At Relate Severn and Wye, we are committed to keeping your personal information safe and being clear about how we collect your data, how we store it and what we do with it.
This privacy policy applies to:
- The Relate website
- relate.org.uk/severn-wye
- message.relate.org.uk.
It applies whether you want information, support or training from us, buy products or use our services, donate to us, work or campaign for us.
Relate services governed by this policy include our Live Chat and Message a Counsellor services, but not face-to-face, telephone and webcam counselling services, and direct services with children, young people and their families, where separate confidentiality statements apply.
Relate is registered under the Data Protection Act 1998 as a data controller with the number Z6442005 (which will be replaced by the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 from 25 May 2018). Full details of this listing can be seen on the Information Commissioner’s Office website. Our registered charity number is 1056625 and our company number is 3219666 (registered in England and Wales).
This privacy notice, along with our website terms and conditions and our cookies policy lets you know how we collect, use and keep your personal information safe.
If you have any queries about our Privacy Notice, please get in touch with our data team:
By email: feedback.severnandwye@relate.org.uk
By post: Data Protection Representative, Relate Worcestershire, 19 Castle Street, Worcester WR1 3AD.
What information do we collect about you?
Information you give to us directly
We will collect and store information that you give us when you do the following things on our website(s):
- Register for Live Chat
- Register for Message a Counsellor
- Register for an event
- Register for a workshop, course or training
- Make an enquiry
- Buy products online (for example, our books or a personality profiler)
- Take a quiz
- Complete a survey
- Sign up to support a campaign
- Support our work through a donation
- Fundraise on our behalf
- Tell us your story (for example, as a media case study)
- Give us feedback or make a complaint
- Apply for a job or work with us
- Register as a volunteer
- Enter into a contract with us
- Are photographed or filmed (for example, at a Relate event)
Information you give to us indirectly
- We store data about your visits to our website, for example, your location data or IP address when you use our Find Your Nearest search engine.
- We store information about how you navigate our website, although this cannot be used to personally identify you.
- We may also collect and store your personal information if you interact with us on our social media channels: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This will depend on your own privacy settings on these individual channels, so make sure you check these first.
Depending on what you do on our website, we may collect and store the following types of personal information: name, email address, date of birth, mobile or telephone number, relationship status, gender, sexual orientation, financial details, credit/debit card information, details about your education and career.
Certain types of personal information are recognised by data protection law as being more ‘sensitive’. So things like sexual orientation, racial or ethnic origin, religious or political opinion, data concerning your health (mental or physical) or your sex life fall into this category.
Relate will only collect sensitive information like this where it informs the provision of the service to you. Whenever we do this, we will state clearly at the time, why this information is required. We may also gather sensitive personal information if you choose to share your experiences with us for a case study, but we will only do this with your explicit consent.
If you’re a young person aged 13 or under
You must get the permission of your parent/guardian before providing Relate with any personal information.
How do we use your personal information?
We will use your personal information to do the following:
- Provide you with information, products or services you’ve requested or that we feel might be of interest to you.
- Process one-off or regular donations and to claim Gift Aid.
- Make our marketing campaigns more targeted and relevant to potential clients and donors; we will only send you marketing information if you have given us specific consent to do.
- Respond to direct requests where you contact us with a query - we will use your personal information to respond.
- Locate your (general position) using your IP address, so that if you use the ‘Find Your Nearest’ search engine, you are able to discover the Relate services nearest to you.
- Carry out general administrative tasks like dealing with complaints and feedback, essential record-keeping.
- Transact: we will use your personal information to take payments from you when processing orders and payments for goods and services.
- Keep you safe: in the event that we reasonably think you (or someone else) is at risk of serious harm or abuse.
- Conduct polls, surveys and market research: we may invite you to take part so that we can improve our website, services and/or strategic development.
- Monitoring and evaluation: we use your personal information to inform and develop our service delivery.
- Improve your experience of our website, so that we may offer you a more user-friendly navigation of our website.
- Process applications to work at Relate: for example, if you fill in an application form or send us your CV or send us information speculatively in respect of possible contract opportunities.
- Supporter profiling and analysis: we will use your personal information to help us better target communications, so that you are more likely to receive communications relevant to your interests.
- For how long will we keep your personal information?
At Relate, we are committed to retaining your personal information for no longer than necessary in relation to the purpose for which it was first collected. This is in line with guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office. Relate may hold some types of data for up to seven years.
For example, in the case of financial transactions like donations and purchases, we will keep your personal information for as long as legally required in respect of tax or accounting purposes, which could be anything up to six years after a transaction has taken place.
Do you share my information with anyone else?
We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which it was obtained in the first place. We won’t share it with any third parties and you won’t receive any communications from other organisations.
However, there are two very explicit ways in which your data might be shared:
- In the event that we use third party suppliers to help deliver our services, fundraising activities and campaigns. For example, we use Mailchimp to send out newsletters via email.
- Where we are legally bound to disclose your personal information, for example, to further criminal investigation or to keep you safe if we believe you (or someone else) is at risk of serious harm or abuse.
Keeping your personal information safe
We have both digital and operational safeguards to make sure your data is secure at Relate. Access to information is reviewed on a regular basis and limited to those people who actually need to access it, and are assigned the permission to do so.
All Relate online webforms are protected by secure end-to-end encryption. Where we pass highly sensitive data over the internet such as credit or debit card details, Relate uses TLS to encrypt data between the client and our partners.
Relate is PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant and uses PCI compliant providers to collect this data on our behalf; we don’t store this data on our own systems.
