Date agreed: September 2024
Agreed by: Sustainable Amersham Board of Trustees
Last reviewed: September 2024
Next review due: September 2026
Sustainable Amersham is a volunteer community association. Sustainable Amersham is committed to keeping the personal details of our members, volunteers and supporters safe. This policy explains how and why we collect and use your personal data, to ensure that you remain informed and in control of your information.
If you are signed up to our newsletter as a supporter, or have signed up as a member, we will only collect basic information: your name and email address.
We do not normally collect or store sensitive personal data (such as information relating to health, beliefs or political affiliation) about supporters, members, volunteers etc. However, there are some situations where this will occur:
If you are a Trustee, we collect certain information, such as your date of birth, address and other sensitive information which is a legal obligation of the Charity Commission. This information will be held for as long as legally necessary. Personal data about Trustees recorded in minutes or agendas will be kept as a record of Sustainable Amersham’s activities and will ultimately be archived in its records.
If you are a supplier or contractor that supplies services or goods to Sustainable Amersham, we may collect further information about you, such as your address, a CV or bank details.
If you take part in an activity, we will register your name name and telephone number of an emergency contact, your email address (if not signed up already) and your signature (to show you will follow our instructions, for example, and consent or not to use photos we take at the activity). The emergency contact details will be made illegible immediately after the activity but the emergency forms need to be kept for a certain period of time for insurance purposes.
If you volunteer with us, we will collect your telephone number, the name and telephone number of an emergency contact, and we may ask whether you have any medical conditions we need to take into account to keep you safe during volunteering. Personal data about volunteers recorded on health and safety documentation, or information about their participation in work or meetings may be recorded in meeting minutes, reports or meeting agendas and will be kept as a record of Sustainable Amersham’s activities and will ultimately be archived in its records.
We are required to keep financial records of donors who have given a donation and filled out a Gift Aid form or have made a substantial donation.
We may also collect sensitive personal data if you have an accident during one of our activities. This information will be retained for legal reasons, for safeguarding purposes and to protect us (including in the event of an insurance or legal claim). If this does occur, we will take extra care to ensure your privacy rights are protected.
In line with the Data Protection Act, we will not collect, store or process your personal details if you are under 13 years of age unless we have the express permission from your parent or guardian to do so.
You directly provide Sustainable Amersham with most of the data we collect. We collect data and process data when you:
Register online or on paper for our newsletter;
Sign a consent form at an activity or a repair form at our Repair Café;
Book a ticket or place for an event or activity;
Sign up as a member, volunteer or Trustee;
Work with us as a partner, contractor or supplier, whether as a volunteer or paid;
Send us a query by email or via the website;
Fill out a Gift Aid form;
Use or view our website via your browser’s cookies.
Some of this collection of data is in person, in writing; at other times, it is over the telephone, through social media or through an email. Data is also collected through cookies on our website; more information about cookies can be found below.
We may also use publicly available sources to carry out due diligence on donors or potential donors wishing to make large donations to meet fundraising and money laundering regulations.
We use your personal data to keep in touch with you. We will only ever collect, store and use your personal data when we have an identified purpose and reason to do so and will obtain your consent where possible. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) refers to this as a ‘lawful basis’. Further information about why we collect your personal data is outlined below.
We get your consent to collect your personal data (name and email) to administer your membership, which may involve sending out an initial membership email and getting in touch should there ever be any issues with your membership, and send you our monthly email newsletter. We will also write to you regarding our Annual General Meeting (and any Extraordinary General Meetings) at which you have a legal right to vote. The ICO defines the lawful basis for processing your data for these purposes as ‘contractual’.
We collect your personal data to send you information about events you have booked onto or have already participated in, to give you pre-event information (eg logistics or changed start times) or to gather feedback to help us improve our work. As defined by the ICO, the lawful basis for these purposes is ‘contractual’.
We also collect your personal data so that we can send you information about our work additional to the monthly newsletter. This will be occasional (a few times per year at most) and may concern meetings, events, competitions and other activities we feel may be of interest, or to ask your opinion about our work. This information is in addition to that outlined in sections a) and b) and is defined as ‘direct marketing’ by the ICO.
You can opt out from emails at any time by using the unsubscribe button on emails or by contacting us at hello@sustainableamersham.org.
