The Royal Philharmonic Society is a UK charity, Registration Number 213693 and a company limited by guarantee, Registration Number 00186522 with registered offices at 48 Great Marlborough Street, London W1F 7BB.

The Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) is registered with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). This document explains how our communications are made in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). By using this website, you consent to the collection and use of your information under the terms of this policy as in force at the time of use.

The terms “you”, “your” and “yours” means you as a user of our websites www.philharmonicsociety.uk and www.rpsawards.com or our other services. The term “we” refers to the Royal Philharmonic Society.

The Royal Philharmonic Society is committed to ensuring that the information you share with us is recorded accurately, retained securely and used only according to your relationship, consent and interests with us. The main purposes for which we process your personal data are:

• to provide the services or information that you have requested
• for administration purposes e.g. to administer donations, Gift Aid and applications
• to further our charitable aims and for fundraising
• to gather feedback
  

PROCESSING YOUR DATA
The ways in which we use your information (e.g. name, email address, postal address, phone number, date of birth), depending on your relationship with us, include:

• notifying you of our services, events or opportunities which may be of interest to you, your organisation, or people you may know;
• notifying you (if you as an individual have opted in) of our latest news, updates and digital content via e-newsletters and occasionally postal newsletters;
• sending information and communications about our fundraising campaigns and other ways in which you can donate to and support the RPS;
• sending you relevant communications based upon your relationship with the RPS;
• contacting you business-to-business, e.g. at your institution about opportunities relevant to students/people there, or you at your organisation to invite you to nominate for the RPS Awards or RPS Honours;
• processing a donation we may receive from you and to communicate with you in regard to the donation (this could include asking you whether you would like to sign a Gift Aid declaration to allow us to claim Gift Aid on your donation, and retaining this information to claim Gift Aid on future donations);
• contacting you about any cancellations, amendments or additional information in respect of any tickets you book for our events;
• providing you with the tickets, services or information you have requested from us. This could include fulfilling terms and conditions you have entered into with us, or servicing your Membership;
• tracking user visits to our website, recording navigation across our website and tracking whether our emails are received and read;
• for customer service or administrative purposes, including the management of any feedback or complaints;
• where it is authorised by law;
• for security purposes, your safety and the safety of others.

We collect only sufficient information to enable us to carry out these services, and may analyse this data in order to continue to improve our understanding of our target audiences and of our supporters.

If you are under 18 years of age, we recommend that you do not submit any personal data to us, or indeed anyone via any media, unless you have parental or guardian consent.

We do not usually collect ‘sensitive personal data’ from you unless there is a clear reason for doing so, such as where we need this information to ensure that we provide appropriate facilities or support, to enable you to enjoy everything we offer. Examples of sensitive personal data we may hold could include health information that comes as a result of knowing your access or other requirements when engaging with our events, activities and programmes.

When applying for our opportunities, you may be invited to fill in a diversity and inclusion monitoring form. Any data you provide in this (e.g. race, health etc.) is for monitoring purposes only, and is given and stored anonymously. Moreover, you are not obliged to provide us with this data if you don’t want to.

We are a registered charity with no regular public subsidy and we rely on donations, grants and sponsorship from individuals, trusts and foundations and businesses to maintain our operation. We believe it is in the Royal Philharmonic Society’s legitimate interest in pursuit of our charitable objectives to collect information on potential new supporters, donors or organisations who might be interested in becoming involved with us. This might include undertaking research from publicly available sources regarding individuals who are known to be supporters of music and the arts generally, or who are known to have been involved with similar organisations, are recognised philanthropists, or people with a public profile. We may also occasionally use information sources in the public domain to ensure that the data we hold about you is accurate and up to date.

COMMUNICATIONS AND EMAILING
If you opt-out/unsubscribe from our mailings, we may still keep your contact details on record to contact you for business purposes (unless you instruct us otherwise) or in relation to a service, ticket, information or opportunity you have applied for or requested (e.g. regarding your Membership status).

Given our obligation to our charitable objectives noted in the previous section, based on the frequency of your visits, booking, donation or purchasing patterns, we may email you to promote our Membership to you, ask you for additional support for our work, or contact you about events or opportunities that we believe will be of interest to you.

