At The Dove Service (TDS), we’re committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This policy explains when and why we collect personal information about you, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others, how we keep it safe and secure and your rights and choices in relation to your information.

Any questions regarding this policy and our privacy practices should be sent by email to [email protected] or by writing to Data Protection Officer, The Dove Service, The Dudson Centre, Hope Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 5DD. Alternatively, you can telephone 01782 683155.

The Dove Service is the only charity dedicated to supporting people of all ages with all aspects of grief in the North West of the UK.
In this policy ‘The Dove Service’ or ‘TDS’, ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’ means TDS, registered charity (no. 1086625) and company limited by guarantee (no. 3613893). Registered address is The Dudson Centre, Hope Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 5DD.

This Privacy Policy is provided in a layered format, click on a link to jump to a specific section.

• How do we collect information from you
• What type if information is collected and why we use it
• How long is your information kept for
• Who do we share your information with
• Lawful processing
• Marketing preferences
• Your rights

We obtain information about you in the following ways:
Information you give us directly
For example, we will obtain information about you when you make a referral into one of our services or projects, or we may obtain information about you when you take part in one of our events, make a donation, apply to volunteer for us, or when you register to receive information from us.

Information you give us indirectly
Your information may be shared with us by third parties, which might include:

• People you have authorised to speak to us on your behalf to support you in making a referral to our organisation.
• Fundraising sites like Just Giving.
  You should check any privacy policy provided to you where you give your data to a third party.

When you visit our website
We, like many companies, automatically collect the following information:

• technical information, including the type of device you’re using, the IP address, browser and operating system being used to connect your computer to the internet. This information may be used to improve the services we offer.
• information about your visit to our website, for example, we collect information about pages you visit and how you navigate the website, i.e. length of visits to certain pages, products and services you viewed and searched for, referral sources (e.g. how you arrived at our website).
• We collect and use your personal information by using cookies on our website – more information on cookies can be found under the ‘Use of Cookies’ section.

Social Media
When you interact with us on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter we may obtain information about you (for example, when you publicly tag us in an event photo), but TDS will never ask for personal or sensitive information and would encourage users wishing to discuss sensitive detail to contact us by telephone or email. The information we receive will depend on the privacy preferences you have set on those types of platforms. Engagement through external social media platforms are subject to their privacy policy and terms and conditions respectively.

The personal information we collect, store and use might include:

• your name and contact details (including postal address, email address and telephone number);
• your date of birth;
• your GP details
• your school/college details
• information about your activities on our website and about the device used to access it, for instance your IP address and geographical location;
• your bank or credit card details. If you make a donation online or make a purchase, your card information is not held by us, it is collected by our third party payment processors, who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions;
• information as to whether you are a UK taxpayer so we can claim gift aid and;
• any other personal information shared with us.

Sensitive information
Data protection laws recognise certain categories of personal information as sensitive and therefore requiring greater protection, for example, information about your health, ethnicity and religion. Because of the nature of our organisation, we collect sensitive data about your mental and physical health when you make a referral and engage in our services, and we also ask about ethnicity. You do not have to give us this information if you do not want to. Where appropriate, we will make it clear why we are collecting this type of information and what it will be used for.

How and why is your information used?
We may use your information for a number of different purposes, which may include:

• providing you with the services, products or information you asked for.
• processing orders that you have submitted.
• carrying out our obligations under any contracts entered into between you and us.
• keeping a record of your relationship with us.
• reporting statistical anonymised information back to our funders as an obligation of our contract with them.
• conducting anonymised analysis and market research so we can understand how we can improve our services, products or information.

Where you have given us your express consent or otherwise clearly indicated to us we may use your information when:

• seeking your views or comments on the services we provide;
• notifying you of changes to our services;
• sending you communications which you have requested and that may be of interest to you. These may include information about campaigns, fundraising appeals and activities and promotions of goods and services; and
• dealing with entries into a fundraising event;
• processing grant or job applications

We keep your information for no longer than is necessary for the purposes it was collected for. The length of time we retain your personal information for is determined by operational and legal considerations. For example, we are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfill our statutory and regulatory obligations (e.g. health/safety and tax/accounting purposes). We review our retention periods on a regular basis.

We do not sell or rent your information to third parties. We do not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.
However, we may disclose your information to third parties in order to achieve the other purposes set out in this policy.

Third-party service providers
We may pass your information to our third-party service providers, suppliers, agents, subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf (for example to process donations and send you mailings). However, when we use these third parties, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the services and we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and prevents them from using it for their own direct marketing purposes. Please be reassured that we will not release your information to third parties for them to use for their own direct marketing purposes.

Legal obligations
We may share your personal data if we are required to do so by law, for example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime to a third party. We will do so if we are under a duty to disclose or in order to comply with any legal obligation or to enforce or apply our terms of use or to protect the rights, property or safety of our staff, supporters, and customers, users of the website or others. However, we will take steps with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected.

Sensitive information
We will not share your sensitive information without your permission except in exceptional circumstances such as:

• If you are at risk of hurting yourself or hurting others.
• If you or someone else is at risk of being hurt by other people.

If we would have to contact someone for example a GP, we would do this whenever possible with your consent.

