Privacy policy
Mental Health UK takes great care to preserve your privacy and safeguard any personal details you provide to us, whether on this website or by another means. This Policy explains how we collect and use your information.
By using our website or providing us with your personal information you are agreeing to this Policy. We update this Policy from time to time, so please check it regularly.
We will communicate changes as often as we can.
1. When will I need to provide my details?
We may collect personal information, such as name, date of birth, address, telephone number and email address for one or more of the following purposes.
- If you apply for a job or volunteering opportunity with Mental Health UK
- If you make a donation to us
- If you register to fundraise for us
- If you attend one of our services
- If you use one of our services
- If you attend one of our events where a photographer is present
- If you visit one of Mental Health UK’s websites, including Mental Health and Money Advice and Truths
- If you engage with us on social media
- If you agree to share your story, including becoming a media volunteer
- If you enquire about, book and/or attend one of our training courses
2. Why do you need my details and how do you use them?
Consent
We’d love to keep in touch with all our supporters about the work we do, and how your support (both financial and non-financial) could help improve the lives of people affected by mental illness. We will only keep in touch with you by phone, email or SMS when you have provided your consent for us to do so.
For communication by post, we will use legitimate interest as a basis for processing your data as outlined below.
Where we have your consent to use your details for marketing, you can withdraw it at any time, and we’ll ask you every now and again if you’re still happy to hear from us.
‘Marketing’ is defined as anything which ‘furthers the aims of the charity’ and includes things like email updates, fundraising appeals and campaigning actions like us asking you to sign a petition or email your MP.
Please rest assured that we will never sell your details to any third party.
For what purpose? (eg Legitimate interest, legal need, or a contract)
Where you have provided your address, we may send you marketing communications. This is using legitimate interest as a basis for processing your data. You can opt-out of receiving postal communications at any time by emailing [email protected], or writing to us at Mental Health UK, 28 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7GR
- Where you have given us your details we may use them to process your donation to us or contact HMRC for Gift Aid. This counts as a type of contract because you asked us to do this for you.
- If you have used one of our services – we will keep professional records of the support we’ve given you,– in most cases we will have got your consent to record your personal information
- If you enquire about, book or attend one of our training courses, you will usually have provided your personal details to allow us to communicate with you about the training we offer. We may use legitimate interests to also send you information about new or future training courses or services that we think might interest you. But you can tell us you would prefer not to receive any additional communication from us.
- We might personalise our communications to you (e.g. by looking at donations you’ve already given us and sorting them by date, subject, frequency and amount) and use this to decide if and when we ask you again. It makes communications more relevant to you and is based on behaviour – not by purchasing data from outside sources.
- When dealing with your personal information we will at all times comply with the Data Protection Act 2018, and any other applicable legislation.
3. Why do you ask for information about my interest in mental health?
Sometimes we may ask you what your link is to mental illness. For example if you have a mental illness yourself, or if a friend or relative of yours does, or if you have another connection to mental illness. We ask for this information simply so that we can understand more about people who support us. It can help us to provide you with information that is more relevant to you; it can help us represent you better in our campaigning work; and it helps us ensure we are carrying out Equality and Diversity best practice, and best practice within our own governance. If you are happy for us to keep this information we will treat it with strict confidence. If you do not want us to have this information you do not need to supply it.
If we have other sensitive information about you (eg your mental health diagnosis because we have supported you through one of our services), this information is also kept in strict confidence – only those members of staff who need to see or report on this information can see it.
4. Do you pass my details to any other organisations or individuals?
We will never sell your data to another organisation.
Mental Health UK comprises 4 separate charities based across the UK: Rethink Mental Illness in England, Adferiad Recovery in Wales, Change Mental Health in Scotland and Mindwise in Northern Ireland. Mental Health UK will share your personal data with the other charities to allow them to provide you with the relevant service for you.
In addition, if we ever need to send data to a third party (for example to our printers to send you a magazine you asked for) we will make sure the company we use has signed a data processing agreement with us, so that they are bound to take care of your data in the same way we do. For instance, our partners at Engaging Networks (who manage large e-campaigns for us where we might encourage supporters to email their MP) use the exact same wording on their sign-up page to our campaigns as we use on our own website, and must treat your data with the same care that we do. Here is a full list of the partner organisations we work with for marketing.
