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Privacy Statement

 

Your privacy is important to The Advantage Foundation Ltd (“TAFL”, “we” or “us”). We are committed to safeguarding and respecting your privacy; this privacy statement sets out how we will treat your personal information. We aim to be clear on the circumstances in which we will collect your data and what we will do with it. 

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Your personal data is protected by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) 2011.

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We will review and update this privacy statement as required, and we will post changes on this page, so you are always aware of how TAFL is using your personal information. Please check this page periodically to ensure that you are happy with any changes.

We hope that this policy statement will answer the questions that you may have about how we manage and protect your details, but if you have any questions which are not answered by this statement, please contact us.

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1. What personal information does TAFL collect?

2. How does TAFL use your information?

3. What is the legal basis for TAFL processing personal data?

4. How long will TAFL keep your information?

5. Communications

6. With whom does TAFL share personal information?

7. Your rights

8. Personal data security

9. Cross-border data transfers

10. Other websites

11. Contact us

 

1. What personal information does TAFL collect?

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TAFL collects, stores and uses the following types of personal information when it is made available to us in the course of our communications with you:

• your name;

• your contact details (including postal address, telephone number, e-mail address and/or social media identity);

• your date of birth;

• your gender;

• financial information such as your bank details where you provide these to make a payment or to receive a grant from us;

• information about TAFL events that you have attended;

• ethnicity, disability, faith, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity information for monitoring purposes;

• information about your activities on our website and about the device you use to access it (which may include your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, referral source, entry page, exit page, length of visit, number of page views, route taken through this website, and similar information) in anonymised form; and

• any other information that you choose to send to us

 

Certain types of personal information are in a special category under data protection laws, as they are considered to be more sensitive. Examples of this type of sensitive data would be information about health, racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs or sexual orientation. We only collect this type of information to the extent that there is a clear reason for us to do so, for example where we ask for information for the purpose of providing appropriate services or support.

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2. How does TAFL use your information?

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Personal information submitted to us via this website or directly via email or post will be used for the purposes specified in this privacy statement.

We will use your personal information to:

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• enable your use of the services available on the website;

• improve your browsing experience;

• respond to your enquiries and requests;

• provide you with information about our activities or about events you sign up to attend;

• provide you with information about specific areas of interest that you sign up to receive;

• process the purchase of sales items;

• generate reports on our work, services and events;

• conduct due diligence;

• monitor website use to identify visitor location, guard against disruptive use, monitor website traffic and/or personalise information which is presented to you;

• process your application for a job or volunteering position;

• audit and administer our accounts;

• meet our legal obligations, or our obligations to regulators, government and/or law enforcement bodies; and

• deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about the use of your data.

 

3. What is the legal basis for TAFL processing personal data?

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Personal information is processed according to Article 6 of the General Data Protection Regulation for the following reasons:

• as necessary in the pursuit of the legitimate interests of our not for profit objectives, in this case, to acquire the information necessary to recruiting applicants to TAFL projects;

• for compliance with legal obligations, in this case to provide full and accurate information to our funders;

• where necessary we ask you for specific consent to use your information in a certain way, and you agree to this (for example when we send you updates about our activities or events via e-mail). Where we use your information for a purpose based on consent, you have the right to withdraw consent for any future use of your information for this purpose at any time. 

 

4. How long will TAFL keep your information?

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• Register for communications about our activities 

If you sign up to receive communications about our activities you will be able to change your preferences or unsubscribe at any point.

• Partners

We will only share your contact details with our partners with your consent.

• Surveys

 

As part of our commitment to project evaluation and participant satisfaction we collect data from participants through surveys. Their purpose is to provide us with indicators and case studies of performance or impact.

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The data collected by the surveys will be held at TAFL offices. For the purposes of analysis and reporting, information disclosed will be pooled and reported on collectively, rather than individually.

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When TAFL does wish to highlight the particular achievements of a project participant, the participant in question will be consulted on such use of their data and their express consent sought before any data is published. Due to the nature of impact assessment and the requirement to consider year on year comparisons, all data collected will be kept indefinitely. We acknowledge that some of the information disclosed in the surveys will be of a confidential nature, therefore the data will not be shared or used for marketing or fundraising activities without your consent. We may use the data as part of our work in building partnerships. However, the previously stated policy on pooling data for collective reporting and seeking express consent for individual mentions will be fully abided by.

