CIRENCESTER ASHCROFT CHURCH is a Methodist and United Reform Church Local Ecumenical Partnership. Based in the centre of Cirencester, Ashcroft Church is a vibrant, busy, welcoming Church with a huge heart for serving the surrounding community.

We take personal privacy seriously and we seek to be transparent, responsible and respectful in the way that we use personal information.

Where we communicate with our supporters, we aim to do so efficiently and in ways that they would expect.

Like most organisations, we need to handle ‘personal information’ to do our work. All we mean by ‘personal information’ is a way of speaking about any information about you, that is either linked to you or could be used to identity you.

So, in our situation, that could mean your name and contact details, bookings for events run by Cirencester Ashcroft Church, consent information for thos who attend our clubs and activities, for example.

Perhaps the most obvious thing for which we use ‘personal information’ is to keep in touch with people.

We do this in two main ways:

  • If you attend Cirencester Ashcroft Church or one of its groups, or have expressed interest in our work and you have given us your consent, we may send you information about what we are doing by email. If you want us to stop doing this, you can contact us at any time.
  • If you are a member of Cirencester Ashcroft Church, your contact details, including phone number, address and email, are held in our members directory to enable members to contact one another.

You can also visit our website www.ashcroftchurch.org.uk to find out more about our work.

We want to offer you a good service, so if you want to update your contact details (e.g. email or postal address) or change the way that we communicate with you, please get in touch.

You can contact us:

  • By email: office@ashcroftchurch.org.uk
  • By post: Cirencester Ashcroft Church, 21 Ashcroft Rd, Cirencester. GL7 1RA
  • By phone: 01285 640292

If you would like more about how we use personal information, please read on. If you have any questions, please contact us.
  

Contents

Whose personal information do we use?
What do we use personal information for?
What personal information do we use?
How do we collect personal information?
Do we share personal information with others?
How long do we keep personal information?
How do we keep personal information safe?
How do we keep you informed about your privacy?
On what basis do we use personal information?
What rights do you have?
How do you complain?
What about our email updates, and the use of personal information?
What about our website, and the use of personal information?
What third-party service-providers do we use?

Whose personal information do we use?

We may hold some personal information about you, if:

  • You have asked us to keep in touch with you and tell you about our work
  • You have donated to us
  • You attend one of our clubs
  • You have attended an event run by Cirencester Ashcroft Church e.g. a residential
  • You have expressed interest in Cirencester Ashcroft Church, or we think that you might be interested in Cirencester Ashcroft Church
  • You visit our website

What do we use personal information for?

We use personal information in various ways, including:

  • Keeping in touch with our supporters (i.e. those who have expressed interest in Cirencester Ashcroft Church and / or have supported us in some way)
  • Maintaining volunteer records for their safety and the safeguarding of children and young people
  • Maintain registrars, emergency contact details and medical information for children and young people with attend our clubs or attend our events
  • Approaching those whom we think might be interested in Cirencester Ashcroft Church
  • Processing and saying thank you for donations
  • Promoting and reporting back on our work (e.g. we might feature children or young people we work with in a newsletter)
  • Maintaining accurate records and accounts (e.g. if we make a donation or pay for a trip)
  • Operating and improving our communications (website, email and postal mailings)
  • Complying with our legal obligations

What personal information do we use?

Name and contact details: For most purposes, we need people’s name and contact details. These contact details usually include a postal address and / or email address and sometimes a phone number.

Interests, preferences and permissions:We may record and use information about what areas of our work you may be most interested in, a church you belong to and about how you would like us to contact you (including any permissions you have given). We may also make a note of previous action that you have taken (e.g. trips you have attended, club you belong to) so that we can tell you about similar opportunities in the future.

Donation details:If you’re kind enough to donate to us, we will record and use information about your giving (e.g. amount, date, frequency) and your Gift Aid status. In some cases, we may record and use bank details (e.g. to help setup and check a Standing Order arrangement). We do not hold credit or debit card information.

Other contributions:If you attend groups or trips run by Cirencester Ashcroft Church or raise funds, we may ask if we can feature you and your contribution in our communications . If so, we may hold and use testimonials, image and video material.

How do we collect personal information?

