Privacy Policy
The Royal Literary Fund respects your privacy.
We are constantly looking for ways to improve the Site. We may amend the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy from time to time, in which case any changes will be published on this page. By continuing to use the Site, you shall be deemed to agree to be bound by those changes and revised terms. You also acknowledge that you agree to our collecting information from you and using it as described here.
LAST UPDATED AND EFFECTIVE AS OF: 1 November 2023
The data controller is the Royal Literary Fund, a charity registered in the UK, number 219952. Our Privacy Notice gives you detailed information on when and why we collect your personal information, how we use it, how we keep it secure and how long we keep it for. We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up to date and you may ask us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate. For any questions about how we use your data, or to exercise your rights over your data, you can contact us on:
Data Protection
Royal Literary Fund
3 Johnson’s Court
London
EC4A 3EA
Under certain conditions, you have the right to require us to:
- provide you with further detail on the use we make of your information.
- provide you with a copy of your information (Subject access request).
- rectify any inaccuracies in the information we hold.
- delete any information about you that we no longer have a lawful ground to use.
- restrict our use of your personal information.
- cease carrying out certain processing activities based on our legitimate interests unless our reasons for undertaking that processing outweigh any
- prejudice to your data protection rights.
Your exercise of these rights is subject to certain exemptions to safeguard the public interest (e.g. the prevention or detection of crime), our interests (e.g. the maintenance of legal privilege) and the rights of third parties.
This privacy notice is intended to be brief and clear. You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, the regulatory authority for the UK.
HOW WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We comply with the Data Protection Act 1998, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) 2018. We understand that your personal information and privacy is important to you. We undertake to ensure that the information you share with us is recorded accurately, retained securely and used only according to your wishes. We do not sell or trade our mailing list data with external organisations.
Joining the Royal Literary Fund database through our newsletter or application process requires you to provide basic information. We will need this to enable us to administer the website and, if necessary, to contact you with news and information about us including, but not limited to, our activities, events, grant giving, and fundraising efforts, our website and its contents, and on any topics which we think may interest you. We will not use your personal information in this way if you have opted out, unsubscribed or otherwise indicated that you do not wish to be contacted for such marketing purposes. We will ensure that we only keep your information for as long as is necessary.
WHAT INFORMATION WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU
We may collect and process information that you choose to provide by signing up to our newsletter, creating an account, filling in forms on the website or by any other method, including post and email or if you apply for financial assistance or the Fellows scheme. Personal Information we collect may include:
- your full name and title, date of birth
- your postal address, postcode, email address and phone number
- It may also include financial information, health information, employment information, background information and bank details, especially if you are applying for financial assistance or a Fellowship.
Using certain features of our website may require that you provide us with your Personal Information. For example our website may include the following features:
- Events
- Surveys
- Newsletter Sign-Up
- Online Forums (e.g. Fellow internal websites)
We will also collect and hold information about any contact you have with us as a visitor, event attendee, donor or supporter of the Royal Literary Fund, and may include details of:
- ticket purchases and attendance
- membership and donor status, including payment details where applicable
- contact preferences
- gift information, including payment details where applicable
- Gift Aid status
- details of correspondence sent to you, or received from you
- any other information provided by yourself at the request of the Royal Literary Fund to process a transaction.
WHY WE COLLECT DATA AND HOW IT IS USED
We collect and process your information in order to provide the services requested by you.
We may process your personal information on one of the following bases: you have provided your consent; where necessary to enter into or perform our contract with you; to achieve our legitimate interests including our charitable objectives; in order to fulfil our legal obligations.
WHO WE SHARE DATA WITH
Third-Party Links
You may find links to third parties (e.g. external creative organisations and suppliers) on our Website. These websites should have their own privacy policies, which you should check. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for their policies whatsoever as we have no control over them. In cases when we use external websites provided by other organisations such as Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, then we would ask you to consult their privacy policies.
Third-Party Providers
We may share your information with IT providers who supply us with systems and services; universities where Fellows are appointed (note: we never share the personal information of students with universities); law firms who provide legal advice to us; our bank in order to make payment to you; our accountants and auditors where strictly necessary. Other online providers include:
- Salesforce.org– our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software system used to store information about our users, grant applicants and recipients and Fellows.
- MailChimp – our software to deliver our newsletter which help gather statistics on opening rates and clicks on links which help us monitor and improve our communications.
- Situation Interactive – our media booking agency, only as anonymised data to understand our audience’s behaviour, locations and demographics
- Third-party advertisers (such as Facebook or Google) – to help us identify customers similar to our audience or to serve adverts they deem relevant to you on third party websites. The information shared with these advertisers is pseudonymised to protect your personal data.
- Other promotional partners – as anonymised data for their understanding audience demographics.
Social Networking Services
Our website may integrate with social networking services. You understand that we do not control such services and are not liable for the manner in which they operate. While we may provide you with the ability to use such services in connection with our website, we are doing so merely as an accommodation and, like you, are relying upon those third-party services to operate properly and fairly.
SECURITY OF YOUR INFORMATION
The security of your information is important to us. This website has commercially reasonable security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Personal Information collected by our website is stored in secure operating environments that are not available to the public and is accessible only by designated staff and is used only for the purposes for which you provide that information. While we try our best to safeguard your personal information once we receive it, no transmission of data over the Internet or any other public network can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. We maintain appropriate administrative technical and physical safeguards to protect your information against accidental or unlawful destruction, accidental loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure, or access, use and all other unlawful forms of processing of the personal data in our possession. We do not take any responsibility for any personal passwords which enable you to access any of our websites and it is your responsibility to keep this password confidential – do not share your password with anyone.
Your data will always be stored and processed inside the EEA, where the General Data Protection Regulation gives you strong legal protection for your data privacy rights. We will always obey both the letter and the spirit of the data protection laws that apply to us.
HOW LONG WE KEEP YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We won’t keep your data for ever. If you haven’t interacted with us for three years – which means visiting our website, opening an email, contacting us etc – we’ll anonymise your data so that it’s no longer connected to you in any way. We will keep the anonymised data indefinitely to help us understand our business and our audience.
IF YOU MAKE A COMPLAINT
If you make a complaint or if we think it’s necessary for any other reason, we may, depending on the issue, pass your data on to our insurers. We will only pass them the data that they need; we have a clear agreement with them that they will only use the data to assess any claim that we may make in connection with the issue.
MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
Whenever you interact with us, we may ask you to consent to receive marketing information by email or text message. If you are a consumer, we will only email or text you if you have consented in this way, and you can withdraw this consent at any time by contacting us using the information at the start of this policy, following the unsubscribe instructions that are in every email or text that we send, or visiting our website. If you are a business, we may send you marketing communications by email or text without prior consent, but you still have the same rights to ask us to stop.
We may also write to you by post. You may ask us to stop at any time by contacting us using the information at the start of this policy, following the unsubscribe instructions that are in every postal communication that we send, or visiting our website. We will also always respect any preference you have expressed.
We do not make telephone marketing calls to consumers and will only call you in response to an enquiry or as part of contractual customer service. We will make telephone marketing calls to businesses but will of course stop if you ask us to either on the call, by contacting us or by visiting our website.
Formally, we justify our marketing activity as being in our legitimate interest. As required by the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulation 2003, for natural people we will only send marketing communication by email and text where we have explicit consent.