Interim Privacy Policy
V1 Agreed 03/09/20
Who we are
The Bridge Collective was found in 2007 and registered as a Community Interest Company No: 6201528 in April 2007.
The Bridge Collective
Unit 4, King Street Business Centre
King Street,
Exeter,
England
EX1 1BH
Email: info@bridgecollective.org.uk
Our Mission Statement:
To be a company whose members are creating:
A democratic community where people who have experiences, beliefs, and feelings that have sometimes been labelled as mental illness are welcomed and can talk about these experiences freely, safely and without judgement; a place to participate in friendship, support, learning, teaching, discussion, being active, and making a valid contribution both within the collective and the wider community.
There is more information about the Bridge Collective on the What we do and how page on this website.
As cited in our Confidentiality Policy
Records will be limited to: names and addresses of members, directors, and others who have asked to be contacted by the Bridge Collective for any reason; information that has been given voluntarily in connection with Bridge activities; records required by law and legal compliance such as accident reports and safeguarding response records.
A simple Privacy statement for visitors to this website
The Bridge Collective inevitably has some information about visitors to this website, as it does about people who contact it by email or post, attend its events, purchase publications from it, or who become its members.
Concern about the collection, usage, storage and protection of personal data has led to laws about this being enacted in the UK (GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation), the Bridge Collective is pleased to respect the safety of people interacting with it.
This page is a simple explanation of what the Bridge Collective understands is most important about the information about people that it is responsible for: how it comes by it, how it uses it, how it stores it, and what happens to it.
In its simplest form this policy lays out that any personal information we do have about people is used for the purpose for which which they provide it, and we do not sell it, we use online services to help us manage data securely and efficiently. This is illustrated in what is said below.
As far as this website is concerned
No information that identifies you personally is collected when you view pages on the Bridge Collective website.
When you visit our site (www.bridgecollective.org.uk) to read or download information, two kinds of “cookies” get created. Cookies are small data packets sent from a website and stored on the visitor’s device by the browser.
One type of cookie is called a “session cookie”. These process certain specific information, such as the kind of browser used, the kind of device, general location data, or your (anonymised) IP address. This is part of the functionality of our website and makes it more user-friendly, efficient, and secure, allowing us, for example, to display our website in different forms according to whether you use a desktop or tablet computer or mobile phone. When you close your browser, these session cookies are deleted.
The other kind of cookie provides us with statistical information about the usage of the website. Visitor data is also collected through our website host service called UK2. These records do not identify the visitor personally. This information is available to us to enable us to evaluate traffic patterns on our site so that we can make it more useful to our visitors, we do not use this information for any other purpose. We may report general statistics about the usage of our website site at a community meeting, for example, but otherwise do not share such data with any third parties.
In short, a visitor to the website should not require to manage these cookies in order to protect their personal information.
Links to other web sites
Because we believe they may contain material of interest to visitors to this website, there are a number of links on it to other websites. Links are clickable parts of the text, currently, they could be any of a variety of colours, they are usually underlined to distinguish them. Although we take care before placing a reference to other websites, we cannot be responsible for the content on that site, and it is your decision to go there.
Icons as links to social media
At the top of each web page on this site, there are two icons, one of which is a link to the Bridge Collective’s Facebook Page, and the other is a link to its Twitter page. It is possible to view the Bridge Collective’s Facebook and Twitter pages without registering with Facebook or Twitter.
On a couple of our webpages pages, we have an ‘embedded’ Soundcloud player which you can click on to hear music composed and recorded at Underground Sound. The player appears to be on our website and the music can be listened to without leaving our website, however, the music is hosted on the Soundcloud servers, if you choose to visit the Bridge Collectives page on the Soundcloud website you will be requested to give your consent to Soundcloud’s Cookie and Privacy policies.
Display of advertising material
The Bridge Collective does not sell advertising, and there is no information on this website which is there because it is paid for by somebody else (an advertisement), with one possible exception – a Vimeo video is “embedded” on our home page. This video appears as if it is on this website, but is hosted on Vimeo servers, and may display some advertising or other Vimeo staff picks videos, as they would if they were watched on Vimeo directly.
Mailing lists
Visitors to the site may ask to be put on an e-mail mailing list in order to be kept informed about Bridge Collective events, activities and news. This is done by clicking on a subscribe link, we use Mailchimp to manage our subscriptions, you can visit MailChimp’s privacy policy on MailChimp’s website here: www.mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/. When you click on the link to subscribe you will be asked to fill in a name and email address and you will be presented with options to select regarding which groups, activities and news you would like to hear about from the Bridge Collective. Your name as given and email address will be added to a list used for this purpose only. The list is securely stored on Mailchimp servers. We will also keep a secure copy of our contacts database on Gsuite which is an online cloud storage facility that we use. The information on our contacts database will not be shared with anybody.
Emails sent to many people at the same time, such as those giving information about events, group activities or news will always include an ‘Update Preferences’ and “Unsubscribe” option. If you choose to unsubscribe, the data you originally gave will still remain on our database but you will no longer receive emails from us. If you would like your data to be completely removed from our database please email this request to info@bridgecollective.org.uk we will then manually remove your record from our database, after which point we will no longer be able to add you back into our database unless you yourself fill out a new online subscription form in which case a new record will be then be created.
Membership
The Bridge is a Community Interest Company, meaning that its aim is to benefit the community and not to make a profit for private individuals. Members of the company are people who have chosen to take part in supporting and furthering this aim. As a member, you are part of the company, and the company is made up of its members acting together. Membership is about belonging to the company and commitment to its aims. Legally, the members are the owners of the company.
When you become a member of the Bridge, your name is added to our official Register of Members, along with your address and the date you became a member. No other information is kept on the register except the date your membership ends. When you cease to be a member the law requires us to keep this information for a further 10 years, after which we will delete it.
The membership register is kept in a locked cupboard and is only used to contact you with information related to your Bridge Collective Membership, including Newsletters and notice of Company Meetings and renewal of your subscription.
More information about The Bridge Collective membership can be found on our What we do and how page of this website: https://www.bridgecollective.org.uk/what-we-do-and-how/
How long we retain your data
Your data processed when using our website will be deleted or blocked as soon as the purpose for its storage ceases to apply, provided the deletion of the same is not in breach of any statutory storage obligations.
Data you choose to share through the subscription form will be kept for the purpose requested until either that purpose ceases to apply or if you ask for your data to be removed from our database as detailed above.
If you choose to become a member of the bridge collective, your membership data as detailed above will be retained for 10 years after you cease to be a member in accordance with our legal requirements.
Any queries
This statement is offered in good faith, with a minimum of legalistic formulation. Further information can be requested from The Bridge Collective through the communications team by email: info@bridgecollective.org.uk