We collect and record personal information (i.e. information about you and your relationship with us) in various ways, including:

From you:

  • You may give us information directly– for example, if you write, call or email us asking for more information about Cirencester Ashcroft Church and you give us your name and address, or you contact us say that your address has changed
  • You complete consent forms for trips or attend a club we run
  • You volunteer for Cirencester Ashcroft Church so complete an application, self-declaration form and DBS request
  • You may give us information indirectly– for example, if you donate to Cirencester Ashcroft Church via JustGiving or Stewardship, those organisations may pass on your name and contact details if you want them to

From observing your interactions and relationship with us:

  • We may keep a note of our actions – for example, if we send you a receipt or thank you letter for a gift
  • We may keep a note of your actions – for example, or you send us a donation, a registrar for attendance at a club
  • We may also collect some information electronically – for example, when we send emails via Salesforce, we may receive some information about how you engage with our emails,

From other sources:

We may collect personal information in person, using paper forms, over the telephone, via email, online, or using other means. To help us collect information, we may use systems provided by other organisations (e.g. we may use Mailchimp to enable you to sign up to receive our emails).

Do we share personal information with others?

We don’t sell or rent your personal information to anyone else. In certain narrowly-defined circumstances, we may share some personal information:

  • Third-party providers:We keep the number of third-party organisations we share information with to an absolute minimum, however in order to operate our communications and safeguarding some sharing is required. We use Mailchimp to send emails to supporters about our work. To enable this, Mailchimp holds a list which contains some personal information (name and email address). We also use Due Diligence Checking to process DBS requests.
  • Promotion of our work:If you benefit from our work by taking part in our activities or contribute in a certain way then we might want to tell others about you and what you have done, or about how you have benefitted. But we would only do this with your permission.
  • Legal or regulatory obligations:In some circumstances, we may share personal information if need to comply with legal or regulatory obligations. For example, we might need to demonstrate to HMRC that we are claiming Gift Aid legitimately or there is a safeguarding concern.

How long do we keep personal information?

That depends on what the information is and why we have it. We keep information in line with our data protection policy.

We hope to have long term relationships with our members, those attending our groups and our supporters and to be in regular contact so we’ll keep and use your personal information whilst the relationship is active.

If the relationship becomes inactive, we may keep the information for a time, in case the relationship is reactivated. If you ask us to stop contacting you, we may need to keep some information so that we can honour your wish.

There is some information that we have to keep for certain periods of time. For example, if you make a donation to us we need to keep records for a certain period of time and safeguarding details.
 

How do we keep personal information safe?

We take steps to secure your personal information, and regularly review our approach with proper controls for paper and electronic records.

When we use other organisations to help us provide services (e.g. Mailchip for sending emails and Due Diligence Checking for process DBS requests) we ensure they are also GDPR compliant.

We should also remind you that no internet communication or internet-connected storage can ever be guaranteed to be completely secure.
 

How do we keep you informed about your privacy?

We regularly review our approach to privacy and the use of personal information, and will keep this page on our website up to date. If we make any changes that are likely to have a significant impact on your privacy, we may email you (if we have your permission) or include information in a postal mailing, to keep you informed.
 

On what basis do we use personal information?

To hold and use personal information, we need to identify a lawful basis for doing so.

In most cases, we hold and use personal information because it is in our legitimate interests to do so. Our legitimate interests include making people aware of our work, encouraging people to support our work (including financially), safeguarding the employees, trustees, volunteers and young people/children taking part in CIRENCESTER ASHCROFT CHURCH activities, keeping in touch with those who support us, and understanding how people relate to us so that we can improve our work.

In determining whether an activity is justified by our legitimate interests, we consider various things including the impact of the activity on people’s privacy.

For general communications with our supporters sent by post, we rely on legitimate interests.

For general communications with our supporters sent by email, however, we rely on consent. We will only send you general emails promoting and reporting back on our work if you have given us explicit permission to do so.

Some of our activities, rely on a different lawful basis. For example, we keep information about Gift Aid status. We also are required to hold certain information to satisfy our safeguarding obligations e.g. Volunteer disclosure information

If you would like more information about the lawful basis for our activities, please contact us.
 

What rights do you have?

Under data protection legislation, you have various rights, including the right to see what personal information we hold about you.

From 25 May 2018, you have a number of rights including:

  • To be informed about how we use your personal information.
  • To see what personal information we hold about you and know how it is used.
  • To correct inaccurate or incomplete information that we hold.
  • To ask us not to use your personal information in certain ways. For example, you can ask us to stop sending you our postal mailings.
  • To ask us to delete your personal information if we have it.

