Privacy and Cookies Policy

This privacy notice explains how ‘Ivy Manchester Limited’ (Ivy) collects, stores and processes your information.

Ivy needs to gather and use certain information about individuals such as church members, attendees, church/business contacts, employees and other people the organisation has a relationship with or may need to contact.

If you want to discuss it further, you can contact the Staff Team Data Protection Lead:

Catherine Proudman (Central Support Team Leader) on 07764 464665 or at Ivy Church, 97 Barlow Moor Road, Didsbury, M20 2GP.

Our promise

Ivy is committed to ensuring that the information you entrust us with is stored securely and treated with the utmost respect in compliance with all regulations.

How we collect personal information

We collect personal information directly from you when you sign up for our mailing list, volunteer to join or enquire about joining a team, become a member of the church or regularly attend our church, join a Grow Group, attend a special event/ course or conference, and when you donate.

We collect cookie information when you visit our website, you can find more details on cookies at the foot of this page.

We may collect data from 3rd parties, for instance if you sign up to donate to us via Just Giving, Stewardship, Stripe or register for newsletters through Mailchimp.

What personal information we collect

If you enquire about volunteering or apply to volunteer with us by serving on a team or join a grow group at church, we will collect and store personal identifying information including your title, name, and contact details including address, email and telephone. Note that this may be shared with a relevant team / group leader who may not be a staff member and with other members of the team / group you are serving with.

We may also store non-identifying information such as gender and ethnicity. We will keep a record of our contact with you, as well as pertinent information such as DBS number, references, and volunteer assessment.  Once you begin serving at church we will record the service team you volunteer with, the type and length of service, any notes we make on the system in relation to your volunteering and a continuing record of our contact with you.

If your children attend a church group or activity, we will collect and store personal identifying information including your title and name as the legal guardian. We will also collect and store your address and emergency contact details including email and telephone. We will collect any relevant medical or dietary information pertinent to your child, as well as general information about your child such as name and date of birth.

If you are a church, community group or business that partners with us then we will collect the name and address of your organisation.

If you attend an event, conference or course and it is necessary to book a ticket or register your place, we will collect and store personal identifying information including your title and name. We will also collect and store your contact details including email and telephone, and address as relevant.

If you make a financial donation to Ivy, we will record the amount and your name. If you are a regular giver we will also record whether you allow us to reclaim tax on your donation from HMRC through Gift Aid. We will collect and store personal identifying information including your title and name. We will also collect and store your address and contact details including email and telephone.  This information is securely saved for six years for accounting and auditing purposes, and then securely destroyed if it is no longer being relied upon.

Why we collect your personal information

If you enquire about volunteering, becoming a church member or donating then we use your information to process your application or gift, to contact you about upcoming events / training we think you would be a good match for and to keep you informed about our work. We keep a record of your volunteering activity and giving history so that we can thank you, as well as respond and support you as best as possible.

We will also use the information we collect for internal reporting, for instance the number of volunteers, church attendees or members and their gender. This is all aggregated information and therefore not identifying.

We collect cookie information when you visit our website to enable our website to function effectively, to improve your experience and to determine and improve the effectiveness of our website and marketing.

Marketing permissions

You may receive email, text and phone communications from us to share with your information about church services, events and church activities that are coming up across the whole church. We ask you to opt in to receive these communications and record your preferences. If you are receiving these and no longer wish to do so,  you can opt out by clicking ‘unsubscribe’ at the bottom of emails and following the instructions, or by contacting the office on 07764 464665.

Who we share your information with

We will not routinely share your information with any other parties. If we had a request, for instance to share a testimony / story to run a press release or share on social media, we would always contact you about this and give you the right to not be identified. If it is an enquiry about volunteering to serve on a team at church, then your contact information will be shared securely through our central contact database ‘Church Suite’ or with the respective leader of the team you wish to volunteer with to organise induction, training and for the purpose of planning rotas.

Any reporting we do on attendee or volunteer demographics is aggregated so as not to identify specific volunteers. For example, we may refer to the number of volunteers in a given service team, church site, or age range. None of these would identify you specifically.

If you require pastoral support then we may share information about you with the appropriate person on the staff team or eldership. In the case of information held on electronic files these are password protected.

Financial and donation information will occasionally be reviewed by accountants or auditors, and we will limit identifying information where possibly as all regular donors are identified by their unique IM number eg. IM 0001

We also use a small number of sub-contractors to assist with technical tasks such as graphic design, marketing and I.T. Contract arrangements such as Service Level Agreements are in place with any subcontractors to ensure that any personal information is treated confidentially and kept secure.

All data is stored within UK based servers. Any personal data stored through a trusted third party such as MailChimp, is kept secure to a very high level and will be stored and backed up in servers based in the UK and USA.

How long do we keep your information

We will keep your information until you notify Ivy or we become aware that you have left the church, at which point your information will be securely deleted or destroyed. We will review this every three years with a complete church ‘data refresh/ census’, to ensure we are not keeping any personal information longer than we should.

We will retain data where we have a legal duty to do so, inclusive of financial, personnel and safeguarding responsibilities in line with our data retention processes.

Your information rights and choices

The law assures you of several rights:

You can request a copy of all the personal information we hold about you. You can do this by contacting the Data Protection Lead.  We will respond to all requests within 30 days of receiving the written request.

You can have erroneous information corrected by contacting the Data Protection Lead.

You can request that we change your marketing preferences to ensure we don’t continue to send you unwanted email, post, or texts/calls.

In addition, you can manage your own data via the “My Church Suite” member portal of the database.

You can withdraw consent for us to store or process your data by contacting the Data Protection Lead to invoke your right to be forgotten and have your Church Suite account deleted.

Changes to the Privacy Notice

We will regularly review this notice as any of our activities, processes or national regulations change. If there is any significant change to the way we intend to handle your personal information, then we will contact you to inform you of this.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. We use cookies to enable our website to function effectively, to improve your experience and to determine and improve the effectiveness of our website.

Here is a brief overview of the types of cookies we use:

Advertising – we use cookies from trusted third parties such as Google and Facebook plus conversion tags from our own material to measure the effectiveness of advertising to ensure the money we spend is used effectively.

Analytics – We use Google Analytics cookies to collect information about how visitors use the website and help us to continually improve our content. For instance, which pages visitors go to most often and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies you. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. We use this data to help us to understand: which pages people visit on the site, which internet browsers are being used, what is popular on our website, the user journey through the website. To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites please click here. https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

Cookies to improve your experience – we use a small number of cookies on our website to help you get the best experience. We also embed YouTube and Vimeo films on our website. We are unable to prevent these sites, or external domains, from collecting information on your usage of this embedded content. If you are not logged in to these external services then they will not know who you are but are likely to gather anonymous usage information for example, number of views, plays, loads etc.

How to manage your cookie settings

It is possible to stop your browser and/or mobile device accepting cookies either generally or from specific websites. However, you may find that some aspects of our website stop working or work less well if you do this. For this reason, we do not recommend turning cookies off when using our website.

To manage your cookie settings, please refer to your browser software. For more information about cookies and how to delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org

Acceptance of cookie use

By using our website, you agree to our use of cookies. This is subject to any preferences or browser setting you may have.

Last updated January 2024

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