Wantage Literary Festival Policies

Safeguarding Young Persons and Vulnerable Adults

As a rule, we ask that all children under 14 (and anyone over 14 requiring specialist help), are accompanied by a capable adult. We do not anticipate a situation where any of the team will require specialist training to care for an individual attendee. We will however ensure that, a member of the team who has a valid portable DBS, is present at any children's events and also, where possible, at events which may be of interest to Young Person’s 14+ who may attend without a guardian.

Equality and Diversity

The Trustees and Volunteers at the Wantage Literary Festival are committed to encouraging equality and diversity and eliminating unlawful discrimination. We aim for the charity to be truly representative of all sections of society and our supporters, to feel respected regardless of their taste in books!

Data Protection

We will use your email address to keep you informed of the latest Wantage Literary Festival news and offers. We will keep your details secure, never sharing these with third parties. We will always remain compliant with any data protection regulations including GDPR (May 2018).

Health & Safety

The Festival team will honour the existing Health & Safety procedure that is in place for each venue used. For outdoor events, where the venue is currently undecided or where multiple venues will be used, the festival will produce a separate risk assessment for the event concerned.

Wantage Literary Festival is committed to the promotion of the arts, advancement of education for the benefit of the public by the promotion of literature, language and the arts in particular through a literary festival in Wantage, Oxfordshire.

Wantage Literary Festival (herein referred to as “WLF”) (registered charity 1165315 (England and Wales)) is the data controller of any personal information you give us. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as a Data Controller for the personal data that we hold and process. Our registration number is ICO:00015672843. When we refer to “we” or “our”, we are referring to WLF.

This Privacy Policy explains what to expect when WLF collects, uses and/or shares your personal information, and your rights regarding it. We are determined to do nothing that would infringe your rights or undermine your trust. We encourage you to read this notice carefully and if you’d like to find out more or get further clarification, please contact our team who will be happy to assist.

Our contact information is:

Email: WantageLitFest@gmail.com

Address: 1 Hamilton Drive, East Challow, Wantage OX12 9JX

Website: https://www.wantageliteraryfestival.co.uk/

The information you give us

You may give us information about yourself by, for example:

• Using, or visiting or providing feedback on our website
• Making an enquiry or providing feedback
• Corresponding with us by phone, email, filling in a form, or otherwise
• Booking tickets for a WLF event
• Making a donation
• Making a purchase
• Giving your taxation status (for Gift Aid purposes)
• Signing up for our newsletter
• Entering survey(s) or participating in research project(s)
• Offering to help as a volunteer, fundraiser or trustee
• Applying for a job or via your employment with us

We may collect some or all of the following personal information that you provide:

• Name
• Date of birth
• Address
• Email address
• Phone number
• Payment or bank details
• Device IP address
• If you are applying for a job with us or are employed by us, we may collect your education, training and previous employment details

When completing a form on our website or communicating with us, we may invite you to opt-in to future contact by email, phone or post if you wish to do so.

Other information on your browsing behaviour, through the use of cookies, on our website does not enable us to identify you personally. However, it does allow us to track usage of our website so that we can improve it.

We use cookies and collect IP addresses of visitors to our website and collect statistics on website visits both at a web server level and using Google Analytics. For further information, please see our cookies policy which is accessible via our website https://www.wantageliteraryfestival.co.uk/

Our Lawful Basis for processing your information

The UK General Data Protection Regulation (“UK GDPR”) requires all organisations that process personal data to have a lawful basis for doing so. WLF relies on the following as the lawful basis to collect and use your personal information:

• If you have consented to the processing of your personal information. For example by making an enquiry or communicating with us
• Performance of a contract with you or to take steps to enter into a contract with you. For example when you purchase a ticket for a WLF event, when we make a booking for you to perform at an event or your employment with us.
• The legitimate interests of the WLF. For example, furthering our charitable purpose or ensuring our events run smoothly.
• Compliance with a legal obligation.

We will be open with you and tell you how we will collect and use your information:

• Information given for a particular purpose will only be used for that purpose unless you’ve been otherwise informed and given your permission where relevant.
• We won’t ask for more information than we need for the purposes for which we’re collecting it.
• We’ll update our records when you tell us that your details have changed
• We’ll periodically review your personal information to ensure we don’t keep it for longer than is necessary.
• We’ll ensure that your information is securely disposed of at the end of the appropriate retention period.
• We observe your rights under applicable privacy and data protection laws and will ensure that queries relating to privacy issues are dealt with promptly and transparently.
• We’ll train our staff on their privacy obligations.
• We’ll ensure we have appropriate physical and technological security measures to protect your information regardless of where it’s held.
• We will delete or anonymise your information at your request unless:
• There is an unresolved issue, such as a complaint.
• We are legally required not to; or
• There are overriding legitimate business interests, including but not limited to fraud prevention and protecting customers’ safety and security.

Sensitive personal information

We do not ordinarily process sensitive personal information. This includes information which reveals your race or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, data concerning health, sex life and sexual orientation.

We will only process the information with your explicit consent, if it is manifestly made public by you or if it is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims or whenever courts are acting in their judicial capacity.

How we may use this information

WLF may use your personal information for the following purposes:

• To provide you with services and information that you request from us
• To process or support payments for goods and services
• To monitor and improve our service to you (via research activities/surveys)
• To provide you with information that you have consented to receive, including news, updates and events
• To investigate and address any of your concerns
• To notify you of changes to our website or services
• Administer the charity in line with our legal obligations, including to the charity commission and other regulators
• To monitor the traffic on the website in accordance with our cookie policy
• As part of a recruitment process or employment, when applicable
• To make statutory returns as required by appropriate bodies.
• As otherwise required or permitted by law

Where we collect information by way of feedback, a survey, or research activities, this will only ever be published anonymously, unless otherwise agreed with you.

