our contacts’ use of social media and this will then inform our marketing strategy.  We have an appropriate contract in place with to ensure the security and protection of the data.

For all kinds of information collected: Please make sure that any personal details you provide are accurate and up to date, and let us know about any changes. Please get consent first before giving us anyone else’s information.

The nature of our work means we often work in partnership with other organisations, however, we will not share your information with any other organisation unless we have your permission first, unless we have a legitimate interest to do so (see section 5 below).  

Some challenges or prizes may include the opportunity to collaborate with other applicants, in this situation you will be asked to agree to your information being shared in this way at the time of application.  

We may also use your information to carry out analysis and research to improve our publications, events and activities, customise our website and its content to your particular preferences, notify you of any changes to our website or to our activities that may affect you, to prevent and detect fraud and abuse, and to protect other users.

However you choose to engage with or support us, we may retain your information for our own legitimate business interests for statistical analysis purposes, in order to review, develop and improve our business activities.  In this situation, we will only keep any personal information if it is necessary to do so, and will always put in place appropriate safeguards, including where possible anonymising or minimising the data retained.

We use a third party to provide cloud based data security, storage and disaster recovery service to backup data that we hold and/or store either in the EU or US, subject to their respective privacy policies.  

3. How long will we keep your information for?

General principle: We will only keep any personal information that you provide to us for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purpose for which you gave us the information and we will securely delete information when it is no longer needed for that purpose, as explained in more detail below.

Events: If you attend a Sustainable Cities Challenge or our event, we will use your information for the purpose of the event, and will only contact you for any other purpose if you have said we can. We will retain your personal information collected for the purpose of its events for 3 years for evaluation and business development purposes to help us understand our audience and reach, and to improve future events.

If you buy a ticket for a Sustainable Cities Challenge or our event, we will also keep your information in order to tell you about future similar events. If you do not wish us to contact you about either of these future events please let us know by writing to us or emailing us at the at the contact details below.  

Consent: We keep records of consent, and any withdrawal of consent, on our files for as long as your personal information is being used in-line with that consent and for a period of 6 years after the consent is withdrawn (unless otherwise requested by you).

Other application details: If you apply for the Sustainable Cities Challenge, and you are successful, then you will enter into a contract with the Toyota Mobility Foundation and they will provide further information about how they will continue to process your personal information.

We will keep your information for a period of 6 years from the end of the agreement we have with the Toyota Mobility Foundation for monitoring and evaluation purposes and to tell you about future opportunities to apply for similar challenges.  

If you do not want to receive information about future opportunities to apply for similar Challenges please let us know by emailing us at the details below. 

Research: If you agree with us to take part in any research your personal information will be kept for as long as it is of value to us and the wider research community, and for as long as may be specified by any external research funder, patent law, legislative and other regulatory requirements. Research data shall be reviewed at least every 5 years to consider its continued value to us, and personal data anonymised or pseudonymised where possible, unless to do so would affect the integrity of the research data and/or its outcomes, or its future value.

To the extent that personal data arising from any research is embodied within a research report or other research outcome, it will be retained in perpetuity as part of the published materials.

Research that supports the development of a prize, project, programme, publication or other research outcome, shall be kept for at least 5 years beyond publication or any other research outcome has been completed. If the research is funded or the subject of any other contract, your personal data may be kept for 6 years after the end of the contract or longer if the contract or funding agreement specifies, which could be up to 12 years after the contract ends. 

Posts and communications: any information that you post on the website shall only be kept and displayed for such time as the subject matter to which it relates is publicly displayed.  

Processing for statistical analysis purposes: This type of processing will only be undertaken whilst we retain your personal information in line with the principles explained above.

4. Marketing

If you sign up to the Sustainable Cities Challenge or our mailing list we will use your details to keep you informed about latest news, blogs, programme updates, research, publications, event details, jobs and funding opportunities, and may request feedback, including our annual audience survey.

We use third party providers including but not limited to Mailchimp, Salesforce and Cvent to deliver our e-newsletters.  We gather statistics around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. Please note that third party providers may use servers hosted in the USA, but do comply with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. If you want to know more about how your information will be stored and processed please visit this privacy policy. If we use any other providers we will let you know when you subscribe.  

If you no longer want to receive marketing communications from the Sustainable Cities Challenge or us, you can unsubscribe from these mailing lists at any time by please clicking the unsubscribe link, at the bottom of our emails or by emailing detailing your name and email address. If you are given the opportunity to update your contact preferences in any email from us, this will link to a form hosted by a third party provider. If this function is not made available, please email us at the above address with your preference updates.  

We use third party marketing services to tailor advertising to you based upon your browsing history on this website, for more information see “Cookies” below. 

5. Who else has access to your information?

As this challenge is being run by the Toyota Mobility Foundation based in Japan, it will be necessary to transfer any personal data contained within your application to the Toyota Mobility Foundation in Japan in order to assess your application in accordance with the application terms and conditions. We will also need to share your information with 89UP, and World Resources Institute who we are working in partnership to manage and operate the Sustainable Cities Challenge. For more information see www.toyotamobilityfoundation.org.  