RETENTION OF PERSONAL DATA
We do not keep your personal data for any longer than is necessary for us to carry out our services or our charitable objectives. Relevant to your interaction with us, your personal data will be retained on the following bases, and if we do not need to keep your personal data for archival, legal or business reasons, we will delete or suppress your personal information:

• Ticket bookings: your personal data will be securely stored for no longer than three years up to the end of our financial year (in August) in which your most recent booking or active engagement with an email communication with us occurred.
• Applications for opportunities: your personal data will be securely stored for no longer than ten years up to the end of our financial year after you last submit an application for one of our opportunities. If you are awarded an RPS grant, commission, award or prize, or are accepted onto one of our development programmes, your personal data will be stored for as long as deemed necessary in respect of our charitable objectives.
• Membership/Donations: Your personal data will be securely stored while you are a registered Member of the RPS, so that we may carry out the services and benefits as part of your Membership. If you make a one-off donation to us, your data will be stored for no more than ten years since you were last active with us up to the end of our financial year. If your Membership lapses, your Member data will be kept until the end of the financial year in which you lapsed, and we shall hold your name on file for archival purposes as a former Member of the Society. If you sign a Gift Aid declaration with us pertaining to past and future donations, either as a Member or non-Member, we will keep this on record until we receive further notice from you.
• Job applications: if you are unsuccessful in your job application, your personal information will be held for no longer than a year up to the end of our financial year after we’ve finished recruiting for the post for which you applied. If you were selected for interview, we may hold your information for up to two years until the end of the financial year, principally on the basis that we often help those who aren’t successful where we can. If you commence employment with the RPS, your data will be processed in accordance with your employment contract and our other applicable policies.

All data collected via forms on our website is stored securely on our website for no more than six months in order for us to carry out the services for which you have applied. Any bookings.

SHARING OF PERSONAL DATA
We do not share your personal data with third parties for marketing purposes. We may share information you provide (e.g. in an application form) with artistic partners, collaborators or professionals. This would only be to the extent necessary to process and adjudicate your application, and provide you the opportunity for which you have applied. We may provide your information to contractors and suppliers who provide services on our behalf. Again, this would only be to the extent necessary to enable you to receive those services that they are conducting on our behalf.

When registering as a Member, you will be invited to complete a Direct Debit mandate to pay for your Membership. This data is processed and managed by GoCardless.

Personal data acquired through you registering for Membership is collected via our content management system (Craft CMS / Freeform), and is stored securely on our customer relationship manager system (Salesforce) and our mailing provider (MailChimp).

The payments for any tickets booked via our website which incur a cost are processed and managed by Stripe.

SECURITY
Data security is very important to us, and to protect your data we have taken suitable measures to safeguard and secure the data we collect. We allow only staff who need to process your data to have access and store your data on our own servers or on third party servers in the Cloud (see ‘Sharing of Personal Data’ above). However, by submitting your personal information to us, you acknowledge that we cannot guarantee the security or confidentiality of your personal information as it may be compromised by unauthorised access, hardware or software failure or other relevant factors.

RIGHT OF ACCESS
At any time, you are entitled to ask for a copy of the information we have about you, check whether the information we have about you is correct, withdraw your consent to be contacted, or have your data erased completely.

LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES
The privacy policies of any other websites which you access through links from the RPS website are not controlled by the RPS nor subject to the RPS Privacy Policy.

COOKIES
We may store information about your user preferences (e.g. preferred text size) using cookies (files which are sent to us by your computer or other access devices) which we can access when you visit our site in future. We do this to enhance you interaction with our website. If you want to delete any cookies that are already on your computer, please refer to instructions for your file management software to locate the file or directory that stores cookies. If you want to prevent cookies being stored on your computer in future, you may do so by referring to your internet browser’s instructions by clicking on the “Help” menu.

HOW TO CONTACT US
If you have any comments or questions about our website, products, services or this Privacy Policy, please contact us here.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY
You are advised to visit this page periodically in order to keep up to date with any changes. By continuing to use our services you will be deemed to have accepted such changes.