The Birmingham Civic Society(“we”) commit ourselves to protecting and respecting your privacy when visiting our website.
Being transparent and providing accessible information to individuals about how we use personal information is a key element of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The most common way to provide this information is in a Privacy Policy.
This Privacy Policy sets out how we, the Birmingham Civic Society, obtain, store and use your personal information when you use or interact with our website, or where we otherwise obtain or collect your personal information.
Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. We recommend that you print off a copy of this Privacy Policy and any future versions in force from time to time for your records.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on 25 May 2018.
This has implications for how the Birmingham Civic Society handles your data and how we communicate with you. The Birmingham Civic Society has always taken all reasonable steps to ensure that data held about its members is treated confidentially.
However, the introduction of the GDPR means that you have to be told in detail how the Society handles your personal data and how we communicate with you. Although the GDPR comes from the European Union the British Government has confirmed that the rules will not be affected by the withdrawal of the UK from the EU.
Your personal information will only be used to process your requests, to provide you with our services, and to provide you with information relating to our services and all other services which we think you may be interested in.
We may collect the following information, depending on how you interact with our website and provide consent for doing so.
When you complete a Contact Us form, any data supplied via the form shall be transmitted to us by email and stored on our email subsystem. No data is stored on our website or hosting servers.
When you visit our website we may collect statistical data on an ongoing basis through Google Analytics, a third-party tool provided by Google linked to our website. This may include data about what pages you access or visit, and information about your use of our site. For example, the pages viewed, how long you stay on a page and the website from which you came to visit our site, for example, a search engine, social media or a referral website.
You can make a choice for what kind of data is stored by our Google Analytics by using our consent mode options when you visit our website.
Click here to learn more information about how we use this third-party service to collect and use information about this website.
Cookies are small files of information that a web server generates and sends to a web browser. Web browsers store the cookies they receive for a predetermined period, or the length of a user’s session on a website. They attach the relevant cookies to any future requests the user makes to the web server.
We are abiding by the EU consent mode for cookies. Therefore, giving you complete control to provide consent for what gets’ stored or not.
Temporary cookies to determine if your browser accepts cookies required for the successful operation of the website may still be operational. These cookies contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
If you are as subscribed member of the Birmingham Civic Society, when you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
For subscribed members who register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profiles. All members can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
Your personal data is stored on electronic equipment and/or hard copy used by members of the Board on a need to know basis. That means information is usually only held by the Chair, Secretary (who is also the Membership Secretary) and the Treasurer. Some of our records, such as membership forms and Gift Aid authorities, are held in paper format by the Secretary and Treasurer. All personal data is stored securely and is regularly updated and backed up.
We keep the information for as long as we deem necessary within the remit of the legislation. Membership details and Gift Aid authorities will be retained for as long as you are a member. We may also need to keep financial information for a period of six financial years after the end of the financial year in which the transaction occurred so that we can respond to any enquiries from HMRC about our income or applications for Gift Aid.
We do not routinely share personal information. On Members’ instructions, we may need to share personal information where the services we provide involve an identified third party supplier in which case we will take reasonable steps to ensure that any information shared will be limited to what is necessary for the specific purpose and will only be processed in accordance with GDPR principles.
You can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold on the website about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
You have the right to ask us to tell you what information we hold about you at any time. You can do this by writing to our Secretary at his/her postal address or by emailing us at info@thebirminghamcivicsociety.org.uk.
You also have the right at any time to correct any information we hold about you which is incorrect or out of date.
You have the right to cancel your membership at any time and ask for your details to be removed from our records. Please note that we may need to keep details of payments you have made to us even after your membership ends as explained above.
When you join the Society we add your name to our mailing lists and then keep you informed about the Society’s events and activities. We will occasionally contact you about your membership of the Society and will remind you when your subscription is due.
We will tell you about Birmingham Civic Society related events organised by other organisations and other civic societies in the area. We will use our judgement and discretion to decide which events not organised by us we decide to tell you about.
We will usually only contact you by email (preferred) or by post. People who have provided us with an email address will receive information from us more frequently than those who have only provided us with a postal address. The reason for this is based primarily on the costs of printing and postage but can also be due to the fact that we sometimes receive information from others at very short notice and there may not be time to issue postal communication to members.
Very rarely we may need to contact you by telephone but this would usually only be to let you know about late changes to our events where an email or letter may not reach you in time.
If you have any questions or feedback regarding this privacy policy or would like to exercise any of your statutory rights, please contact us by email at info@thebirminghamcivicsociety.org.uk.
If you have any other general enquiries please contact us at info@thebirminghamcivicsociety.org.uk
Thank you for taking the time to read our privacy policy.
This policy was updated on 20 June 2024 to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation and EU Consent Mode requirements