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Privacy notice

This privacy policy explains how we use any personal information we collect about you when you contact us by phone, email, letter, attend any of our events or when you use any of our websites listed below:

Where we ask you to provide us with any information by which you can be identified, you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement, and in line with UK data protection law which includes but may not be limited to the Data Protection Act 2018, the UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation (PECR)

This notice provides information concerning the processing activities for both the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) charity registration number 225922 and NCVO Trading Limited company number 198344.

What information do we collect about you?

We collect information about you when you fill in an online form to:

  • Register for a website account or update your account details
  • Sign up for email updates
  • Contact us
  • Place orders for free or paid products or services
  • Apply for membership
  • Complete surveys or provide feedback.

This information may include:

  • Name, role and organisation
  • Contact details including email address
  • Demographic information such as postcode and interests.

We collect material that you proactively post or contribute to our sites including social media and any correspondence you have with us.

We also collect information on your website usage through cookies, if your browser accepts them. Some of our websites feature tracking software – this means that if you're a logged-in user, have filled an online form or have previously clicked a link in one of our emails, we may link your website usage information (such as pages visited, IP address, browser and device used) to other information we hold about you, such as your name and organisation.

When you contact us by email, letter or on the phone, we may also record this information on our customer relationship management system to help us process your request efficiently.

How do we use your information?

We collect information about you to manage your account, process your order or fulfil any contract we have with you.

We use information collected from your website visits to personalise your future visits and to improve the experience we provide to our online users. For example, information like the browser and device you are using helps us to maintain usable and accessible websites for all our audiences.

We also use your information to help us develop products and services that you need, and where we have a lawful basis and permission to contact you, we may use it to help us send you relevant and timely information about the help and support that we offer.

If you visit our offices, we may capture your images on our CCTV systems.

Where do we store your information?

Online forms

The forms on our website are built using a platform hosted in the US, so the information you provide to us is initially stored there. The contract we have with this provider ensures their practices comply with UK data protection law and we regularly delete data from this system. We are required to ensure that such data is appropriately protected. This means that we must undertake a UK Transfer Risk Assessment (TRA) and ensure important safeguards are in place. Such safeguards may include the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the UK Addendum.

In the longer term your data is stored in our customer relationship management system, which is hosted outside of the UK on a secure server in the EU.

Website accounts

If you are a registered user of our website(s), the personal data within your account(s) is stored in secure web servers outside of the UK, based in the EU.

You are responsible for keeping your website account password(s) confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone for your own security.

Security and encryption

We take great care to ensure that our websites operate at the highest security levels and that our suppliers are committed to best practice in digital security. All personal information and financial data is encrypted in transmission. However, the security of data transmission via the internet can never be 100% guaranteed, and data transmission is at your own risk.

Cookies

What are cookies and how do we use them?

The use of cookies is common practice on modern websites. A cookie is a small text file which is placed on your computer’s hard drive by a website. When you visit one of our websites, your browser checks to see if it has any cookies for it and sends the information contained in those cookies back to the site in order to tailor and improve your experience.

Our cookies record things like whether you are currently logged into your website account, to ensure you’re given the right access on each page. They make sure the display settings you’ve selected before (for example, preferred language) – or the settings associated with your account permissions – are activated correctly.

We also use third-party cookies to track how our websites are used, as well as to carry out our advertising and marketing activities. 

Third-party cookies

When you visit our websites, we allow a number of third parties including CookieHub, Hotjar, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and ClickDimensions to set cookies on your device to help us better understand who our users are and how they use our websites. This information enables us to:

  • measure our sites' effectiveness
  • improve our content and user experience
  • make our websites more useful and relevant to your interests
  • promote our services and resources more usefully online
  • make adverts you see online more relevant to you
  • limit the number of times you see our promotional advertising.

For example, we use Google Analytics cookies to collect anonymous usage and visitor behaviour information – this includes:

  • IP address
  • operating system
  • browser type
  • pages visited
  • links you click on
  • services you purchase.

Google Advertising cookies help us understand the demographics and interests of our users so we can better meet their needs. If you are a user who has signed up to receive marketing emails from us, you might receive emails containing content that is tailored to your interests, based on your browsing habits collected by ClickDimensions. Similarly, Facebook and LinkedIn cookies help make our adverts more relevant to you.