If you are a Sustainable Amersham volunteer (including a Trustee), we collect your personal data so that we can keep in touch with you about, for example, volunteer events that we think you may be interested in participating in; updated volunteer policies and procedures; changes to planned volunteer work you may be taking part in; or dedicated volunteer thank-you events. As a Trustee, you would also be contacted about meetings, events, and to be consulted about issues and questions arising between meetings. As defined by the ICO, the lawful basis for processing your data for these purposes is ‘contractual’ (where administering your volunteer record) and ‘legitimate interest’ (when sending you information about our work).
If you are working with us as a partner, contractor or supplier to supply goods or organise an activity, we will collect some of your personal data to enable us to work together effectively. As defined by the ICO, the lawful basis for these purposes is ‘contractual’.
Designated Sustainable Amersham volunteers may take photos of people participating in events or activities on their personal mobile phones. We may also collect quotes from you about our events through feedback forms. We will get your explicit consent to use this information to tell other people about our work and to report to the public and the Charity Commission about what we have achieved. We will get written consent from you to take and use your photo in this way, and from parents if we take and might use a photo of a child. As defined by the ICO, the lawful basis for these purposes is consent.
All of the personal data we process is processed by our volunteers in the UK. However, for the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance your information may be situated outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). This will be done in accordance with guidance issued by the ICO. Electronic data and databases are stored on secure computer systems and we control who has access to information (using both physical and electronic means). Physical data is always stored securely. Our volunteers are made aware of their responsibilities for data protection, confidentiality and security which they commit to following. We cannot guarantee the security of your home computer or the internet, and any online communications (eg information provided by email or our website) and links you follow from our website or other communications are at your own risk.
We do not process payments online ourselves. Any payments for events are managed through Eventbrite and any payments made in person are processed through SumUp.
Sustainable Amersham will only share personal data with others when truly necessary, legally required and permitted to do so. When we do so, we will ensure the data is protected and that it complies with our policies. We will never sell your data.
We may share your data with:
Third party organisations that provide applications/functionality, data processing or IT services to us, for example to send emails, store our documents, host our website, back up data, and sell tickets to events. The servers powering and facilitating this cloud infrastructure are located in secure data centres around the world.
Third party organisations that otherwise assist Sustainable Amersham in providing goods, services or information, such as event facilitators but only where necessary;
Law enforcement or regulatory agencies, such as HMRC when Sustainable Amersham processes Gift Aid donations.
Photographs of members of the public attending our events (including children and vulnerable adults) may be taken and used only under the following conditions:
the event leader is responsible for collecting signed consent to take and use the photo from any person in a photograph;
only the event leader or volunteers designated by the event leader can use their phone to take photographs;
once a photograph has been saved by Sustainable Amersham it must be deleted from personal phones.
We will only use and store information for as long as it required for the purposes it was collected for. There may be occasions which will require data to be kept for longer; this will typically be for legal purposes, such as to record a Gift Aided donation. In addition, personal data may be securely archived with restricted access and other appropriate safeguards where there is a need to continue to retain it. We periodically review what information we hold to ensure that it is still relevant and necessary, and delete what is no longer required.
You can view our Data Retention Policy here.
We respect your right to control your data. Your rights include:
This privacy notice outlines how we capture, store and use your data. If you have any questions about any elements of this policy, please contact us.
You can request to see any of your personal data that we hold. We will respond within 30 days. We may charge a reasonable fee for the work involved.
If you let us know that we have captured information about you that is inaccurate or incomplete, we will update it.
You can ask us to remove your personal details from our records.
You can ask us to stop using your personal data.
You can ask to obtain your personal data from us for your own purposes.
You can ask to be excluded from marketing activity.
You have the right to ask for information and challenge any automated decision making we do using your data.
If you wish to exercise any of these rights, you can send an email to hello@sustainableamersham.org
‘Cookies’ are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information. When you visit our website, we may collect information from you automatically through cookies.
Our cookies help us:
Make our website work as you would expect
Remember your settings during and between visits
Improve the speed/security of the site
Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
Continuously improve our website for you
Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org. If you remove cookies, some of our website features may not function as a result.
Our privacy policy only applies to our own website. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of any other websites linked to our website. If you have followed a link from our website to another website you may be supplying information to a third party and should read their privacy policy.
Sustainable Amersham keeps its privacy policy under regular review and places any updates on its website. This privacy policy was last updated in September 2024.
If you have any questions about Sustainable Amersham’s privacy policy, the data we hold on you, or you would like to exercise one of your data protection rights, please do not hesitate to contact us on hello@sustainableamersham.org.
To contact the Information Commissioner’s Office, go to Information Commissioner’s Office.