There are, however, inherent risks to passing information over public networks and Relate cannot 100% guarantee the security of data handled in this way.
Relate's web servers are located in England and Ireland.
Your rights and managing your own data
You have the right to request access to the personal information that Relate stores and processes about you. You can ask for corrections to be made to the information we hold or for your personal information to be deleted. You can also ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information or to object to the processing of it altogether.
We will not charge you for either considering or complying with a request unless it is deemed to be excessive in nature. We will ask you for proof of identity and upon this being successfully verified, you are entitled to obtain the following information about your personal information:
- The purposes of the collection, processing, use and storage of your personal data.
- The source(s) of the personal information, if it was not obtained from you.
- The categories of personal data stored about you.
- The recipients (or categories of recipients) to whom your personal data has been or may be transmitted, along with the location of those recipients.
- The envisaged period of storage for your personal data or the rationale for determining the storage period.
- The use of any automated decision-making and/or profiling
If you’d like to make a request relating to any of the rights above, please send a request by emailing feedback.severnandwye@relate.org.uk Or if you prefer, you can make the request in writing to: Data Protection Representative, Relate Worcestershire, 19 Castle Street, Worcester WR1 3AD.
How to make a complaint
If you have any questions about this privacy policy or the way in which Relate handles your personal information, or if you wish to make a complaint, please follow our complaints procedure.
If you’re unhappy with our response, you may then raise your concern directly with the Information Commissioner’s Office: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.
Alternatively you can visit the ICO website.
Relate is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office as a Data Controller under number Z6442005.
Changes to our privacy policy
Our Privacy Notice may change from time to time, so please check this page occasionally to see if we have included any updates or changes, and that you are happy with them.
(Last updated: 09 May 2018)
What is a cookie?
Cookies are little text files downloaded by and stored on your device (phone, laptop, tablet, etc.) when you visit a website. Cookies are used to help the website owner (in this case, Relate) to provide you with a smooth experience while you browse.
Relate uses cookies to:
● Make our website work
● Collect anonymous data to gain insight into how visitors use our website
● Help us show advertisements about our services to those people who might be interested in them
● Allow you to share content with social networks like Twitter and Facebook
Relate does not use cookies to collect any information that could personally identify you. Neither do we use cookies to pass on any personally identifiable information to third parties.
Ok, so what cookies does Relate use and why?
We use several types of cookie on the Relate websites (including message.relate.org.uk) each of which is described below. We also provide the names of the cookies that fall into these categories and we explain what they are used for.
The cookies described below were identified by a CookieBot scan during April 2018.
Necessary cookies
Necessary cookies make a website work by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The Relate website cannot function properly without these cookies.
Cookie name: has_js
Purpose: Registers whether or not the user has activated JavaScript in the browser.
Statistic cookies
Statistic cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously.
Cookie name: _ga
Purpose: Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.
Cookie name: _gat
Purpose: Used by Google Analytics to control the number of requests for data.
Cookie name: _gid
Purpose: Another cookie that registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.
Marketing cookies
Relate uses marketing cookies to track your visits across our websites, for instance, to display adverts about our services that might be relevant to people interested in our services.
Cookie name: _hjIncludedInSample
Purpose: Works out if the user’s navigation should be included in a certain statistical ‘placeholder’ - this is simply a programming term to describe a character, word, or string of characters that may be used to take up space until such a time that the space is actually needed.
Cookie name: ads/ga-audiences
Purpose: Used by Google AdWords to re-engage visitors that are likely to convert into customers based on their online behaviour.
Cookie name: ads/user-lists/#
Purpose: Used by Google when a user visits a page on a website containing a remarketing tag. Google puts a cookie on the user’s device and adds the cookie to a ‘user list’. This is simply a collection of visitor cookies generated by one (or more) remarketing tags.
Cookie name: collect
Purpose: Used by Google Analytics to collect data about the user’s device and behaviour.
Cookie name: IDE
Purpose: Used by Google Double Click to register and report the user’s actions after clicking on an ad. So for example, you might search Google for ‘relationship counselling’, click on a Relate ad for relationship counselling and be directed to a page on our website about relationship counselling. This cookie would collect that data.
Cookie name: test-cookie
Purpose: Does what it says on the tin: tests to see if the user’s browser supports cookies.
Cookie name: hjCookieTest
Purpose: Similar to the cookie above, but tests to see if the user’s browser supports cookies for the HotJar application, which Relate uses to understand more about how visitors actually use our website.
Unclassified cookies
These are cookies that we are in the process of classifying, together with the providers of individual cookies.
Cookie name: (unnamed)
Unclassified, but originated at: https://static.hotjar.com/c/hotjar-424700.js?sv=6
Cookie name: SSESS612ddc447be40fe3087f1ef6bd80d097
Unclassified, but originated at relate.org.uk/relationship-help
Third party cookies
Relate uses some third party applications on our website, for example:
● Video content embedded from our YouTube channel
● Content embedded from our Twitter feed
● Google Maps content to help you find your nearest Relate centre, outpost or counsellor.
If you visit pages with this type of content embedded, you may be sent cookies from these websites. We don’t control the settings of these cookies, so please do check with the third party website for more information about how to manage these cookies.
Controlling the use of cookies
Mostly, you are able to manage the cookies set up by websites and you can do this through your browser settings. Most browsers will automatically accept cookies unless you tell them otherwise - you can restrict, block or delete cookies. Please check your browser settings for more information on how to do this.
However, please be aware that if you set your browser to block cookies, some or all parts of the Relate website will not function.
You can find out more about cookies and discover how to manage them at: http://www.aboutcookies.org.uk/