Privacy Policy

We want everyone who supports us, or who comes to us for support, to feel confident and comfortable with how we look after your personal information.

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use and store your personal information. Personal information means any information that could identify you.

The BBK charity Privacy Policy may change so please remember to check back from time to time. This version is dated 30^th January 2025.

How we collect information about you

Everything we do, we do to ensure that we can help people get both support and respect. We want to make sure you receive the communications that are most relevant to you, be it through visiting our website or receiving emails, post or phone calls.

We collect information from you in the following ways:

When you interact with us directly: This could be if you ask us about our activities, register with us for training or an event, complete a survey providing feedback on our services, apply for volunteering opportunity or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you phone us, visit our website or get in touch through the post, or in person.

When you interact with us through third parties: This could be if you provide a donation through a third party such as GiveWP or one of the other third parties that we work with.

When you visit our website: We gather general information which might include which pages you visit most often and which services, events or information is of most interest to you. We may also track which pages you visit when you click on links in emails from us. We also use “cookies” to help our site run effectively. There are more details below – see ‘Cookies’.

We use this information to personalise the way our website is presented when you visit to make improvements and to ensure we provide the best service and experience for you. Wherever possible we use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website.

Information we collect and why we use it

Personal Information

Personal information we collect includes details such as your name, email address, postal address, and telephone number, as well as information you provide in any communications between us. You will have given us this information while registering for an event on our website or any of the other ways to interact with us.

We will mainly use this information:

To process your donations or other payments, to claim Gift Aid on your donations and verify any financial transactions.

To provide the services or information that you have requested.

To update you with important administrative messages about your donation, an event or services you have requested.

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 donations.

To keep a record of your relationship with us.

If you do not provide this information, we may 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 us (see section on ‘Marketing’ below for further information).

To invite you to participate in surveys or research.

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.

You can of course decide if you want to remain anonymous, if you are happy to share your personal details with staff members or if you would like us to share your story with the media or other parties as part of our work telling people’s personal stories (for example, on our blog).

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 on our website or in other more general communications with us such as blogs or emails, 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 provide.

We will not pass on your details to anyone else without your explicit consent 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 exploitation.

Where you have given us your explicit consent or otherwise clearly indicated to us that you are happy for us to share your story, then we may publish it on our blog or in other media.

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 any service requested by you.

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 BBK Charity to process your information to help us to achieve our vision of ensuring that everyone who contacts us 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.

Cookies

When you first visit our website, we will ask for consent to set any cookies (and to process any personal data collected by these cookies) which are not strictly necessary to make our pages work: you will be able to set your preferences at this stage. Where cookies are strictly necessary, we consider that we have a legitimate interest in processing the personal data they collect.

You can always withdraw your consent by clearing cookies from the cache in your computer and rejecting them next time you visit our site.

We may also use similar technologies to identify when our emails are opened. This allows us to identify whether our marketing campaigns are effective, and we consider that we have a legitimate interest in doing so.

For more information about our use of cookies and tags, different types of cookies, the information they collect and further information about how you can control the types of cookies that are placed on your browser, please refer to our Cookies Policy.

Marketing

We will only contact you about our work and how you can support us by phone, email or text message, if you have agreed for us to contact you in this manner.

If you agree for us to contact, you through one of these channels we will send you information about our work and how you can help us to make sure that everyone who contacts us for help receives both support and respect, As well as sharing our latest news, we will contact you about fundraising for us, events and our campaigns.

You can update your choices or stop us sending you these communications at any time by contacting info@bbkcharity.org.uk or clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the relevant communication. Please note that when you update your communication preferences it can take up to 28 days to take effect across all of our systems.

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.

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.

Our websites may contain links to other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content, or the privacy practices employed by other sites. Please be aware that advertisers or Web sites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you. This privacy statement does not cover the information practices of those websites or advertisers.

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).

 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 our Public Affairs team by email at (insert email ). You can also make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office.

• 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 making. 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 ground. 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 time.
• Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information held about you.
• Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, or you have withdrawn consent, or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
• 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 transferred.
• 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 carry out any automated decision-making.