If you are offering WLF goods or services, your information may be processed in relation to such offers or contracts.

Information we receive from other sources

We do not buy or use mailing lists from third parties.

We work closely with a small number of third parties in order for us to provide a specific service to you. They are contracted as our data processors and may receive information about you from them when you have agreed for this to be shared with us:

• Zettle
• Ticketsource
• Seven Design Associates
• Mailchimp
• Wantage Bookshop

Marketing Permissions

Email marketing: We will ask for your permission to contact you by email for marketing purposes.

Postal marketing: From time to time we may send you information about our work if you have shared your address with us unless you have told us you would prefer not to receive this information by post.

You can update your permission and contact preferences by emailing Festivaldirector@wantageliteraryfestival.co.uk. You can also click the ‘unsubscribe’ link included in each email communication we send.

Job Applicants and WLF employees and volunteers

We use information supplied to WLF to process job or volunteer applications. Personal information about unsuccessful candidates will be held for six months after the recruitment exercise has finished. It will then be securely destroyed or deleted. Once a person has taken up employment with WLF, we will hold personnel information about their employment. The information will be kept secure and will only be used for purposes directly relevant to the person’s employment duties. We will keep this as required by our retention policy, as set out below, and then securely destroy or delete it.

Who we share your information with

We do not sell, share or exchange your data with another organisation for funding or marketing purposes. The only times we share your information are:

• Where you have consented for us to do so
• Exceptionally, we may need to disclose personal information to comply with legal and regulatory obligations for safeguarding or other regulatory reasons. This may include investigating, preventing, or taking action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, or situations involving potential threats to the physical safety, property or rights of any person.
• We sometimes need to use selected and trusted third parties to handle some of our services on our behalf. These organisations are only allowed to use your personal information for the specific purpose they have been contracted to provide. For example, processing your payment for event tickets. We require third parties we work with to comply with privacy principles as part of our contract with them.

We may use standard third-party web analytics services (such as Google Analytics) so we can monitor and report on the effectiveness of our website, so we can improve it. This involves collecting anonymous information about your computer, including your IP address, operating system and browser type and includes, for example, the number of users viewing pages on the site, but it does not identify you individually to us.

We use third party providers to host our website, email provider and data storage. These third-party providers are:

• Seven Design Associates
• Gmail
• Dropbox

We have satisfied ourselves that data transferred to third parties is fully protected and safeguarded as required by the General Data Protection Regulation.

Information rights and choices

You can contact WLF at Festivaldirector@wantageliteraryfestival.co.uk to:

• Correct the information we hold about you.
• Change your preferences relating to marketing communications from WLF and withdraw your consent at any time.
• Make a request to access your personally identifiable information that’s held by us and maintained in our database.
• Receive a copy of the personal information you have provided to us or have this information sent to a third party.

Depending on the circumstances, you may also have the right to:

• Request deletion of personal information we hold about you
• Request restriction of processing of such information
• Object to the processing of such information
• Request a copy of such information in a portable format.

Any requests regarding personal data will be dealt with in a reasonable time frame, depending on the complexity of the request. We would aim to deal with simple requests within 7 days.

Security and safe storage of your personal information

We take the security and safe storage of your personal data very seriously and endeavour to protect your personal data. We cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted over the internet; this is at your own risk.

We aim to keep any information/data supplied by you to us or collected by us, transferred and stored by us, within the European Economic Area and to select third party processors, who also keep data within the European Economic Area.

We may monitor the use and content of emails, phone calls and secure messages sent from and received by us so that we can identify and take legal action against the unlawful or improper use of our systems. For example, impersonation of WLF, the transmission of computer viruses and attempts to prevent our website or its services from working.

People who contact us through social media

We use third party providers Meta, Meta/Facebook Messenger, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. Private or direct messages will be stored in line with our data retention policy set out below and will not be shared with any other organisations.

Children’s data

If a child under 16 years old contacts the charity, their information will only be used to deal with their enquiry. We recognise the need to protect the privacy and safety of children under 16.

How long we keep your data

We will retain and process your personal information for as long as necessary to comply with our legal obligations.

We will normally store all your information until at least 7 years from, for example the date of the last provision of service or goods, the date of the last payment made or received or the date on which your employment terminates, whichever is the latest. This is because it may be needed for potential legal proceedings. At this point any further retention will be reviewed and the information will be marked for deletion or further retention for a further period. The latter retention period is likely to occur only where the information is needed for legal proceedings, regulatory matters or active complaints. Deletion will be carried out as soon as reasonably practicable after the information is marked for deletion.

Names and contact details held for marketing purposes will be stored indefinitely or until we become aware or are informed that the individual has ceased to be a potential customer.

Personal information of employees or volunteers will be stored for 7 years after the individual ceases employment with or volunteering for WLF.

Third party websites

Our website may, from time to time, contain links to and from third-party websites. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Reporting your concerns or complaints

If you have concerns about the way we handle your personal data, you can contact the ICO or raise a complaint via WantageLitFest@gmail.com.

If you want more information about your rights under the UK GDPR please see the Guidance from the Information Commissioners Office on Individual's rights under the GDPR.

If you want to exercise any of these rights, we may need to ask you to provide other information so that you can be identified, for example proof of identity and your address.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners’ Office if you are in the UK. The Information Commissioner’s Office can be contacted at http://ico.org.uk/concerns/.

Change to the Privacy Policy

We may change our Privacy policy from time to time. If or when changes are made, we will include them here, so be sure to check back occasionally.

30 January 2024