Registered Charity Number 1097376; Company limited by guarantee; registered in England no. 4689779
‘Promoting, developing and supporting the voluntary sector’
Voluntary Action Epping Forest (VAEF) Privacy Statement
We want everyone who supports us, or who comes to us for support, to feel confident and comfortable with how any personal information you share with us will be looked after or used. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information (this means any information that identifies or could identify you).
- Who we are
- How we collect information about you
- Information we collect and why we use it
- Legal basis for using your information
- Marketing
- Sharing your Information
- Keeping your information safe
- How long we hold your information for
- Your rights
- Monitoring
- How we use your information if you apply for a role at VAEF
1. Who we are
Voluntary Action Epping Forest (VAEF) is a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee. We are committed to protecting your personal information and making every effort to ensure that your personal information is processed in a fair, open and transparent manner.
We are a “data controller” for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998 and (from 25 May 2018) the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“Data Protection Law”). This means that we are responsible for, and control the processing of, your personal information.
2. How we collect information about you
We collect information from you in the following ways:
When you interact with us directly: This could be if you ask us about our services/support/projects, apply for membership, register with us for training or an event, make a donation to us, ask a question about one of our projects or services, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you phone us, visit our website, or get in touch through email, the post, or in person.
When you interact with us through third parties: This could be when you ask for support/services through Epping Forest District Council or Essex County Council or you provide a donation through a third party such as Just Giving or one of the other third parties that we work with and provide your consent for your personal information to be shared with us.
3. Information we collect and why we use it
Personal Information
Personal information we collect includes details such as your name, date of birth, email address, postal address and telephone number (if you are making a donation), as well as information you provide in any communications between us. You will have given us this information whilst applying for support through one of our services/projects, applying for membership, making a donation, registering for an event, or any of the other ways to interact with us.
We will mainly use this information:
- To provide the services/support you have
- To update you with important administrative messages about an event or services you have requested or your
- To keep a record of your relationship with
- Where you volunteer with us, to administer the volunteering
- To process your donations or other payments, to claim Gift Aid on your donations and verify any financial transactions
- To comply with the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016 and follow the recommendations of the official regulator of charities, the Charity Commission, which require us to identify and verify the identity of supporters who make major gifts so we can assess any risks associated with accepting their
If you do not provide this information, we will not be able to process your donation, sign you up for a particular event or provide services you have requested.
We may also use your personal information:
- To contact you about our work and how you can support VAEF (see section 8 on ‘Marketing’ below for further information).
- To invite you to participate in surveys or
Sensitive Personal Information
If you share your personal experience or the experiences of a friend or relative, we may also collect this health information. If you provide us with any Sensitive Personal Information by telephone, email or by other means, we will treat that information with extra care and confidentiality and always in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
A special note about the Sensitive Personal Information we hold
Data Protection Law recognises that some categories of personal information are more sensitive. Sensitive Personal Information can include information about a person’s health, race, ethnic origin, political opinions, sex life, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.
If you contact us about one of our services/projects, you may choose to provide details of a sensitive nature.
We will only use this information:
- For the purposes of dealing with your enquiry, training, and quality monitoring or evaluating the services we
- We will not pass on your details to anyone else without your express permission except in exceptional circumstances. Examples of this might include anyone reporting serious self-harm or posing a threat to others or children contacting us and sharing serious issues such as physical abuse or
4. Legal basis for using your information
In some cases, we will only use your personal information where we have your consent or because we need to use it in order to fulfil a contract with you for example to provide a service by our Handyman. However, there are other lawful reasons that allow us to process your personal information and one of those is called ‘legitimate interests’. This means that the reason that we are processing information is because there is a legitimate interest for VAEF to process your information to help us to achieve our vision of ensuring that everyone approaching us for support through one of our projects gets both support and respect.
Whenever we process your Personal Information under the ‘legitimate interest’ lawful basis we make sure that we take into account your rights and interests and will not process your personal information if we feel that there is an imbalance.
Some examples of where we have a legitimate interest to process your Personal information are where we contact you about our work via post, use your personal information for data analytics, conducting research to better understand who our supporters are, improving our services, for our legal purposes (for example, dealing with complaints and claims), or for complying with guidance from the Charity Commission.
5. Marketing
We will only contact you about our work and how you can support VAEF by phone, email or text message, if you have agreed for us to contact you in this manner.
