Privacy Notice – Approved January 2019
At Elsie Ever After we take your privacy seriously and understand that often people contact us during a period of difficulty or crisis. Therefore, we feel it is important to ensure that where you share you information with us, we keep it safe, we are transparent about how we use the information and how we ensure it is stored safely. We value the trust you have in us as an organisation and believe that part of our role includes ensuring we safely care for the information you share with us.
We are a registered CIO and our registered charity number in England and Wales is 1177173.
Our Data Protection Offer is shared amongst trustees and you can contact them with any queries via the following email address: elsieeverafter@hotmail.com
Why do you need my information?
Elsie Ever After is a bereavement charity with the aim to support bereaved families, linking existing services and plugging the gaps where the support is lacking – starting in and around Cheshire and the North West.
Our key service provides support and signposting to bereaved families and professionals working with bereaved families. This includes guidance on helpful books or materials, alongside the provision of financial support, specific identified activities (including counselling services or creative therapies), and the provision of bereavement support packs to work with children who have experienced a bereavement.
We gather information that could be used to identify you; this could be just your name and address, your age, gender and email address, and it could relate to the circumstances of the bereavement you have faced. This could be quite sensitive and personal information about what has happened and what support you would benefit from. To clarify what information we require and ensure this is proportionate, we have made the decision from January 2019 to operate a two-tiered approach to support.
In order to only gather the information we require, we operate a two-tiered approach to services:
Tier 1: For bereaved families, or professionals working with bereaved families, who only seek bereavement packs and signposting for support.
Tier 1 would only require the person seeking a pack or signposting to provide the following information to be stored for the purpose of reviewing impact of charity and when applying for future funding:
– Whether child supporting is of primary or secondary age.
– Relationship of person who has died (e.g. parent, grandparent, friend)
– Cause of death (e.g. neonatal, road traffic accident, murder, suicide).
– County of residence.
– Address for pack/info to be sent (Note – this information will not be stored).
Tier 2: For bereaved families, or professionals working with bereaved families, who are seeking additional support or targeted provision.
Tier 2 would require a greater level of information to be shared to ensure that the most appropriate support or help can be accurately provided or recommended. We have therefore created a Tier 2 referral form which will gather the following information and can be seen in appendix 1:
– Name and age of bereaved child.
– Name of parent giving permission to proceed.
– Address of bereaved family.
– Relationship to person who has died.
– Referring professional (if relevant; self-referral is welcome).
– Cause of death (e.g. neonatal, road traffic accident, murder, suicide).
– Support requested.
How we gather the information:
This information is gathered through the following means:
– Social Media contact
– Telephone
– Online contact
– Support referral form (Tier 2 only)
This information either is received directly from the family or through a professional who has sought consent to make contact with the service in order to gather advice or access direct support.
Information is also gathered from those people wishing to help raise money for us to enable future delivery of services.
To reassure you; we don’t gather information from any other third party source without your consent. We do provide packs to schools, doctors, hospitals, family support workers, social workers and churches to use to support families directly – we do not hold any data regarding where these packs are used.
What allows you to use my information and for how long will you keep it?
The information we gather is gained via consent – either directly through families when they contact us or through a referral form from a professional contacting the service (Tier 2 only).
Where via referral form or another practitioner sharing the information, we would seek for your explicit consent for the use of this information and you need to be aware this consent can be withdrawn at any point; either via email or phone. We will store this data for as long as necessary for the purposes it was obtained in order to follow up and be able to report on basic data (including how many families have received support, age range of the children involved and any feedback).
If you have contacted us in order to raise money for us, we will store this data for as long as necessary for the purposes it was obtained in order to follow up and share our progress; we will seek your consent to extend this storage of data to keep you updated on any progress or money raising opportunities.
It is important that you alert us if you wish to withdraw your consent and you are able to do this at any point.
We take safeguarding both children and adults very seriously. We are legally obliged to pass on personal information to the relevant authority if we thought a child, young person or vulnerable adult was at risk. Otherwise, your information will only be shared with your consent to partner agencies with whom we are seeking to commission external direct support.
In relation to GDPR, we use your consent as the lawful basis for processing your data and we rely on legitimate interest where we have existing and ongoing relationships with our donors, supporters and volunteers.
How will my information be stored?
Your information will be stored on secure password protected devices, including an encrypted memory stick and encrypted memory drive. Our internal system is robust and has additional security measures to support safe storage. This information is then used to review and evaluate the support provided and direct purchase of any additional resources.
We will occasionally share collated information publicly to note the number of families supported and evidence demand upon our organisation. This information will not be identifiable.
What rights do I have when it comes to my data?
We abide by the principles, processes and practices we set out under data protection legislation; you have the right to request access to the information that we hold about you.
You also have the right to:
- object to processing of personal data that is likely to cause, or is causing, damage or distress
- prevent processing for the purpose of direct marketing
- object to decisions being taken by automated means
- in certain circumstances, have inaccurate personal data rectified, blocked, erased or destroyed.
The Information Commissioners Office has produced a summary of your rights in relation to data protection and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):
If you have any concerns about how we have handled your data, please make contact with our data protection officer (DPO) on the following email address: elsieeverafter@hotmail.com
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office if you have a concern about how we have handle or processed your data using the following details:
- Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website
- By post: The Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
- Telephone: 08456 30 60 60 or 01625 54 57 45’s