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We want everyone who supports us, or who comes to us for support, to feel confident and comfortable with how any personal information you share with us will be looked after or used. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information (this means any information that identifies or could identify you).

The ASC Privacy Policy may change so please remember to check back from time to time.

  1. Who we are
  2. How we collect information about you
  3. Information we collect and why we use it
  4. Profiling: making our work more unique to you
  5. Legal basis for using your information
  6. Marketing
  7. Sharing your Information
  8. Keeping your information safe
  9. How long we hold your information for
  10. Your rights
  11. Cookies
  12. Monitoring

1. Who we are

ASC are committed to protecting your personal information and making every effort to ensure that your personal information is processed in a fair, open and transparent manner.

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

  • Writing to The Chief Executive, ASC, 13-15 Pine Street, London EC1R 0JG
  • Calling us on 020 3316 8113
  • Emailing to [email protected]

References to “we”, “us”, or “our” in this Privacy Policy are references to Action for Stammering Children, a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales, registered company number: 2328627; and a charity registered in England and Wales, registered charity number: 801171.

Action for Stammering Children is registered under the Data Protection Act 1998 as a Data Controller under number Z3588574.

2. How we collect information about you

Everything we do, we do to ensure that children and young people across the UK that stammer have access to effective services and support to help them meet the challenges created by their stammer . We want to make sure you receive the communications that are most relevant to you, be it through visiting our website or receiving emails, communicating with us via social media, video or voice calls. We want to make sure you receive the best possible experience when you join the ASC community, e.g. by becoming a supporter, attending our events, or taking part in our projects.

We collect information from you in the following ways: 

When you interact with us directly: This could be if you ask us about our activities, register with us for an event, make a donation to us, ask a question about ASC, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you phone us (audio or video call), visit our website, or get in touch through the post, social media or in person. 

When you interact with us through third parties: This could be if you provide a donation through a third party such as Just Giving or one of the other third parties that we work with and provide your consent for your personal information to be shared with us. It might be that you and/or your child participate in one of the projects that we deliver in collaboration with our project partners, and you consent for our project partner to share your personal information with us for the purpose of sending you information about our fundarsiing campaigns, events and projects.  

When you visit our website: We gather general information which might include the pages you visit most. We may track which pages you visit when you click on links in emails from us. We also use “cookies” to help our site run effectively. There are more details below – see ‘Cookies’. 

We use this information to make improvements and to ensure we provide the best service and experience for you. Wherever possible we use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website. 

From other information that is available to the public: In order to tailor our communications with you to your background and interests we may collect information about you from publicly available sources. 

3. Information we collect and why we use it

Personal Information

Personal information we collect includes details such as your name, age, email address, postal address, telephone number, as well as information you provide in any communications between us.  You will have given us this information whilst contacting ASC, making a donation, registering for an event, participating in one of our projects, interacting with our website or any of the other ways to interact with us. 

We will use this information: 

  • To send you our monthly e-newsletter 
  • To share opportunities to participate in our community, for example invitiations to events, information about fundraising campaigns, and news about our projects. 
  • To process your donations or other payments, to claim Gift Aid on your donations and verify any financial transactions. 
  • To update you with important administrative messages about your donation, an event, project participation, or services or goods you have requested. 
  • To keep an accurate and up to date record of your relationship with us. 

 If you do not provide this information, we will not be able to process your donation.  

We may also use your personal information to contact you about our work and how you can support ASC.  

Sensitive Personal Information

Data Protection Law recognises that some categories of personal information are more sensitive. An example of this is ethnic origin. If we collect information that is more sensitive then we will only use this information to identify trends and we will not share this information without your express consent.

4. Legal basis for using your information

In most cases, we will only use your personal information where we have your informed consent to do so or because we need to use it in order to fulfil a contract with you. 

However, there are other lawful reasons that allow us to process your personal information and one of those is called ‘legitimate interests’. This means that the reason that we are processing information is because there is a legitimate interest for ASC to process your information to help us to achieve our work as a charity. 

When you make a donation to us, we will contact you to confirm and thank you for your donation. In these instances, we are processing your data under the lawful basis of legitimate interest. This is because we believe that it is important for you to know that your donation has been received and to have written confirmation for your records. As a donor, we also believe you have a right to understand how your donation has been used to support our work, and therefore, from time to time, we may send you updates about our charitable activities. It will be possible to opt out of these communications at any time either by clicking ‘unsubscribe’ or contacting us directly.  

