1. Introduction

Hear Me Out is committed to protecting the privacy of your personal information. This privacy notice is to let you know when and why we collect your personal information, how we use it and how we keep it secure.

Hear Me Out is a charitable company limited by guarantee incorporated in England and Wales (company number: 5943893; charity number: 1119049).

(a) What information do we collect?

We only collect the information that’s necessary to carry out our charitable work, provide a particular service you have asked for, and to keep you informed.

We collect information when you decide to interact with us, for example, when you:

- Sign-up to our e-newsletter

- Make a donation online, by post or by phone

- Visit our website

- Talk to us on the phone

- Send us an email or letter

- Take part in a music workshop

- Attend an event or performance

- Complete a supporter survey

- The types of information we collect include:

(a) General personal information.

By visiting our website, making a donation, participating in a music activity, or taking up a role in the organisation or its work, you may provide the following categories of personal information to us:

- Full name

- Email address

- Postal address

- Contact phone number(s)

- Survey responses

- Demographics (collected by online search engines)

- Billing information

- Transaction history (for example, details of when you make a donation and for how much)

- Gift Aid Declarations

- Communication preferences and history (when and how you choose to be communicated with)

Personal information is held securely, restricted to those who need to use it, never shared with anyone outside the organisation without your consent, and deleted when we no longer need it.

(b) Sensitive personal information

Sometimes we may ask you to provide sensitive personal information. For example:

- When you attend or participate in a Hear Me Out event or music activity, we may collect information relating to your age, gender, ethnicity, nationality or health, in order to understand, improve and communicate the effects of our charitable work. If you choose to provide information about your personal circumstances or history, we may record this information for the same purposes.

- When you are involved in the delivery of our music activities and other charitable work (including if you are employed/engaged by a delivery partner), we may collect information about your work and volunteering history, circumstances, ethnicity and gender and any disability, in order to understand, improve and communicate the operation and effects of our charitable work.

- When you apply for and/or are appointed to a paid or voluntary role in Hear Me Out, we will collect information necessary for any selection process and for equal opportunities monitoring. This may include information about your work and volunteering history, circumstances, ethnicity and gender and any disability.

As with all the personal information we hold, sensitive information is held securely, restricted to those who need to use it, never shared with anyone outside the organisation without your consent, and deleted when we no longer need it.

(c) Information obtained from other sources

We may also occasionally obtain information about you from other sources, such as if a family member, friend or another organisation contacts us on your behalf. We may combine this with such information as you provide us with, to gain a better understanding of our supporters and beneficiaries, and to improve our fundraising and charitable work.

These additional sources of information may include:

- Other organisations that we have worked with

- Fundraising platforms like BT My Donate that help us collect donations

- Information found within the public domain, eg listed Directorships, social media profiles, biographies on employers’ websites, or information that has been published in articles and/or newspapers.

You should always check the relevant privacy policies whenever you provide your information to understand how the respective organisation or platform will process and safeguard your data.

(d) Mailchimp and our e-newsletter

If you choose to receive our e-newsletter, please note that we use Mailchimp to send it to you. Mailchimp keeps a record of the emails we send you, and uses industry-standard technology to track whether you receive or open them so that we can tailor them and ensure we are sending you the most relevant information. For more information about how Mailchimp handle your details, see their Privacy Policy.

You can unsubscribe to our e-newsletter at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails.

(e) Device information

When you visit our website or open communications (for example an e-newsletter), some information is automatically collected from the device you are using (eg mobile phone, laptop, desktop computer, tablet), including what time you visited our website, what operating system you use, browser information and public IP address.

We also use Google Analytics to collect standard Internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is processed anonymously and cannot be used to identify you.

(f) Location information

If you use our website, we may receive your generic location (such as city).

3. What we use your personal information for

When we collect your information we aim to be clear about what we are going to use it

for, and not to do anything with it that you wouldn’t reasonably expect.

(a) Using your personal information

We may use your information to:

- Provide you with the information you ask for

- Ensure we know how you prefer to be contacted

- Manage our relationship with you

- Learn how we could improve our communications or events

- Manage donations and process Gift Aid

- Develop new ways to provide for your interests and needs as a supporter, friend, participant or beneficiary

- Invite you to events

- Follow up on your comments, questions or complaints

- Develop and run our fundraising activities

- Perform analysis for reports

- Protect against and investigate any fraudulent, unauthorised or illegal activity

- Comply with our policies, procedures and legal obligations

- As otherwise consented to by you, and as required or permitted by applicable law.

(b) Retaining your personal information

We will retain your information only for as long as may be necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this policy, and as otherwise required to comply with applicable law, or until you ask us to amend or delete it.