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5. Communications

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In addition to the above, some information about participants may be used for external communications or marketing purposes, but only with express permission from the individual concerned. Communications preferences will be requested and these permissions recorded on our database in relation to the individual.

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Members of the public who sign up to receive information from us will be covered by the provisions of this policy.

 

6. With whom does TAFL share personal information?

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We may disclose information about you to any of our employees, as reasonably necessary for the purposes as set out in this privacy statement. All roles mentioned above receive training in matters relating to Data Protection and confidentiality and are required to sign up to TAFL’s Privacy Policy.

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We will never sell or rent your information to third parties for marketing purposes. However, we may disclose your information to third parties in connection with the other legitimate purposes as set out in this policy; however, the third parties concerned would be bound by a confidentiality agreement which would prevent them from using this information for any other purpose. These third parties may include:

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• funding partners,

• analytics and search engine providers;

• IT service and website support providers.

 

In addition, we may disclose your personal information:

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1. to the extent that we are required to do so by law;

2. in connection with any legal proceedings or prospective legal proceedings;

3. in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk); and

4. to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.

Except as expressly provided in this privacy statement, we will not provide your information to third parties.

 

7. Your rights 

 

You have the right to be informed, which is the purpose of this Privacy Policy.

The accuracy of your individual identifying information is important to TAFL. You have the right to have inaccurate or incomplete information we hold about you corrected – at most within one month. If you change your email address, or if any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please get in touch with the details.

 

You have a right to request access to the personal data that we hold about you and also the right to request a copy of the information we hold about you. We will provide you with this unless legal exceptions apply. Provision of such information will be subject to the supply of appropriate evidence of your identity. We aim to issue an initial response to all enquiries within five working days and will offer a full response to all information access requests within thirty working days of receipt. There is no fee for this unless you make repeated requests of the same data. If you want to access your information, please send a description of the information you want electronically or via post to our registered address: The Advantage Foundation Ltd, Sloefield Business Park, 1 Sloefield Drive, Carrickfergus, BT38 8GX.

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You also have the right to restrict or stop the processing of your personal information if you contest its accuracy or object to its processing for example if some information we hold on you isn’t right; we’re not lawfully allowed to use it; or you believe your privacy rights outweigh our legitimate interests to use your information for a particular purpose and you have objected to us doing so. In such cases processing will be restricted until the matter is resolved and we will inform you of that resolution.

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You have a right to obtain your personal information from us without hindering the usability of the data and you may ask us to provide it to you or another service provider in a machine-readable format. This right applies when we process your data with consent, pursuant to a contract and the processing is being done by automated means.

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If TAFL relies on consent as the legal basis for processing your personal data (as set out in ‘What personal information does TAFL collect?’) you may withdraw your consent to that processing. However, we often rely on different legal bases for different aspects of processing, and this means that we may not be able to act on your request if we have a compelling legal reason not to. If we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes, and you wish to object, we will stop processing your information for these purposes as soon as reasonably possible. 

If you want to exercise any of the above rights, please contact us.

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Please note that exceptions apply to a number of these rights; not all rights will be applicable in all circumstances. For more details please consult the guidance published by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

 

8. Personal data security

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We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information.

We will store all the personal data you provide on our secure cloud-based services including Office 365 and an additional encrypted back up on a hard drive. This information is protected using both password management tools and data encryption.

 

9. Cross-border data transfers 

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Information that TAFL collects may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in the EU in accordance with this privacy statement. In addition, personal information that you submit for publication on the website, or that you publish on your profile page, will be published on the internet and may be available around the world.

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10. Other websites

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The website contains links to other websites that are not under the control of and are not maintained by TAFL. We are not responsible for the content or reliability of the linked websites. TAFL provides these links for your convenience only but does not endorse the material on these sites.

 

11. Contact us

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If you have any questions about this privacy statement or our treatment of your personal information, please contact us electronically or write to us by post to The Advantage Foundation Ltd, Sloefield Business Park, 1 Sloefield Drive, Carrickfergus, BT38 8GX.

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If you have concerns about how we use your personal information, we would like to hear from you so we can address your concerns. TAFL is committed to treating complaints seriously, sensitively, and with discretion and understanding.

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We aim to issue an initial response within five working days. If we need to investigate further, we will let you know we have received your complaint and how long it will take to resolve. However, if you are still unhappy you have the right to lodge a complaint about any use of your information with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), the UK data protection regulator.