Whenever we process your Personal Information under the ‘legitimate interest’ lawful basis we make sure that we take into account your rights and interests and will not process your personal information if we feel that there is an imbalance. 

There may be instances in which an individual shares information that raises concerns about the safety and welfare of that individual. This may occur when a beneficiary is taking part in one of our projects, during discussions on the charity’s social media platforms, at an event, or when beneficiaries interact with us directly via phone, email, social media messaging, video call, or webchat. In such instances, ASC staff and volunteers will adhere to our Safeguarding Policies and Procedures. This may mean that we need to share your personal information with the relevant authority for your own protection. In these instances, we will be processing your data under the lawful basis of protecting an individual’s vital interests. 

 5. Marketing

We may contact you about our work and how you can support ASC by phone, email, post or text message, but you can stop us sending you these communication at any time by contacting info@stammeringchildren.org or clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the relevant digital communication. 

6. Sharing your Information

The personal information we collect about you will mainly be used by our staff (and volunteers) at ASC so that they can support you.  

For some of our projects in which we have partnered with external organisatons to deliver expert services, we may enter into a data sharing agreement with the partner organisation. This will be made clear to you when you sign up to a particular project. If a data sharing agreement is in place, this means that personal data that you consent to be collected by our project partner will be shared securely with ASC. The purpose for which your data is being shared will be made clear when you are asked for informed consent to process your data.  

We will never sell or share 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. 

7. Keeping your information safe

We take looking after your information very seriously. 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. We also meet the standards for the Cyber Essentials Plus Scheme (certificate no. 33925e34-ee96-4e24-8764-f07596d57df8), which means we have put in place advanced cyber-security measures to safeguard personal data. Only specified employees of the charity have access to our secure databases, where we store your personal data.  

Nevertheless, unfortunately the transmission of information across the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our utmost to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to our site. 

Our websites may contain links to external sites that may be of interest to you. 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. 

Any debit or credit card details which we receive via our website are processed securely by our payment providers who are fully GDPR compliant. In employing their services for processing online donations, we have entered into a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) with them.  

8. How long we hold your information for

We only keep personal data as long as is reasonable and necessary for the relevant activity, which may be to fulfil statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid). Typically, personal data that you share with us will be kept for 10 years. We will contact you when we are approaching this deadline to ask whether you consent for us to retain your data. From time to time, we may also contact you to check that the information we hold about you is correct. You can request we delete your data at any time 

9. Your rights

You have various rights in respect of the personal information we hold about you – these are set out in more detail below.  If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting [email protected] or calling 020 33168113.  You can also make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, https://ico.org.uk/:

  • Access to your personal information: You have the right to request access to a copy of the personal information that we hold about you, along with information on what personal information we use, why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it for and whether it has been used for any automated decision making. You can make a request for access free of charge.  Please make all requests for access in writing, and provide us with evidence of your identity.
  • Right to object: You can object to our processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.  Please contact us as noted above, providing details of your objection.
  • Consent: If you have given us your consent to use personal information (for example, for marketing), you can withdraw your consent at any time.
  • Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information held about you.
  • Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, you have withdrawn consent, or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
  • Portability: You can ask us to provide you or a third party with some of the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form, so it can be easily transferred.
  • Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the personal information we use about you where you have asked for it to be erased or where you have objected to our use of it.

Please note, some of these rights only apply in certain circumstances and we may not be able to fulfil every request.

10. Cookies

Cookie‘ is a name for a small file, usually of letters and numbers, which is downloaded onto your device, like your computer, mobile phone or tablet when you visit a website.

They let websites recognise your device, so that the sites can work more effectively, and also gather information about how you use the site. A cookie, by itself, can’t be used to identify you.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to improve the user experience.

We use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use this site. We do this to make sure it’s meeting its users’ needs and to understand how we could do it better. Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information (e.g. your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. We do not allow Google to use or share our analytics data.

Cookies are also used elsewhere on the site, including by the content management system we use, WordPress. These improve things by remembering settings, so you don’t have to keep re-entering them whenever you visit a new page, log in or leave a comment.

Our cookies aren’t used to identify you personally. They’re just here to make the site work better for you.

No cookies, please

You can opt out of all our cookies (except the strictly necessary ones). Find out how to control and delete cookies in your browser.

But, if you choose to refuse all cookies, our website may not function for you as we would like it to.

If you have any questions about how we use cookies, please contact [email protected] or call 020 3316 8113