Data protection law requires us to rely on one or more lawful grounds to process your personal information. We consider the following grounds to be relevant:

Specific consent
Where you have provided specific consent to us using your personal information in a certain way, such as to contact you by email, text or post regarding our services or for marketing purposes. We will only contact you about our work if you have specifically agreed for us to contact you.
Performance of a contract
Where we are entering into a contract with you and performing our obligations for example when you make a referral for counselling or group support.
Legal obligation
Where necessary so that we can comply with a legal or regulatory obligation to which we are subject, for example where we are ordered by a court or regulatory authority like the Charity Commission or Fundraising Regulator.
Vital interests
Where it is necessary to protect life or health (for example in the case of medical emergency suffered by an individual) or a safeguarding issue which requires us to share your information with the emergency services.
Legitimate interests
Where it is reasonably necessary to achieve our or others’ legitimate interests (as long as what the information is used for is fair and does not duly impact your rights).

We consider our legitimate interests to be running TDS as a charitable organisation in pursuit of our aims and ideals. For example to:

• provide services to support your mental and emotional needs;
• send postal communications which we think will be of interest to you;
• conduct research to better understand who our supporters are to better target our fundraising;
• monitor who we deal with to protect the charity against fraud, money laundering and other risks;
• comply with the Charities (Protection & Social Investment) Act 2016;
• enhance, modify, personalise or otherwise improve our services /communications for the benefit of our customers and;
• understand better how people interact with our website and our organisation.

When we legitimately process your personal information in this way, we consider and balance any potential impact on you, and your rights under data protection laws. We will not use your personal information where our interests are overridden by the impact on you, for example, where use would be excessively intrusive (unless, for instance, we are otherwise required or permitted to by law).

When we use sensitive personal information, we require an additional legal basis to do so under data protection laws, so will either do so on the basis of your explicit consent or another route available to us at law (for example, if we need to process it for social protection purposes, your vital interests, or in some cases, if it is in the public interest for us to do so).

You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. If you do not want to receive direct marketing communications from us about the vital work we do for our communities and the exciting events and services we offer, then you can select your choices by ticking the relevant boxes situated on the form used to collect your information.

We’re committed to putting you in control of your data so you’re free to change your marketing preferences (including to tell us that you don’t want to be contacted for marketing purposes) at any time by contacting us by email: [email protected], telephone: 01782 683155 or post: Data Protection Officer, The Dove Service, The Dudson Centre, Hope Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 5DD.

We will not use your personal information for marketing purposes if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted. However, we may still need to contact you for administrative purposes like where we are processing a donation or thanking you for your participation in an event.

Whilst the data that we hold about you and is created during your engagement with us belongs to the Dove Service, under UK data protection law, you have certain rights over the personal information that we hold about you. Here is a summary of the rights that apply:
Right of access
You have a right to request access to the personal data that we hold about you. You also have the right to request a copy of the information we hold about you, and we will provide you with this unless legal exceptions apply.
Right of portability
You can also ask us to provide you or a third party with your personal information in a commonly used electronic form.
Right to rectification
You can have inaccurate or incomplete information we hold about you corrected. If you believe any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please contact us.
Right to restrict use
You can ask us to restrict the processing of some or all of your personal information if there is a disagreement about its accuracy or we’re not lawfully allowed to use it.
Right of erasure
You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, where you have withdrawn consent or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
Right to object
You have the right to object to processing where we use your personal information for direct marketing, for statistical/research purposes or where processing is based on legitimate interests or those of a third party.
Right to no automated decision-making
We do not carry out any automated decision-making.

If you want to exercise any of the above rights or make a complaint, please email us at [email protected] or write to our Data Protection Officer, The Dove Service, The Dudson Centre, Hope Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 5DD. We may ask for further information and/or evidence of identity. We will respond to all requests within one month of receipt of your request, however, if we are unable to do so we will contact you with reasons for the delay.

Please note that exceptions apply to a number of these rights and not all rights will be applicable in all circumstances.
You can also make a complaint to the independent data protection body, The Information Commissioner’s Office, full details available at co.org.uk.

Keeping your information safe
When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that appropriate technical and organisational controls are in place to protect it. We undertake regular reviews of who has access to information that we hold to ensure that your info is only accessible by appropriately trained staff, volunteers and contractors.

Non-sensitive details (your email address etc.) transmitted over the Internet can never be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems.

Any debit or credit card details we receive on our website are passed securely to Sage Pay and Paypal our payment processing partners who operate according to the payment card industry security standards.

Links to other websites
Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organisations. This policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other websites even if you access them using links from our website.
In addition, if you linked to our website from a third-party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third-party site and recommend that you check the privacy policy of that third-party site.

Use of ‘Cookies’
Like many other websites, our website uses cookies. Cookies are small pieces of information sent by an organisation to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognise you when you visit. For example, we use cookies to store your country preference. This helps us to deliver a better more personalised service when you browse our website and improve our services.

It is possible to switch off cookies by setting your browser preferences but it may result in a loss of functionality when using our website. For more information view our cookies policy

Transferring your information outside of Europe
We do not transfer any information about or relating to individuals to anyone who is located outside of the European Economic Area. However, on some occasions, the information we collect on our website may be transferred to organisations who may store and use such data at premises in other countries. Where we allow an organisation to process your personal information outside of the European Economic Area, we will ensure that we create and maintain appropriate safeguards with those organisations so that your personal information is subject to the same standards and protections as when we are processing your personal information inside the European Economic Area. If you use our website while you are outside the EEA, your information may be transferred outside the EEA in order to provide you with information or services.

Changes to this policy
Any changes we may make to this policy in the future will be posted on our website so please check occasionally to ensure that you are happy with any changes. If we make any significant changes we will make this clear on our website.  We keep this policy under regular review.

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