Royal Voluntary Service
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Privacy statement

What is this statement about?

Royal Voluntary Service is committed to protecting your privacy. This statement explains what, how and why we collect information about you, how we use it, the circumstances in which we may disclose it to others and the way we work to keep your information safe and secure.

In compiling this statement, Royal Voluntary Service has considered the General Data Protection Regulation and the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations.

If you are involved with the Volunteer Responder Scheme, follow the links below to find out more information about the way we collect, use, share and store information about you relating to that Scheme:

Coronation Champions Awards is an official Coronation project run by Royal Voluntary Service with support from with Her Majesty The Queen Consort to celebrate the contribution of volunteers to make a difference to people’s lives and to their communities. Follow the link below to find out more information about the way we collect, use, share and store information about you relating to the awards:

Royal Voluntary Service works with corporate partners and their employees that volunteer through their company with Royal Voluntary Service. Follow the link below to find out more information about the way we collect, use, share and store information about you if you wish to volunteer in the programme.

Who are we, how you can contact us and other useful contacts?

Royal Voluntary Service is a primarily volunteer led organisation with a mission to inspire and enable people to give the gift of voluntary service to meet the needs of the day in communities.

We are a registered charity (in England and Wales number 1015988 and in Scotland number SC038924) and a registered company (number 2520413). Our registered office is at the address below. Royal Voluntary Service is registered with the Information Commissioners Office with the reference Z9787450.

You can raise any queries about this statement by contacting our Data Protection Officer at: dataprotection@royalvoluntaryservice.org.uk

Royal Voluntary Service
PO Box 565
Unit B
RD Park
EN11 0RF.

 
You can find further information on data protection and privacy by following the links below:

ico.org.uk
gov.uk/government/organisations/charity-commission

What information do we collect about you?

The information we collect will vary depending on the reason for our interaction with you but may include your name, postal address, phone number, email address, date of birth, next of kin, medical history, bank details, your IP address (the location of your computer on the internet), pages accessed on our website, information about your interests and hobbies and any other information that is reasonably necessary.

What is the legal basis for using your information?

In some situations we will only use your personal information where we have your consent, or because we need it to fulfil a contract with you as a volunteer.

There are other lawful reasons that allow us to process your information, including one known as Legitimate Interest.

Legitimate Interest means that we can process your personal information if we have a genuine and legitimate reason to do so and we are not harming your rights and interests.

We will use your information to give you the most appropriate volunteering information, fundraising materials, services and products and provide the best and most secure experience. We view these as our 'Legitimate Interests'.

This may include:
  • Providing you with the services you have requested
  • Processing and verifying any financial transactions arising from donations to us, purchases from us or other payments
  • Processing any job or voluntary role
  • Providing you with direct marketing & correspondence. We may telephone or send information, marketing and fundraising materials which further the aims of Royal Voluntary Service.
  • Using it in your best interest when processing your information, to protect you against fraud when transacting on our website, and to ensure our websites and systems are secure.

What will we do with your information?

  •  We will use it to enable us to personalise or otherwise improve our services, communications and advertising to you.
  • We will analyse it to process your personal information for customer analysis, to help us with our activities and to provide you with the most relevant information.
  • We will research it to determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and advertising and to develop our products, services, systems and relationships with you.
  • We will use it to comply with administrative duties, financial regulations and the law

We will always respect your wishes and give you the opportunity to change the way you receive information from us, or to not receive any information from us at all, and inform you of how to do this. This will include your right to rectify what we hold to ensure it is up to date and accurate.

We fully understand and accept the fact that when you provide us your information you expect us to keep it safely and may not want us to share it with other organisations.

Your interests

When we process your personal information for our legitimate interests, or for any other reason we will balance any potential impact on you and your rights under data protection and any other relevant law. Our legitimate business interests do not automatically override your interests.

How do we collect information about you?

We collect and store information about you whenever you interact with us including for example when you register with us to receive any of our services, when you apply to volunteer with us, when you make a donation to us or leave us a legacy or otherwise give us any other personal information.

We may also receive information about you from third parties for a specific purpose, for example when you are referred to us by the National Health Service.

Before we collect any data from anyone under 16 years of age we will always ask them to obtain the permission of their parent or guardian.

We will never sell or rent your information

We will treat your information as confidential and only share it with, for example:
  • your family, next of kin, friends or associates who act on your behalf
  • our volunteers and/or employees who provide you with a service
  • trusted third parties that we use to help us deliver our activities or to promote Royal Voluntary Service
  • medical professionals in the event of a medical emergency or if you are unwell
  • the Police, courts or any other regulatory authority if asked to do so for a legal reason.

If we do ask a third party to help us, we will carry out checks to ensure they are trusted and reputable and that their systems will protect and keep your data safe. These partners may include mailing houses which process our mailing needs, marketing and research agencies which help us with promotion of the charity and its activities, IT specialists which support our systems, finance houses which process any card payments and research firms. We will be happy to provide further details of our trusted partners; if you would like further details, please contact us as the address above.