You also have other rights, including the right to complain.

There are some circumstances in which these rights don’t apply. If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us in writing. We usually need to comply with your request within one month of receiving it. We may need some information from you to ensure that we can identify you.
 

How do you complain?

We try hard to protect and respect your privacy so we really hope that you don’t have cause to complain. But if you are unsure or unhappy about something, please contact us.

You also the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). You can complain to the ICO without contacting us first, if you wish.

What about our email updates, and the use of personal information?

If you have given us your consent, we may send you emails about us and our work. You may remove your consent at any point. You can do this by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the messages that we send, or you can contact us.

We currently use Mailchimp to send emails. To do this, we share personal information with Salesforce, including your email address. You can read more about this on Salesforce website. We may use your personal information to determine which email messages to send you.

External links

If you click on a link in one of our emails that takes you to a website that is not operated by us, then your use of that that site (and any information that is collected from you or about you) is governed by that website’s privacy policy and is not our responsibility.
 

What about our website, and the use of personal information?

Our website (www.ashcroftchurch.org.uk) is maintained by Ashcroft Church and hosted by a third party provider (LCN.com). Some sign-up forms are processed by Mailchip. Only Cirencester Ashcroft Church will have access to the information that you provide via the website.

Information provided by you

If you visit our website, you may choose to submit information to us via the ‘contact us’ form. This information will be transmitted to us via email which is not be encrypted. Therefore we will never ask for information such as financial details to be sent in this manner. We treat information submitted via our webform in the same way as information that we receive via other means (e.g. by email), in accordance with the principles that we have set out above. Information that you submit is not stored on the web server.

Information collected about your visit

Like other websites, when you visit our website, we (and others) collect some information about your visit.

This is often called ‘usage data’ and refers to information about how our website is accessed and used. It may include information such as your internet browser type (e.g. Google Chrome), browser version, your Internet Protocol (IP) address, the date and time of your visit, which pages you visited and how you arrived at the website.

We (and / or our suppliers) may use this information to:

  • Operate the website and improve your immediate experience of it (for example, on some parts of the website we might use larger text if you are using a small screen such as a mobile phone)
  • Analyse how people arrive at our website and what action they take, so that we can make the website easier to use and improve people’s experience in the future
  • Protect our website and the information contained

Certain information (such as your IP address) is needed by the web-server to provide the web pages that you have requested.

Information such as the browser and the type of device that you are using can help us to provide web content to you in the best format.

‘Usage information’ may be stored in log files on the web server, as this may help to troubleshoot problems, and improve the security and performance of the website in the future. If you would like to know more about what happens to this information, please contact us.

Cookies

We also use cookies on our website. Cookies are small computer files that may contain data such as an anonymous, unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a website and stored on your device. These cookies may be set by us, or by third-parties that we use to provide you with content (e.g. to play a video).

The cookies we have identified on our website include

“Google Analytics – cookies to track how you use the website in order to improve the usability of the website”

Additional cookies may be set if you log in to our website. Only website editors log in to our website however and they will be informed in other ways

Third-party cookies and tracking technology

Where we ‘embed’ content hosted by another organisation (e.g. if we ‘embed’ a video that is hosted by YouTube, so that you can watch it on our website), then it is possible that those third-party organisations will use cookies or other tracking technology to provide this functionality and / or for their own purposes (which may include tracking and analytics). In this scenario, we don’t control how these organisations use this technology, and you should their privacy policy for more information.

Controlling cookies and tracking technology

You can find out more about cookies and how you may be able to disable them, here: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/

You can disable various tracking technologies and opt out of the collection and use of information for advert tracking. You can find more information about this at http://www.aboutads.info/choices or http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/

Our collection of ‘usage data’

We do not knowingly attempt to match any of the ‘usage information’ that we collect on our website, with your name or contact details.

External links

If you click on a link on our website that takes you to another website, then your use of that that site (and any information that is collected from you or about you) is governed by that website’s privacy policy and is not our responsibility.
 

What third-party service-providers do we use?

As explained above, we use some third-party organisations to help us achieve our aims and provide the services that we do. Their use of your personal information is governed by our agreement with them and by their own privacy policy.

Mailchimp: used to send newsletters, prayer diaries and other information to our supporters, and those who have signed up to receive them. Privacy Policy

LCN.COM – We use LCN to host our website