NICVA Privacy Notice

NICVA Privacy Notice

NICVA is committed to maintaining high standards of privacy and data protection for our stakeholders and those we work with. This privacy notice lets you know what happens to any personal data that you give to us, or any that we may collect from or about you.

We have aimed to provide this information concisely and in clear language. It won't cover the full detail of each of our fair processing activities, but if you need further information or want this notice to be provided in an alternative format, please contact us.

Please note that there is a separate Staff Privacy Notice for members of NICVA staff and job applicants.

Who we are

'NICVA' is the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action based at 61 Duncairn Gardens, Belfast, BT15 2GB.

NICVA is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (Z249132X).

Personal data we collect

The majority of our services and products are provided to employees or volunteers who are connected with organisations in the community and voluntary sector, private sector and government. To provide efficient services and support we collect and process personal data.

Information we collect from you

  • business contact information such as your full name, email address, job title and the organisations that you are associated with.
  • records of your registration and attendance at events, such as conferences, seminars, training sessions and formal meetings that we organise or host.
  • records of your contact and activities with us, including emails, notes from phone calls and face-to-face meetings.
  • records of cases we have provided support on matters such as Governance or HR
  • records of your subscriptions to email bulletin products such as eNews, Scope, CommunityNI Jobs, Member Bulletins, including a log of whether you open the emails and clicked on links.
  • photographs, video and/or sound recordings of events and training sessions for use in printed and electronic media, for promotional and archival purposes.
  • user account records for website products such as CommunityNI, Grant Tracker and ScopeNI
  • if you apply for a job with NICVA we collect your personal contact details and employment history, as well as equality monitoring information and unspent criminal convictions (where applicable) in completing job applications and pre-employment checks. Please see the Staff Privacy Notice.

Information we collect about you from other sources

  • standard internet log information such as your IP address and visitor behaviour patterns. We use Google Analytics to analyse website traffic. You can get more information about Google’s security and privacy principles here and control how your information is used by Google (e.g. for ad personalisation) here. See also: Cookies and Analytics
  • survey responses for our State of the Sector, Viewfinder, Charitable Giving, Salary and other surveys. We use Survey Gizmo for our own sector research surveys (and occasionally for event and training feedback). You can read the Survey Gizmo privacy policy here. Occasionally we engage survey companies to undertake surveys on our behalf, and the responses we receive will have been anonymised. Privacy information is provided to survey participants.

How we collect your personal data

We collect personal data from you:

  • When you register to attend an event such as a conference or training session
  • When you register an account on our websites such as CommunityNI or Grant Tracker
  • When you subscribe to email bulletin services such as Enews and ScopeNI
  • When you participate in the MediaConnect programme as an expert or journalist
  • When you contact us to book a room at our conference facilities
  • When you contact us for advice or support
  • When you contact us to apply for NICVA membership
  • When you attend an event either in or outside our building
  • When you visit our websites (nicva.org, communityni.org, scopeni.nicva.org, grant-tracker.org) and create user accounts
  • When you complete one of our surveys
  • When you apply for a job with us

How we use your personal data

We use your personal information to:

  • manage registration and attendance at training and events, and to evaluate feedback afterwards
  • provide digital products and services such as email bulletins and websites, including allowing you to create posts on CommunityNI, to access Grant Tracker services, or to manage your profile on the MediaConnect portal
  • gather and analyse statistics around email opening and website traffic to help us improve our digital products
  • maintain records of services, advice or support that our staff have provided to you
  • provide information to accredited training awarding bodies such as ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) or TQUK (Training Qualifications UK) where required. We are an approved training centre for the ILM and TQUK awarding bodies

What are the lawful bases for our processing of your personal data?

We use the following lawful bases to process personal data:

  • Where it is in our legitimate interest to provide confirmations or updates about products or services we provide you with, such as fulfilling your request to attend events, participate in training courses, or help you with advice and support.
  • Where it is in our legitimate interest to provide our organisation membership service by keeping business contacts informed about membership services and sector updates, including the NICVA Member Bulletin.
  • Where you have subscribed to receive an email bulletin such as the weekly NICVA eNews, CommunityNI and Scope bulletins you will have given consent for us store your contact information and to contact you by subscribing. You can unsubscribe at any time from the email itself or by contacting us.
  • Where you have an account on one of our digital platforms and you have given consent to the sharing of your information (for instance, contact details) either publically or to other parties.
  • Where we have legal obligations under UK or EU law, such as fraud prevention, the exercise of consumer rights, and under equal opportunity responsibilities.

Sharing your personal data

We do not share your information with any third parties for the purposes of direct marketing.

We may use data processors who are third parties who provide some services for us (for instance, survey platforms). We have contracts in place with our data processors which limits the purpose of the the personal data that has been shared with them to providing the service and acting only on our instructions, and they are bound to confidentiality in doing so.