However, if you have provided us with your postal address we may send you information about our work and how you can support VAEF by mail unless you have told us that you would prefer not to hear from us in that way.
You can update your choices or stop us sending you these communications at any time by contacting us at: email admin@vaef.org.uk or clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the relevant communication.
6. Sharing your Information
The personal information we collect about you will mainly be used by our staff (and volunteers) at VAEF so that they can support you.
We will never sell or share your personal information with organisations so that they can contact you for any marketing activities. Nor do we sell any information about your web browsing activity.
Legal disclosure
We may disclose your information if required to do so by law (for example, to comply with applicable laws, regulations and codes of practice or in response to a valid request from a competent authority); or, in order to enforce our conditions of sale and other agreements.
7. Keeping your information safe
We take looking after your information very seriously. We’ve implemented appropriate physical, technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction and loss.
Unfortunately the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to our site.
8. How long we hold your information for
We only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary for the relevant activity, which may be to fulfil statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid).
9. Your rights
You have various rights in respect of the personal information we hold about you – these are set out in more detail below. If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting us at:
Mr David Wright, Voluntary Action Epping Forest, Epping Forest District Council Offices
25 Hemnall Street Epping, Essex CM16 4LU
Telephone 01992 564178 or email admin@vaef.org.uk
You can also make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, https://ico.org.uk/
- Access to your personal information: You have the right to request access to a copy of the personal information that we hold about you, along with information on what personal information we use, why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it for and whether it has been used for any automated decision You can make a request for access free of charge. Please make all requests for access in writing, and provide us with evidence of your identity.
- Right to object: You can object to our processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes. Please contact us as noted above, providing details of your objection.
- Consent: If you have given us your consent to use personal information (for example, for marketing), you can withdraw your consent at any
- Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information held about
- Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, you have withdrawn consent, or where we have no lawful basis for keeping
- Portability: You can ask us to provide you or a third party with some of the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form, so it can be easily
- Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the personal information we use about you where you have asked for it to be erased or where you have objected to our use of it.
- No automated-decision making: Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. You have the right not to be subject to automated decisions that will
create legal effects or have a similar significant impact on you, unless you have given us your consent, it is necessary for a contract between you and us or is otherwise permitted by law. You also have certain rights to challenge decisions made about you. We do not currently carry out any automated decision-making.
Please note, some of these rights only apply in certain circumstances and we may not be able to fulfil every request.
10. Monitoring
Your communications with us (including by telephone or email) may be monitored and/or recorded for training, quality control and compliance purposes to ensure that we continuously improve our customer service standards.
11. How we use your information if you apply for a role at VAEF
We collect information from anyone who applies to work or volunteer at VAEF. We only use this information for our recruitment or employment purposes and it is entirely separate to our member/service user/supporter data.
As an applicant or employee, you are entitled to the same rights as our supporters, and these are outlined in our Rights section.
Applicants
When you apply to work or volunteer at VAEF we will ask for information about you and your work history to understand how your skills and past experience matches the requirements of a role.
There are two circumstances where we might disclose details outside of VAEF as we process your application:
- We will ask for details of referees, and we will contact them to verify the information that you have given us – when we contact them, we will share your name and the role that you have applied for. We contact referees on the basis of our legitimate interests as an organisation to understand applicants and their suitability for the roles they apply
- Some roles also require us to obtain a disclosure from the Disclosure & Barring This will be clearly marked in the advertisement, and so we will not give you further notice before we apply for this disclosure.
All candidates applying to work or to volunteer at VAEF will automatically have their application details saved and retained on our database for 12 months. We use our database to identify candidates who were unsuccessful in their application, but who we feel may have an interest in and suitability for another role.
If you would like for us to remove your personal details from our system at any time before that, please write to us to let us know, contact details as above.
You should know that we always keep anonymous statistical information about applicants to develop our recruitment processes and for equality and diversity monitoring, but this does not contain any information that could be used to identify individual job applicants.
Employees
If you begin employment with us, we will put together a staff file, which will contain your information. We keep this information in this file secure and will only use it for matters that apply directly to your employment with VAEF
{We provide all of our employees with an internal privacy notice, which explains exactly how we process their data as an employee, including how we use their personal data in case of emergency, and how long we retain all of this information for.}
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Voluntary Action Epping Forest,
Epping Forest District Council Offices
25 Hemnall StreetEpping, Essex CM16 4LU
Telephone 01992 564178 or email admin@vaef.org.uk
May 2018