1.  Our Privacy Principles 

• We will look after any personal information that you share with us. 

• This is central to our values as an organisation. We want everyone who supports us, or who comes to us for support, to feel confident about how any personal information they share will be looked after or used. 

• You can be confident that: 

• We only use personal information in the ways we need to and that is expected of us. 

• We will keep you up to date with our work, including how we are campaigning to improve services, raising awareness, promoting understanding as well as our fundraising activities. 

• But we only use your personal information to do this if you have previously told us that’s OK. 

• We will make it easy for you to tell us how you want us to communicate with you, including how to opt out from future communications – and we promise your request will be respected straight away. 

• We will never release your information to organisations outside The Bereavement Counselling Charity for their marketing purposes. 

• We will be especially careful and sensitive when engaging with vulnerable people or those we have reason to believe might be vulnerable 

• We take all reasonable care to safeguard your personal information through security policies and secure business processes. 

 

We will always provide easy ways for you to contact us and we will be happy to answer any queries you may have, at any time, by emailing us at admin@bereavementcharity.org.uk. 

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2.  Privacy Policy 

We know that your privacy is very important to you.  
We promise that it is even more important to us. 

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1. How we collect personal information about you 

We may collect personal information from you when you interact with us. There are many occasions when this could happen, for example: if you enquire about our activities, register with us, make a donation to us, ask a question about bereavement, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity, if you chose to provide some optional feedback or otherwise provide us with personal information. And, this may be when you phone us, go onto our website, through the post, or in person. 

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2. What information do we collect? 

The personal information we collect might include your contact details such as name, date of birth, email address, postal address, telephone number, as well as information you provide in any correspondence between us. 

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We may also collect health information if you tell us about your experience or the experiences of a friend or relative; however, you can decide if you want to remain anonymous or if you are happy to share your personal details. 

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We also gather general information about the use of our websites, such as which pages users visit most often and which services, events or facilities are of most interest. We may also track which pages users visit when they click on links in The Bereavement Counselling Charity’s emails. We may use this information to personalise the way our website is presented when users visit it, to make improvements to our website and to ensure we provide the best service for users. Wherever possible we use aggregated or anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our websites. 

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3. Cookies 

We use cookies and other technologies to collect information about you when you visit our site, use our services (or view online advertisements). We may collect information about the Web pages you view, links you click, and IP address. 

You can also visit our website and use some of our services without revealing any information about yourself. We collect only the domain names and not the e-mail addresses of the visitors. We use this information to measure the usage of our site and to improve the content of our site. 

 

Cookies are a standard method of registering user preferences when people use websites, to ensure a better and more personalised experience. These preferences are stored in a file on your computer’s hard drive. For example, a cookie would contain your preferred country of residence, so we do not have to ask you this question each time you visit. 

Our website uses both persistent, session cookies and Third-party cookies. 

•  Persistent cookies are cookies that stay on your computer permanently until you “manually” delete them. 

• Session cookies delete themselves automatically when you leave a website and go to another one or shut down your browser. 

• Third party cookies are used by our carefully selected and approved business partners who assist in the delivery of a high-quality website. Some of these suppliers may also set cookies during your visit in order to meet contractual obligations with us. These cookies do not store any personal details relating to you or your credit cards. 

 

For more information about cookies, including how to enable cookies, change your browser settings and find and delete cookies on your hard drive, please refer to your web browser’s help menus or visit the aboutcookies website. 

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4. How do we use personal information? 

We may use your personal information to: 

•  Provide you with the important advice and support you’ve asked us for, whether this be in person, over the phone, via email or Zoom or other online video-conferencing software or through our publications.

• Provide or administer activities relating to all our services: updating you with important administrative messages, to help us identify you when you contact us, and help us to properly maintain our records; 

• Improve your experience with us. We may use your information to enhance the service that we provide, to improve our information and communications, or to personalise the website to better suit your needs; 

• Provide you with information about our plans. This may be letting you know about new or enhanced services that we hope will be useful and interesting to you, and may include fundraising updates; of course, we will only do this with your consent and you can change your mind and remove or add your consent at any time by contacting us; 

• Analyse the personal information we collect about you so that we can better understand our clients and supporters, their preferences and needs and important trends. 

• We may need to disclose your information if required to do so by law (for example, to comply with applicable laws, regulations and codes of practice or in response to a valid request from a competent authority); or, in order to enforce our conditions of sale and other agreements.

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To do some of this, The Bereavement Counselling Charity may share your information with our trusted partners and suppliers, but is always carried out under our instruction, and is never for their marketing approaches. We ensure that they store the data securely and delete it when it is no longer needed. 

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A special note about the Sensitive Information we hold 

If you contact us at The Bereavement Counselling Charity by email, phone or in person, you may choose to provide details of a sensitive nature. 

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We only use it for the purposes of dealing with your enquiry/ support needs as agreed with you, training, and quality monitoring or evaluating the services we provide. We will not pass on your details to anyone else without your express permission except in exceptional circumstances. 