Processing card payments

If you use a debit or credit card to donate to us or buy something from us, we will pass your debit or credit card details securely to our payment processing partners, World Pay, PayPal, Stripe, The Access Group and Open Mobile Global as part of the payment process. Where you have provided us with card details directly so that we may process a regular donation from you by direct debit we will keep that information securely.

How we look after your information

We take the security of your information seriously and are bound by law to ensure your information is kept safely. We will use all reasonable efforts to do this. In the unlikely event that our processes do not meet our high standards we will tell you immediately.
When we collect information, we will only collect what we need and keep it to a minimum. We will adhere to our internal policies and will abide by laws and the recommendations of regulatory bodies such as the Information Commissioners Office and the Charity Commission. See the links above.
We will take appropriate physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your information secure and we will only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary and in line with our retention schedule, which is available on request. Information kept on our computer systems and technical devices are encrypted with passwords to prevent unauthorised access.

Using our website

If you use our website, we will collect personal information about you in a number of different ways. For example, you will directly provide personal information to us if you fill out a form on our website or make a donation. Other personal data may be collected by us indirectly through our use of cookies (cookies are small text files which collect and store information). You can find out more about the cookies we use on our website from our Cookie Policy.

Our Cookie Policy tells you about certain cookies which we will set automatically (because they are necessary to provide a service you have requested through our website) and other cookies which can only be used with your consent. It also provides you with information about how you can set and change your cookie preferences. Any personal information which we collect or obtain from you when you visit our website will be used in accordance with this Privacy Statement.

Volunteering opportunities

If you apply for a volunteering opportunity with us we will collect information to assess your suitability for the role. We will only use the information you give us to process your application and to monitor recruitment statistics and undertake relevant checks.

Royal Voluntary Service will put together a file about your volunteering role which will be kept secure, used only for matters that apply directly to your role with us and kept after your role with us has ended in accordance with our record retention policy.

Playing our lottery

If you decide to enter our lottery, the following additional privacy information will apply to you:
  • Our lottery is administered on our behalf by an External Lottery Manager (‘ELM’). Our ELM will act as our data processor and will process your personal data in accordance with our instructions. Our current External Lottery Manager is Sterling Management Centre Limited.
  • We will need to collect your name, age and contact details. Depending on how you decide to pay to play our lottery, we may also need to collect payment information (such as your bank account details) from you. Without this personal data, we would be unable to fulfil our contract with you.
  • Unless you agree to us contacting you for other purposes (see below), we will only use your personal data to run and administer the lottery. This will include:
    • registering you as a player; 
    • including you in our regular draws;
    • collecting payment from you;
    • providing you with important information about playing the lottery; and
    • paying out any winnings.
  • The legal basis we will generally rely upon to process your personal data is that our processing is necessary to fulfil our contract with you. However, as stated below, we will sometimes also rely on your consent or the existence of regulatory or statutory obligations. We will not collect any special category personal data about you for the purposes of the lottery.
  • When you register for the lottery, you will be asked whether you consent to us using your personal data to contact you to let you know how your support is helping us and about our latest fundraising appeal. We will only contact you for these purposes (‘Fundraising Purposes’), if you give us your consent to do so. You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.
  • We will not transfer any of the personal data we receive from you outside the EEA.
  • We will retain the personal data we collect or obtain from you in connection with our lottery (including your payment history, draw entry history and win history) during the period you play the lottery and, to the extent necessary, for a further period of 7 years after you stop playing (the ‘Lottery Retention Period’). Retention of your personal data after you have stopped playing is necessary so that we can:
    • meet our regulatory requirements with The Gambling Commission, HMRC and AIM; 
    • comply with statutory obligations which apply to us (such as to maintain accurate financial and other records); and
    • resolve any disputes which arise.
Once the Lottery Retention Period has expired, we will permanently delete your personal data from our systems. This paragraph does not apply to personal data we process for Fundraising Purposes (which we will continue to use until such time as you withdraw your consent).

Your rights and choices

Current legislation gives you the right to see all the personal information we hold on you, the right to have it amended and the right to stop us causing you damage or distress (we hope we never do).
If you want to see the information we hold on you then you can send a request to the Data Protection Officer at the address above. We will need to confirm your identity before progressing the request and will aim to achieve this within 30 days of confirmation.
We will send updates about the charity to service users, volunteers and employees to keep them informed of the work that we do. You have a choice about whether you receive information from us. If you do not want to receive marking communications from us about the work that we do and our services and activities then you can always change your preferences at any time by contacting us at:

generalsupport@royalvoluntaryservice.org.uk
or the postal address above.

If for any reason you have a dispute with Royal Voluntary Service we encourage you to contact us first to allow us to resolve the issues raised, but you can also contact the Information Commissioners Office at the email above to raise your concerns.

NHS data security & protection toolkit

Royal Voluntary Service uses the NHS data security & protection toolkit on an annual basis to ensure that our data is held in line with the National Data Guardian’s 10 data security standards.

Statement review

We will keep this statement under regular review. This statement was last reviewed in March 2022.

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