Some of the services on our websites, such as adverts from CharityJob, videos from Vimeo, and sharing functions from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, may place cookies on your computer to enable their service to work properly or to measure usage of their service.

To find out more about how the third parties referred to above use cookies and how to opt out of them, please review their privacy policies. You can also follow the links below:

Email cookies

Our emails and websites contain cookies to tell us whether emails are opened and verify any clicks through to links within an email. We use this information to help us understand how an email campaign has performed, what types of emails and content our users find interesting, and what actions our users took, so we can improve our email campaigns in the future and make our emails more relevant to you.

Can I refuse cookies?

Yes, you can. We use the CookieHub cookie consent management system to manage cookies on our main ncvo.org.uk site. When you first access the site you can set your preferences. If you refuse cookies, you will still be able to access the site.

Across all of our sites, you can use your browser settings to disable cookies. Different browsers offer different levels of control – for example you may be able to accept certain cookies and reject others, such as third party cookies.

If you refuse cookies please be aware our websites may not work smoothly for you and there will be certain parts that won’t function correctly.

You can delete the cookies stored on your computer at any time.

More information

For further information about cookies, including how to manage your cookie settings, you can visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

For a full list of the cookies we use and what they do, please email websitehelp@ncvo.org.uk.

Email marketing

If you have purchased a product or service from NCVO or have opted-in to hear about NCVO’s products and services, we will send you information which may be of interest to you.

You have a right to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes at any time. You can do this in several different ways:

  • All our marketing emails contain unsubscribe links
  • Manage your email preferences online by editing the ‘Your details’ tab on your user profile dashboard
  • Contact us at any time to request a change to your marketing preferences.

The lawful basis for processing your personal data

We are required to identify a lawful basis with which to process your personal data. For marketing it may be your consent. Sometimes we may have a legal obligation to process personal data. On other occasions we may process the data in the legitimate interest of the NCVO. We may undertake a balancing test to ensure this is appropriate. You may object to such processing.

Where NCVO Trading processes your personal data it may rely upon a contractual obligation and may retain such data for up to 7 years. NCVO Trading may send you marketing communications concerning services and products you have previously purchased or have shown an interest in. You may stop such communications at any time.

How long do we keep your information?

We do not keep your information for longer than necessary. We keep financial information for up to seven years due to legal and contractual requirements, and we delete all other personal information from our customer relationship management system if we have had no contact with you for three years.

Access to your information

You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. If you would like a copy of some or all of your personal information, you can:

  • email ncvo@ncvo.org.uk
  • write to NCVO, Society Building, 8 All Saints Street, London, N1 9RL

We will not charge you for this service unless the request is ‘manifestly unfounded or excessive or repetitive’.

Keeping your information up to date

We want to make sure that any personal information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. You can:

  • Manage your personal information online through your ncvo.org.uk user profile dashboard
  • Contact us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate.

Sharing your information with other organisations

NCVO will not sell your information to any third party. We may share your information with third parties where we have legal duty to do so or to provide you with a service you have asked for. For example, we use a third party supplier to dispatch publications you may buy on our sites and we use secure third party partners to process financial transactions. We have contracts in place with all third party suppliers to ensure they are obligated to treat our customers’ personal data in compliance with the UK data protection law.

We signpost to other organisations on our website using hyperlinks. The signposted organisations may use tracking in these hyperlinks to monitor engagement from our website to theirs.

If NCVO is acquired by a third party, personal data held by NCVO will be one of the transferred assets.

Other websites

Our websites contain links to other websites not run by NCVO. This privacy policy only applies to NCVO websites so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies.

Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review and we will place any updates on this web page. This privacy policy was last updated on 16 August 2022.

Your rights

Data protection regulations give you clear rights over how your data is used by us. You can find out more detail about your rights by visiting the Information Commissioner’s Office website’s section on individual rights.

You also have the right to report concerns or complain about our handling of your data to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Details of how to do this can be found on its website.

Your right to complain

If you are concerned about the way NCVO are processing your personal data, you have the right to complain. You may do this by contacting us using the following details:

  • Email ncvo@ncvo.org.uk
  • write to NCVO, Society Building, 8 All Saints Street, London, N1 9RL

Or you may complain to the regulator of information rights in the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). You can find more details on their website.

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