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Exceptional circumstances would include safeguarding concerns, for example: 

• Anyone reporting serious risk to themselves i.e. self-harm or suicidality. 
• Anyone posing a threat to others including but not exclusively, vulnerable children and adults. 
• Anyone reporting information about the whereabouts of a missing child (section 50 of the Children Act 1989) 

And or other serious concerns, for example details of a serious crime, for example: 

• Anyone reporting information in relation to a murder or violent crime 
• Anyone reporting they were involved in, or had information about, acts of terrorism either being planned, or which had already taken place (Terrorism Act 2000, section 38B) 
• Anyone reporting that they had been the driver involved in a road traffic collision (section 21 of the Road Traffic Act 1991) 

 

If you provide us with any Sensitive Personal Data by telephone, email or by other means, we will treat that information with extra care and always in accordance with this Privacy Policy. 

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Your personal information and details of the enquiries received are stored on a secure database for no longer than is necessary for the purposes of its use. We carry out periodic deletion of data whose retention period has expired and/or when the need to continue holding such data is no longer necessary. 

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5. Your choices 

We’d like to keep our valued clients and supporters up to date with our progress. So, to update you on what we’re doing and ask whether you’d be able to support us, where you have given us your consent, we’d like to keep in touch with you (by post, phone, email, text and other electronic means) about our progress and how you can continue to help us in this important mission. 

Please be reassured that respect lies at the heart of everything our committed staff and volunteers do: we respect any information that you share with us and you can change your mind and remove or add your consent at any time, by simply contacting us on admin@bereavementcharity.org.uk. 

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You consent to The Bereavement Counselling Charity transferring your information to countries or jurisdictions which may not provide the same level of data protection as the European Economic Area (“EEA”). At present, The Bereavement Counselling Charity does NOT transfer nor store your personal information outside the EEA. If we chose to do so in the future, we will update this Policy and we will comply fully with our legal obligations as a data controller and take all steps necessary to ensure that your personal information is treated securely and in accordance with legislation. 

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6. Who sees your personal information? 

The personal information we collect about you will be used by our staff (and volunteers) so that they can support you; also, by a few selected organisations that work with us or on our behalf to deliver our services; and possibly to legal and regulatory authorities if required to by law. 

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This never involves us selling or sharing your personal information with organisations so that they can contact you for any marketing activities. Nor do we sell any information about your web browsing activity. 

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7. Your Information Security 

We take the security of your personal information extremely seriously. 

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We’ve implemented appropriate physical, technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction and loss. 

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And, we only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary, which may be to fulfil statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid or performance of a contract with the NHS or local authority). 

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Here are some of the ways we protect your personal information: 

• If you provide personal information to us online the transmission of that information to us is protected by TLS encryption. Encryption is the process through which sensitive information is scrambled before it is transmitted so that it remains private even if it is intercepted. However, unless your internet browser supports TLS you will not be able to take advantage of this level of security 
• Offline, your personal information is kept securely in our databases and in offices/locations where a secured, lockable, filing cabinet is used. 
• We will take all reasonable steps to protect your personal information, but data can never be guaranteed as 100% secure. Please note that we will not be liable for any breach of security unless we have been negligent. 
• Links to other Websites and their security and privacy policies: 
• Our website may contain links to other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content or the privacy practices employed by other sites. Please be aware that advertisers or websites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you. This privacy statement does not cover the information practices of those websites or advertisers. 

 

8. Your communication with our teams at The Bereavement Counselling Charity 

Your communications with our teams (including by telephone or email) may be monitored and/or recorded for training, quality control and compliance purposes to ensure that we continuously improve our customer service standards. 

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9. How to update or access your personal information 

You may ask us at any time to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate. You have a right to know what personal information The Bereavement Counselling Charity holds about you. 

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You can ask us to update your details, or request a copy of your personal information we hold, by contacting The Bereavement Counselling Charity: 

Writing:  The Bereavement Counselling Charity, PO Box 250, Petersfield, Hants   GU32 9EJ  
Tel:          07827491902 
Email:     admin@bereavementcharity.org.uk 

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10. Changes to our Privacy Policy 

Our Privacy Policy is reviewed regularly to ensure that it reflects how we use your information. Any changes will be notified to you by updating this policy so please check this Policy to see if any changes have been made that are important to you. Where appropriate, changes will be notified to you by email. 

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This Privacy Policy (version 1.0) was last updated on 18/01/2022. 

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11. Who we are 

Here at The Bereavement Counselling Charity (“we”/”us”), we are committed to protecting your personal information and to reassure you that that you have control over the information we store about you and what types of information you would like to receive from us. 

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For further information about our privacy practices, please contact us by: 

Writing to: The Bereavement Counselling Charity, PO Box 250, Petersfield, Hants   GU32 9EJ 

Calling us on: 0782749190 

Emailing:  admin@bereavementcharity.org.uk 

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