In some circumstances we may have a legal obligation to share information for law enforcement purposes, such as to cooperate with investigations or in line with a court order. 

We also share personal data with other people or organisations in the following circumstances:

  • To act as a representative membership body we may from time to time share limited personal information (name, organisation, job role and email address) about you in your role as a representative, specialist or policy officer to other organisations such as government bodies, media contacts or other community and voluntary sector groups. We do this where we determine that it is within our legitimate interests and of benefit to you in your professional capacity, and the impact on your privacy is limited. In other circumstances we will seek your consent before doing this.
  • To act as an approved training centre for ILM and TQUK we transfer learners’ personal data provided in registration forms to them for the purposes of learning, assessment and certification, as it is in our legitimate interests to do so. The ILM privacy notice is here and TQUK’s privacy notice here. We may be required to share special category data (e.g. medical information) with these bodies and external trainers to make reasonable adjustments or in the course of an investigation, complaint or appeal. In these circumstances we will obtain your explicit consent to do so.
  • To run events in partnership with other organisations we may share limited personal information from your event registration including name, organisation, job role and email address with the event partners.  We do this where we determine it is within our legitimate interest to facilitate the event.
  • In any other case where we have obtained your consent in order to share your information with named third parties.

Your rights under data protection laws

The General Data Protection Regulation provides the following rights to you:

  • The right to be informed about the processing of your personal information
  • The right to have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate and to have incomplete personal information completed
  • The right to object to processing of your personal information
  • The right to restrict processing of your personal information
  • The right to have your personal information erased (the “right to be forgotten”)
  • The right to request access to your personal information and to obtain information about how we process it
  • The right to move, copy or transfer your personal information (“data portability”)
  • Rights in relation to automated decision-making which has a legal effect or otherwise significantly affects you

We are committed to upholding your rights.  You can contact us for further clarification or any concerns you have regarding your personal data that we hold by contacting the Data Protection Officer using the details below. Please note that the exercise of your rights are dependent on the lawful basis that has been used for each processing activity.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office which enforces data protection laws: https://ico.org.uk/concerns

Data security and retention

We minimise the amount of personal data we keep about you and the period of time we hold it for.

In some cases, we retain records for the length of time that we are legally obliged to do so (for example, invoices, payment information, job application and monitoring information, minutes of general meetings and trustee decisions). In other cases, we apply our retention schedule when we no longer require personal data and ensure its secure deletion or disposal.

We make sure that we don’t collect more personal information than we need in order to carry out our activities and review our practices regularly.

When we use third party services and cloud services to process personal data we take due diligence to make sure that they are reputable and have appropriate data protection practices.

Cookies and Analytics

We collect information about your visits to our sites, including where available, your IP address, operating system and browser type. The data cannot be used to identify any individual. To help us gather this information we use cookies; small files stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies allow us to improve our site and deliver a better service.

Our sites use:

  • NICVA website session cookie: A session cookie to store your session id, this cookie is unique to your visit and is required for logging into the site or using the support, comment and booking forms on the site.
  • NICVA website Javascript cookie: A JavaScript cookie which flags up whether or not you have JavaScript enabled (this expires when you close your browser)
  • AddThis sharing cookies: These cookies enable the sharing features to work on NICVA's website. The AddThis feature allows you to easily share links to articles you like, via sites such as twitter, facebook, etc. Find out more on the AddThis website. Find out about Twitter's use of data here.
  • Google Analytics cookies: We use Google Analytics, a popular web analytics service provided by Google Inc. Google uses cookies to collect and analyse information about how the website is used. Google undertakes not to associate your IP address with other data held by Google. Find out more about Google Analytics here.

If you do not wish to accept cookies you can activate the appropriate settings on your browser, however, you may be unable to access some parts of our sites. To find out more about cookies and how they can be turned off, visit www.aboutcookies.org. We will keep your information confidential except where disclosure is required and permitted by law.

Links to other websites

This privacy notice does not cover any websites linked to from within our own suite of websites (nicva.org, communityni.org, grant-tracker.org, scopeni.nicva.org)

Changes to this privacy notice

We may change this privacy notice from time to time by updating this page to reflect changes in the law, the type of work we do, and our privacy practices.  We will notify our members and other stakeholders of any meaningful changes to our privacy practice via our website, email, and other digital channels.

This privacy notice was last updated on 24 January 2019.

Summary of changes

24 January 2019: use of personal data through the MediaConnect programme and how data may be shared under legal obligations.

14 May 2018: streamlined this Privacy Notice to make information clear and ih accordance with GDPR.

Contact Us

You can contact our Data Protection Officer using one of the following channels:

  • Email: [email protected]
  • Address: NICVA, 61 Duncairn Gardens, Belfast. BT15 2GB
  • Phone: 028 9087 7777