We may need to share your information with other partners or companies who may help us operate the challenge. We will share your information with judges who help us assess applications. For information on the judges please visit https://sustainablecitieschallenge.org. 

If you register to attend an event or indicate interest in any other activity detailed on this site, we may share your details with the companies/organisations who help us to fund and organise the events or other activities.

Our legal basis for sharing your information with partners, Judges and others who help operate the Sustainable Cities Challenge or any events is to pursue our legitimate interest of being able to work collaboratively with other organisations and individuals to operate and administer the challenge and any associated events or activities.  Some of these organisations and individuals may process your information in countries outside the EEA, such as the United States, where data protection laws are not the same as in the EEA. Where transfers are necessary to countries where data protection has not yet been declared to be adequate, we rely on GDPR Article 49(1)(c) for these transfers. Rest assured that we will always ensure any transfer is subject to appropriate security measures to safeguard your personal data. Full details of these organisations, confirmation of where they would process your personal information, and details of the steps we have taken to safeguard your personal data will be provided as part of the online data collection process., or displayed on this website when known

We may share your information within our group of companies, for the purposes of managing the Challenge and any associated events or our events. We currently provide all support and services for its subsidiary companies, therefore, our legal basis for sharing your information is to pursue the legitimate interests of shared resources and management reporting between the companies within the group. Our group companies will not process your data outside the EEA unless we notify you otherwise. Details of our group companies can be found at our website.  

Comments, blogs and other information which you post on the site are displayed publicly and can be viewed by other users. Please be careful when disclosing personal information which may identify you or anyone else. We are not responsible for the protection or security of information which you post in public areas.

The developer of this website, ​89up, Ltd.​ will have access to personal information that you provide, including your name and where you work, if provided, solely for the purpose of the administration and maintenance of the website. We have an appropriate agreement in place with the developer, to ensure the security of your personal information.

We may disclose your personal information to law enforcement agencies if required by law (in which case our legal basis for doing this is for compliance with a legal obligation), or to protect or defend ourselves or others against illegal or harmful activities (in which case, our legal basis for doing this is the pursuit of these legitimate interests). 

6. Cookies

This site contains cookies. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites you visit. They are widely used to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to site owners. Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through browser settings.

This site uses cookies that are strictly necessary to enable you to move around the site or to provide certain basic features, such as logging into secure areas.

The site also uses performance cookies which collect information about how you use the site, such as how you are referred to it and how long you stay on certain pages. This information is aggregated and therefore anonymous and is used to improve the performance of the site. If you want, you can block cookies by changing the settings on your browser.  Please note that some of the features of the site may not work if you choose to block cookies.

We also use third party tracking cookies for marketing. These third parties help us to send you tailored advertisements, that we think may be of interest to you, based on what parts of the website you have viewed. The advertisements will be shown to you on other search results pages, or on sites within Google’s or any other third-party display network. We do not collect any identifiable information through the use these third-party marketing services.

If you do not wish to receive such advertisements, then you must deactivate these cookies from your account. For more information and links to manage your setting see the Cookie Policy.

7. Security

We take steps to protect your personal information and follow procedures designed to minimise unauthorised access or disclosure of your information. If you have a password for an account on this site, please keep this safe and do not share it with anyone else. You are responsible for all activity on your account and must contact us immediately if you are aware of any unauthorised use of your password or other security breach. 

8. Contacting us, exercising your rights and complaints

You are legally entitled to know what personal information we hold about you and how that information is processed, which includes the right to:

• know what information we hold about you
• ask us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold
• ask us to delete your personal information
• ask us to stop using your personal information or restrict how we can use it, for example if you feel it is inaccurate or no longer needs to be used by Nesta
• to object to us using of your personal information
• to object to any automated decision making that we may do using your personal information  

If you wish to know what information we hold about you, or wish to exercise any of your other rights as detailed above, or have any complaint about how we are using your personal information, then please email us using [email protected] and provide enough information to identify yourself (e.g. name and address or any registration details). 

If our information is incorrect or out of date, please provide us with information to update it. If you want us to delete, restrict or stop using any information we hold about you, please explain the reasons why you are asking this. If you are unhappy with how we are using your information, again please explain to us the reasons and we will investigate the matter.

You can also write to the same address if you have a complaint about this policy.

If you are unhappy with how any data rights request or complaint has dealt with you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner at Wycliff House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF or the following link. https://ico.org.uk/concerns or helpline: 0303 123 1113.

Partner Information:

Toyota Mobility Foundation: 4-18 Koraku 1-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan

89Up Limited: 66-68 Pentonville Road, London, N1 9PR

World Resources Institute:  10 G Street NE, Suite 800, Washington DC 20002

Challenge Works:  58 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DS.

9. Changes to the privacy policy

We may change this privacy policy from time to time.  We will notify you of any changes that relate to information we already hold about you, where practicable. You should check this policy occasionally to ensure you are aware of the most recent version that will apply each time you access this website.