If you have made a Gift Aid declaration, we may disclose the information you have provided as part of the declaration to HMRC for the purpose of reclaiming gift aid on your donation(s).
We may also share or disclose your personal information if we are required to do so by any law or court order. This is called a legal need.
5. How do you keep my information secure?
We will take precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or unauthorised alteration of personal information you give us.
We may send communications to you by email. E-mail is not a fully secure means of communication, and whilst we do our utmost to keep our systems and communications protected we cannot guarantee this.
We make no representations about any other websites, and when you access any other website through a link on our website (including social media sites) you should understand that it is independent from us and that we have no control over that website or the way your personal information is collected through those websites.
Those websites may have their own privacy policies and we encourage you to look at those policies or contact the website operators directly to understand how your personal information is used.
6. How do you use cookies on this website?
For information on how cookies are used on our website, please see our Cookie Policy.
Some uses of cookies (like helping you to fill out forms) may be replaced by ‘Local Storage’ in the coming years – we will update our Policy if we adopt this, to keep you informed. There are also new ‘E-Privacy’ regulations coming in 2019 which will inform more updates about electronic data.
7. How long will you keep my data?
We will keep data for only as long as it makes sense to do – so this becomes more important after you end your contact with us, for example. Legally we need to keep some records (financial or in relation to care services) in case there is a query. In general, we use a 6-year rule.
We will review supporter data 6 years after your last contact with us, and delete or minimise those we have no reason to keep.
In most cases we won’t totally delete a record of you (see note below in the next section)
8. What if I don’t want you to use my details anymore?
If you ever change your mind about your marketing choices, you can update your contact preferences at any time by emailing us on [email protected] or by writing to us at Mental Health UK, 15th Floor, 28 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7GR, Any choices you make will overwrite any previous preferences you told us. This helps us record the most up-to-date information for you.
If you don’t want us to hold your data at all anymore, we have a duty to let you know that the best way for us to be sure we don’t contact you again is to minimise the data we hold (e.g. reduce it to name and last known address) and then ‘block’ those details from contact rather than delete them completely. It’s best practice (from the Information Commissioner’s Office) to hold ‘suppressed’ records rather than to delete completely, so that we can make sure we’re never able to accidentally acquire a person’s details again – that way we can recognise the address and prevent contact to it.
If you have a special reason for us to delete all record of you – just let us know, and of course we can do that
9. Access rights
You have the right to request copies of certain of your personal information within our custody and control, and details of how we use that information. This is sometimes called a Subject Access Request. If you think any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, you may also request it is corrected. You also have a right, in certain circumstances, to require us to stop processing your personal information.
In relation to all of these rights, please email or write to us at the address below. Please note that we will require proof of identity in order to carry this out, and ask you the scope of the request you’re making, so that we can best help you within the applicable timeframe of one month (in accordance with the Information Commissioner’s Office guidelines).
In certain circumstances (for example where required or permitted by law) we might not be able to provide you with access to some of your personal information, but where appropriate we will notify you of the reasons for this.
10. Using countries outside of the EU
Our database has servers based in the USA, and our email software is based in the USA. All data is stored and transferred in accordance with current Data Protection regulations through contract. We will only work with USA based organisations who have certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield.
11. Online advertising
When we do online (paid search) advertising – this is anonymously targeted at those using websites we think will attract new supporters to us, or at those web users who have shown an interest in the charity or related subjects. We do not store data received in this way – we place ads according to online behaviours and interests (see Cookie Policy).
We follow Facebook’s strict advertising policies when using that platform, and we only target based on ‘likes’ on our page or similar anonymised data using cookies. We do not ever upload our own supporters’ data to Facebook for advertising purposes, as we do not consider this is a fully ‘opted-in’ position to take.
We do not currently advertise on Twitter but should this change we will update this policy and follow the same standards of quality and protection of your data.
Our Data Protection Officer is Company Secretary, Caroline Cannar, who can be contacted by email at: [email protected] or by post: Mental Health UK, 28 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7GR.
If you have any questions about this Policy, please contact us at [email protected] or
Mental Health UK, 28 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7GR
Please use these details to complain about Data Protection practices, and if we don’t resolve your issue to your satisfaction, you can approach The Information Commissioner’s Office on https://ico.org.uk/ (or if it’s about our fundraising practices in relation to data) you can contact the Fundraising Regulator using their complaints form at www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk or on 0300 999 3407.