Our Privacy Policy

At VSA, we are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what data we hold and how we use it.

We will use your personal information, which you have provided to us, in accordance with UK data protection laws, including the UK GDPR.

This privacy policy sets out clear explanations about how and why we, Aberdeen Association of Social Services (T/A VSA) use, protect and collect your personal information via the phone, email, online, any other correspondence, or from third parties.

This privacy policy applies to people who visit our website, our supporters, customers and the general public as well as visitors to any of our premises.

This policy explains:

• What information the VSA may collect about you;

• How we will use that information;

• Whether we disclose your details to anyone else;

• Your rights regarding the information you provide to us.

If you have any queries about this privacy and cookies policy, please contact the Data Protection Officer at data.protection@vsa.org.uk or call 01224 212021. You can also write to us at VSA, Data Protection Department, 38 Castle Street Aberdeen, AB11 5YU

If you are a VSA employee or volunteer, please visit the employee handbook or ask HR for an up-to-date copy of our employee / volunteer privacy policy.

This privacy policy does not apply to the information VSA collects from people who are registered to use our services. Their information is handled independently and according to the nature of each service and our regulators' requirements. [Please contact us if you would like to receive a copy of our ‘Service User Privacy Notice”.]

Changes To Our Privacy Policy

All policies across our organisation, including our data protection and privacy policies, are regularly reviewed and updated if required. This policy may change from time to time to reflect any changes in legislation, guidance or to capture any changes we have made to how we collect and use your data. Please visit this section on our website regularly to keep up to date with any changes made to this policy.

Who we are

Aberdeen Association of Social Services T/A VSA, is a leading social care charity in Scotland and is a registered Scottish Charity SC012950 and a Company limited by guarantee under number SC018487. VAT Registration No. 265 8668 08.

We are also registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number Z7253656.

Overview

VSA ("we") is committed to protecting any personal information you share with us and will always ensure you are happy with the way we handle it.

In order to help support the development of VSA's voluntary income, our Fundraising department uses a dedicated database to store personal information collected by VSA over the course of our relationship with our members, donors, sponsors and our business contacts, such as our supplier contacts.

VSA only collects personal information that you have provided directly to us or have made publicly available (for example, on social media, blogs, websites, etc.).

What personal information we collect

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you as follows:

• Identity Data: including titles, full names, date of birth, [age], [gender], [pronouns], [nationality].

• Contact Data: including telephone number, mobile number, email address and home address.

• CCTV Data: some of our properties have CCTV covering their entrances, footage of you may be collected by our CCTV and surveillance systems when you attend our premises.

• Communications Data: including information generated when sending and responding to correspondence with you.

• Event and Publicity Data: including publicity information about the fundraising activities you are involved in or attend (including video, photographs and recordings of any fundraising event), a record of your attendance at an event, health-related information necessary for your participation in our events (including allergy information, dietary requirements and the full names, email address and telephone numbers of potential emergency contacts).

• Financial and Transaction Data: including donation history, gift aid declaration (including tax status) and, [bank account and payment card details].

• Marketing Data: including information about your marketing preferences for receiving information about us, our news and fundraising activities. We also collect information about how you interact with any electronic direct marketing messages we sent to you (such as when you open it and how long you spend reading it).

• Technical Data: including technical information about how you interact with and use our website, including accessibility settings and language preferences.

• Tracking Data: including information collected by cookies and other tracking technologies. More information regarding this is available in our “Cookies Policy”.

• Social Media Data: including information about you from your social media profile and we may receive information about how you interact with social media from social media platforms (including Meta).

How we use your personal information

VSA will use personal information for the following:

• Processing donations or other payments and verify financial transactions. Donations made online via our website is completed on behalf of VSA by a third-party data processor called Enthuse.

• Registering you for our events

• Registering you for fundraising challenges

• Contacting you to promote events, campaigns, and appeals, or make you aware of volunteering opportunities

• Processing requests for corporate volunteering or support

• Fulfilling requests to leave a gift in your will

• Sending updates and/or newsletters that we think would be of interest to you

• Sending our annual report and invitations to our AGM

• Recording any contact, we have with you (phone calls, face-to-face meetings, etc.)

• Identifying our visitors and supporters

• Preventing or detecting fraud or abuses of our website and enable third parties to carry out technical, logistical or other functions on our behalf

• Where you have given us your express consent, we will use photos and videos in which you appear on our social media sites, website, annual report, promotional and campaigning publications – we will always offer you a clear opt-in option for this on our registration forms

Direct marketing

We hope to develop a strong relationship with you and ensure we know how you want to be contacted and for what purpose, so we also record your communication preferences. We adopt a consent-based or “opt-in only” marketing communication policy; this means that you choose what you want to receive and how. You will find opt-in options on all our registration forms and you can also update them at any time by contacting our Fundraising department on Fundraising@vsa.org.uk or our Reception 01224 212021 (Mon-Fri 9.00-17.00), or by contacting our Data Protection Officer using the details above. You will also have the opportunity to unsubscribe from any of our marketing emails by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email.

