Privacy Policy – Ripon Civic Society

Our website address is: https://riponcivicsociety.org.uk.

Registered Charity Number 517434

Please read the Society’s Data Protection Policy which can be downloaded here. This relates specifically to anyone who joins the Society as a member.

The Society takes all reasonable steps to ensure that the personal data it collects about its members is treated confidentially.

What is ‘personal data’?
In this context, personal data is any information about you which allows us to identify you.
The Society keeps the following personal data about you:
• Your name and title
• Your address
• Your phone number and/or mobile phone number where you have provided one
• Your email address where you have provided one
• Details of membership subscriptions you have paid
• Details of any Gift Aid authorities you may have signed
• Details of any events you may have attended and payments you have made for admission tickets
• In addition, we may have retained emails that you have sent us to book events or ask for information about the Society and its activities.

Personal data is stored on computers / laptops operated by members of the Society’s committee on a need to know basis.

Membership records are stored securely. They are encrypted and password protected and regularly backed up.

Some of our records, such as membership forms and Gift Aid authorities, are also retained in paper format and are held securely by the Treasurer and the Membership Secretary.

We keep the information for as long as we deem necessary within the remit of the legislation. Membership details and Gift Aid authorities will be retained for as long as you are a member. We may also need to keep financial information for a period of six financial years after the end of the financial year in which the transaction occurred so that we can respond to any enquiries from HMRC about our income or applications for Gift Aid.

We only use the information we keep to help us to administer the functions of a membership-based organisation and to notify you of our latest news, activities and events.

We may occasionally tell you about events organised by others that we think may be of interest to members (see below) but we will not pass on your information to third parties without your permission unless we are required to do so in law.

Your rights
You have a right to formally request us to tell you what information we hold about you at any time. You can do this by writing to us at our postal address as shown below or by emailing us at info@riponcivicsociety.org.uk.

You also have the right at any time to correct any information we hold about you which is incorrect or out of date.

You have a right to cancel your membership at any time and ask for your details to be removed from our mailing lists.

Please note that we may need to keep details of payments you have made to us (and what for) even after your membership ends as explained above.

How we will contact you
When you join the Society, we will confirm your membership and send you a membership pack. After that, we will remind you when your subscription is due in January each year. However, to get the most out of your membership, we would also like to tell you about our events and activities and we ask you to give us consent to do so by ticking the box on our membership form. We will then send you regular updates unless you ask us to stop.

We will continue to tell you about civic society related events organised by other organisations within the movement such as Civic Voice, the Yorkshire and Humber Association of Civic Societies (YHACS) and other civic societies in the local area.

We may also inform you about events and activities organised by other organisations in and around Ripon where we think the events will be of interest.

We will use our judgement and discretion to decide which events not organised by us that we tell you about.

We would prefer to contact you by email as this helps to keep costs down and means we can send you more information than we can if you only want to hear from us by post.

It would also help us if you can give us consent to contact you by telephone.

We will only do this exceptionally; for example, if we need to tell you about late changes to our events where an email or letter may not reach you in time.

Please keep a copy of the new policy for your records.