Keeping your personal information safe
The Brontë Society – Privacy Statement – Customers / Partners
Who we are
In this policy whenever you see the terms ‘We’, ‘Us’ or ‘Our’ it refers to The Brontë Society, Brontë Parsonage Museum or Brontë Genius.
The Brontë Society is a registered charity which owns and operates the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. The Brontë Genius Company is the trading arm of the Society and operates the gift shop in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
The full legal information for each entity is:
The Brontë Society: Established 1893, Incorporated 1902. A company limited by guarantee not having a capital divided into shares, registered in England No. 73855. Registered Charity No. 529952.
Brontë Parsonage Museum: A museum wholly owned and operated by The Brontë Society.
The Brontë Genius Company Limited: Incorporated February 2008. Private company limited by shares, registered in England & Wales, No 06504497. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Brontë Society.
What information do we collect about you?
We only collect information about you that we need:
- to provide the service you have requested, this may include: membership, event bookings, online purchases, e-newsletter sign-up,
- to contact you regarding a service you provide to us eg event delivery, educational services, technical assistance.
The personal information we collect may include:
- Your name, including title
- Date of birth
- Postal address, email address and phone number
- Gift Aid information
- Direct Debit / bank details
- Employment details
- A record of any correspondence you send us
- Details of any transactions you carry out via our website
- Your contact preferences
When we ask for your personal information we will explain why we need it and direct you to this policy.
How will we use the information we collect?
We will only use your information for the purpose for which you provided it or for which you have given us prior consent. For example:
- To fulfil your membership contract
- To process your booking
- To process your online purchase
- To process your donation
- To send you information about the Brontë Society, Brontë Parsonage Museum and events
- To send you surveys about our performance
- To send you information about our fundraising efforts
- To send you other information you may be interested in
- To contact you about opportunities for working with us
How we share your information
We do not share your personal information with any third party or external organisations for any purpose other than those detailed below, unless we are legally required to do so. Where we do share information, we only share what is absolutely necessary to fulfil that contract.
We work with carefully selected service providers who carry out some functions on our behalf. These service providers will act on our instruction and adhere to the UK GDPR (UK General Data Protection Regulations). For example:
- We use mailing houses / publishers to distribute bulk mailings including membership mailings
- We use a PR agency to create and distribute our e-newsletter
- We use a bulk email distributor for our e-newsletter and some membership emails. Where this is necessary, we may need to transfer your personal information overseas. Although based in the USA, this company fully complies with GDPR in its use and storage of data.
- We use a ticketing platform to manage and process some of our ticket sales
- We use card payment processors to process online payments
We ensure that any transfer of data is done securely, in accordance with best practice and in accordance with UK GDPR (UK General Data Protection Regulation).
We may occasionally share anonymised data with our partners to fulfil contracts and for benchmarking, eg Arts Council England. If we do share anonymised data it would not be possible to identify any individual person from the data we share.
Marketing
We will never sell or pass your personal data to a third party for marketing purposes. We will only use your data ourselves for marketing if you have given us permission to do.
Access to your information and correction
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, please email bronte@bronte.co.uk putting Subject Access Request in the subject line.
Before we can supply this information, you will need to provide adequate proof of your identity. We will endeavour to provide the information to you within one month of the request for information. In line with UK GDPR procedures we will contact you should we require longer to fulfil your request.
Under certain circumstances you have the right to ask us to erase your data from our records.
We try to ensure all information we store is correct. If, however, you find that we hold incorrect information, please let us know and we will correct it.
How we store your data and keep it secure
We take all reasonable steps to ensure your data is kept secure. We hold personal data in electronic and paper form.
We will keep your information only for as long as we need it to provide you with the goods, services or information you have requested, to administer your contract with us, or are required to for legal / financial reasons.
Electronic information is stored on an encrypted server, which is password protected. Emails are run from UK Based data centre, using Microsoft Exchange Server 2013. These connections are secured using SSL. No third party can access any data on the server or email server without our permission. All areas that contain any data are password protected.
All staff are contractually required to keep personal data safe and are given training in Data Protection.
Cookies
How we use Cookies
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. This sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:
– Enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information during one task
– Recognising that you have already given a username and password so you don’t need to enter it for every web page requested
– Measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and that there is enough capacity to ensure they are fast
Cookies for measuring website usage
Google Analytics cookies: _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmv, _utmd,_utmz
We use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use our site. We do this to make sure it is meeting its users’ needs and to understand how we could do it better.
Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on our site, how you got there and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information (e.g. your name, address or IP address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. We do not allow Google to use or share our analytics data.
Data stored by cookies:
_utma stores each user’s number of visits, time of the first visit, the previous visit and the current visit
_utmb and _utmc checks how long a visitor stays on the site: when a visit starts and ends
_utmz tracks where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link)
_utmv and _utmd track visitor journeys through the site and classifies them into groups
Duration of cookies:
_utma expires two years after your last visit to this site
_utmb expires 30 minutes after your visit, or after 30 minutes of inactivity
_utmc expires at the end of a session (when you close your browser)
_utmz expires six months after it was last set
_utmv (not set) expires immediately
_utmd (not set) expires immediately
Changes to our Privacy Policy
We regularly review our Privacy Policy Statement. The statement was last updated in March 2022.
How to complain
If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at: The Brontë Society, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Church Street, Haworth, Keighley, West Yorkshire, BD22 8DR. Please mark you letter for the attention of the Executive Team.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioners Office if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.
The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk
How to contact The Brontë Society
By email: bronte@bronte.org.uk
By post: The Brontë Society, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Church Street, Haworth, Keighley, West Yorkshire, BD22 8DR
By phone: 01535 642323