When you opt-in to receive marketing from us, VSA will keep you posted on our progress, events, opportunities to support us in different ways or may ask for donations according to your preferences only.

VSA will never sell or share your personal information with third party organisations for marketing purposes. We will always be clear about how your information will be used and what will happen to it on our registration forms.

Building your profile

In order to get to know you better, VSA may also collect personal information when it is already publicly available from social media sites, for example Facebook and Twitter, or has been published in articles/newspapers. This information helps us to better understand your interests and target our communications with you accordingly.

Legal Grounds

To comply with UK data protection laws, we can only use your personal information when we have legal grounds to do so. Our legal grounds for using your personal information are:

• Performance of a contract with you: Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you, such as a contract to provide you with a membership, entry to an event, or other products or services.

• Legitimate interests: We may process your personal information where necessary for our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party. These interests may include pursuit of the purposes outlined above.

• Legal obligation: We may process your personal information in order to comply with legal obligations imposed on us by statutes and regulations, including safeguarding, employment and tax laws

• Consent: We may need your express consent to collect health data and marketing preferences. When we collect consent, we will give you specific information so it is clear what you are consenting to.

Sharing your personal information

We may share your personal data where necessary with the parties set out below:

• Service Providers: We rely on various third party service providers who may process your personal information as part of the services they provide to us, including our IT system providers and event organisers.

• Professional Advisers: We may share your personal information where necessary with our professional advisers, such as our accountants, insurance providers and lawyers.

• Regulators: We may share your personal information with regulators where required by law or on their reasonable request. Our regulators include the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, HMRC, Care Inspectorate, Education Scotland and GTC Scotland.

• Law Enforcement: Where necessary, we may share information with law enforcement agencies for the prevention or detection or crime, or the apprehension of offenders. This may include sharing of CCTV data

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

How we store your personal information

The information we collect is stored by us on computers located in the UK. We may transfer the information to other departments within VSA and to other reputable third-party organisations, as explained above, and we will always check where they are situated (inside or outside the UK or the EEA) prior to any arrangements being made. We also store paper files.

VSA places a great importance on the security of all personally identifiable information. We have security measures in place to attempt to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal information under our control. For example, only authorised personnel are authorised to access user information and we use secure server software (SSL) to encrypt financial and personal information you input before it is sent to us. While we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of information will not occur while it is under our control, we use our best efforts to try to prevent this.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information across the internet is not completely secure and whilst we do our best to try to protect the security of your information, we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of information will not occur whilst information is being transferred.

Retention

We will keep your personal information only for as long as we need it to provide you with the information you have required, to administer your membership, regular donations and sponsorships, or administer your marketing preferences to comply with the law. We do not communicate with people who have asked us not to.

When we no longer need the information, we will always dispose of it securely, using specialist companies if necessary to do this work for us. Some personal information we hold is retained to fulfil statutory obligations; for instance, HMRC requires us to retain Gift Aid declarations for a set period of 6 years from the end of the accounting period they relate to.

Your rights

The GDPR gives you certain rights over your personal information and how we use it. These include the right to:

• Access to the personal information we hold about you, called a subject access request

• Object to our processing of your personal information

• Object to your personal information being used for marketing purposes

• Restrict the processing of your personal information

• obtain a copy of your personal information in a portable format so that you can reuse it with a third party

• Rectify your personal information if you believe it is incorrect; we want to ensure that your personal information is accurate and kept up to date so please let us know of any changes

• Request the erasure of your personal information. Please note that in certain circumstances, we may need to retain your personal information for a set period to comply with our legal obligation (for instance, Gift Aid declarations)

If you wish to exercise any of those rights, please contact the Data Protection Department in writing to VSA, 38 Castle Street, Aberdeen, AB11 5YU or by emailing data.protection@vsa.org.uk.

You have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK regulator for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). However, you also have the right to make a complaint to us directly. We recommend contacting us before submitting a complaint to the ICO, as we may be able to resolve your issue directly. You can make a complaint by contacting our Data Protection Officer at the details noted above.

Cookies

VSA uses cookies on its website. Cookies are text files that contain two pieces of information: a site name and a unique user ID (your IP address). When you visit our website and accept our cookies, they are downloaded onto your device. They help enhance your experience on our website and we collect this information in a way that does not identify you.

You can find our cookies policy and instructions on how to control and delete them here.

Other useful information

Children’s personal information

It is our policy not to request donations, subscriptions or membership, or accept orders (such as subscription to our newsletter, request to sponsor one of our animals and baby animals, registering for an event or a fundraising challenge) from children under the age of 18.

Links to third party websites

Our website contains links to various third-party websites which we believe may be of interest to our website visitors. There are also links to some of our sponsors (when they support a section of our website). This privacy statement only governs VSA’s website; we are not responsible for third-party websites, please check their privacy policy before sharing any personal or financial information on their website.

Social media websites

VSA operates a number of social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Although this privacy statement covers how VSA will use your personal information from those pages, it does not cover or govern how social media websites will use it. Please ensure you read their privacy policies before sharing any information and make sure you familiarise yourself and use their privacy settings and reporting mechanisms to control how your personal information is used.