(c) Respecting our participants

The needs and wellbeing of immigration detainees and other participants in our music workshops are Hear Me Out's first concern, and it is integral to this work that we share ownership of our creative work with you. In addition most of our participants are in difficult and uncertain circumstances. Therefore we will always take great care to ensure that our use of your personal information has your consent.

You can opt in to receive information about supporting Hear Me Out by giving us your email address or other contact details, subscribing to our e-newsletter and selecting the appropriate option, sending us a Hear Me Out postcard, text or other message, phoning us, or telling one of our artists or staff in a music session. You may also tell us about your circumstances or history in the course of a music session, evaluation activity or other written or oral communication.

We will use information that you give us with great care and using our best understanding of your intentions, based on the specific consents you have given (or withheld), and what we have learned about your needs and interests from working with you. We may use your information to help us evaluate the effects of our work, and communicate about it to people outside Hear Me Out, such as detention centre managers, funders and others who can help us. We will not share your name, photo or other information which could identify you without your specific consent.

We may continue to use your personal information for a maximum period of three years after our last interaction with you. After this we will delete any personal information we hold on our system. Information you have provided may continue to be available after this in reports or other documents which were published within the three year period.

(d) Respecting our donors

We rely on charitable support to continue working with immigration detainees and community groups around the country. You can opt in to receive information about supporting Hear Me Out by subscribing to our e-newsletter and selecting the appropriate option, writing to us, or telling one of our members of staff over the phone.

We want to ensure our communications to our supporters are personal, relevant and timely. If you have chosen to receive information from us, we may also analyse geographic, demographic and publicly available information relating to you in order to better understand your interests and send you the most relevant information.

In addition, we may invite people who we think might be interested in supporting Hear Me Out to occasional events. Guests we invite may include current supporters, people who have donated in the past, audience members, and friends and colleagues of current supporters, our Board and staff. We will make sure these invitations are appropriate and cost-effective by analysing our database of supporters, which might include looking at your address and previous donations, as well as publicly available information.

4. How we keep your personal information safe

We are committed to protecting the personal information you entrust to us and have adopted robust technologies and policies so the information we have about you is protected from unauthorised access and improper use.

We will never share, sell, rent or trade your personal information to any third parties for marketing purposes. We may need to disclose your details if required to the police, regulatory bodies, or legal advisors.

(a) Information about people working for Hear Me Out or involved in its music activities

Your personal information is stored in Hear Me Out's cloud-based server, provided by Microsoft as part of its Office 365 software. This is a highly secure cloud-computing platform with data centres in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands and USA. You can read more about their security and privacy policies here.

Only people working for Hear Me Out (in paid and voluntary roles), and selected individuals working for our delivery partners, have access to the server.

Text, audio and graphics files may be held on other devices (eg mobile phones, memory sticks) temporarily for specific purposes, and will be deleted from these once this specific purpose has been served. Information on paper is stored in locked storage in our office.

(b) Information about supporters and donors

We use the CRM database Donorfy to store your personal information, and access to this information is strictly controlled. Data transferred to Donorfy is encrypted using SSL, and hosted in Microsoft Azure, a highly secure cloud-computing platform with data centres in the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands. You can read more about Donorfy’s security policies here, and their privacy policy here.

Please note that we do not collect or store credit card details. Payments made through our website are processed securely by leading online payment processers Stripe (for single payments) and Go Cardless (for regular payments using Direct Debit). For more information on how your payment details are securely handled, please see here and here for their respective privacy notices.

We also hold some information about you on our Office 365 server. See the previous section for more information about how we keep this information secure.

(c) Security risks

We cannot guarantee that your information will always be secure, or that unauthorised third parties will never be able to defeat the security measures that we and our thirdparty service providers (like Donorfy and Go Cardless) have taken. Except to the extent that liability cannot be excluded or limited due to applicable law, we can assume no liability or responsibility for disclosure of your information due to errors in transmission, unauthorised third-party access, or other causes beyond our control.

5. Your rights and choices

You have the right to view, amend or delete the personal information that we hold, and to request that we stop contacting you. To view, amend or delete your personal information, or to request that we stop contacting you, please get in touch by phoning, emailing or writing using our contact details below.

You have the right to complain if you are unhappy with how we have used your personal information. To do this, please contact us using the details below. You may also lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office if you believe your information to have been misused or improperly handled. See here for more information on how to report a concern to the ICO.

6. Contact us

Please contact us if you have any questions about this policy or the information we hold about you. You can reach us by email at info@hearmeout.org.uk, or write to us at Hear Me Out, Kings Place Music Base, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG.

7. Updates or changes to this policy

This Data Privacy Policy was last updated on 23rd May 2018. It may be updated in the future to take into account of changes at Hear Me Out or changes to regulation or legislation.