Last updated 10th November 2023

This document sets out the details of Strength & Stem’s Privacy Policy, in relation to information collected about you on our website (www.strengthandstem.co.uk and www.strengthandstem.com) , as well as through other means including in person, by email, or by telephone. We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This policy explains when, how, and why we collect personal information about people who visit our website, take part in our programmes, volunteer with us, and donate money to us; how we keep this information secure, and the conditions under which we may share it with others.

Who we are

Strength & Stem is a charity and social enterprise that uses floristry to help female survivors of human trafficking become restored from their trauma, empowered for the future, and able to maintain a good quality of life.

The Strength & Stem Ltd (charity) registered office address is 155 Taybridge Road, London, England, SW11 5PY. We are a registered charity number 1192080 and a company limited by guarantee in England and Wales no. 12165279. The Strength & Stem Flowers (social enterprise) registered office address is 81 Rectory Lane, Byfleet, Surrey, KT14 7LX. We are a registered company number 14218713.

The name Strength & Stem is used as an umbrella term to refer to both entities (Strength & Stem Ltd and Strength & Stem Flowers) which operate to fulfil the same mission.

For further information about our privacy practices, please contact us by emailing hello@strengthandstem.com

How and when we get your personal information

We collect personal information that you provide when you contact us, interact with us, or use our website. This can include when you sign up to receive newsletters from us via our email mailing list, when you decide to donate to us, or when you volunteer with us.

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you in one of the following ways:

Through direct interaction: This could be if you donate to us, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity, or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you visit our website or get in touch through the post or in person.

Through interaction with third parties: This could be if you provide a donation to Strength & Stem through a third party such as the Charities Aid Foundation, JustGiving, DPD or one of the other third parties that we work with and provide your consent for your personal information to be shared with us.

Through our website: This could be if you sign up to receive newsletters from us via our email mailing list. We also gather general information which might include which pages you visit most often, and which services, events or information is of most interest to you. We may also 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 the Strength & Stem website easier to use and improve our service. Wherever possible we use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website.

The type of personal information we collect

We collect and store personal information from you when we are required to do so, such as to fulfil a contract you have with us; and when you have opted to give it to us, such as to be kept informed about our work by email newsletters.

The following list of information is data we gather directly from you through our website (www.strengthandstem.co.uk or www.strengthandstem.com), over the phone or by post, or through third party processors such as MailChimp or the Charities Aid Foundation CAF Donate, which is usually collected when you make a donation, sign up to our mailing list, apply for a volunteering or job opportunity, or interact with us:

 ·         Your title, name, and date of birth.

·         Your postal address and/or billing address.

·         Your email address and phone number.

·         Your place of work.

·         Your IP address and information on what pages you accessed (see Cookies policy below).

·         Your current professional interests or activities which may be related to Strength & Stem’s work.

·         contact preferences.

·         fundraising event registration, attendance, or ticket purchases.

·         gifts and donation information, such as Standing Order bank details if applicable.

·         Gift Aid status.

·         details of correspondence sent to you and received from you by email

·         donor status and donation assessment information.

·         employment information and professional activities.

·         any other information provided by yourself, at the request of Strength & Stem.

What we do with your information

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are contractual necessity, consent, and legitimate interest. Which lawful basis depends on your interaction with us. For our relationships with donors and funders, we generally rely on consent and will use your most recent contact preferences to ensure we contact you only when you have asked us to, and in the ways, you have told us to do so. You are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting hello@strengthandstem.com

Other lawful reasons that allow us to process your personal information include 'legitimate interests'. This means that the reason that we are processing information is because there is a legitimate interest for Strength & Stem to process your information to help us to achieve our aims of empowering female survivors of human trafficking. Whenever we process your Personal Information under the ‘legitimate interest' lawful basis we make sure that we consider your rights and interests and will not process your personal information if we feel that there is an imbalance.

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

We use the information that you have given us to:

·         Process your donations, to claim Gift Aid on your donations and verify any financial transactions.

·         To send you promotional, marketing, or fundraising information by electronic means, when you have told us you wish to receive these by opting into our mailing list or where we have an existing customer relationship with you, and we have a legitimate interest. These types of communications can include:

o    Informing you of other services or events related to Strength & Stem’s work, such as forthcoming projects or upcoming fundraising events.

o    News and updates about Strength & Stem including via email newsletter as well as information on our fundraising activity.

o    Surveys about our work and opportunities to be involved in market research related to Strength & Stem

·         To update you with important administrative messages about your donation or an event.

·         To fulfil a contract, such as completing a reservation to a fundraising event made online, including sending payment receipts.

·         To keep a record of your relationship with us.

·         To comply with the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016 and follow the recommendations of the official regulator of charities, the Charity Commission, which require us to identify and verify the identity of supporters who make major gifts so we can assess any risks associated with accepting their donations.

·         Where you volunteer with us, to administer the volunteering arrangement.

Tools may be used to monitor the effectiveness of our communications with you, including email tracking, which records when an e-newsletter from us is opened and/or how many links are clicked within the message. The data from this tracking is generally used in an anonymised form through MailChimp.

 You can opt out of all our communications at any point simply by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ button on the bottom of any email which we send to you. Alternatively, you can update your contact preferences for each type of mailing you receive by clicking the link which appears alongside ‘unsubscribe’. You may also make this request by contacting us directly by emailing hello@strengthandstem.com    

Sharing your information

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.

Your data will only be shared or passed to a third party on a temporary basis to provide an essential service (see examples below). Any third party with whom data has been shared in this way will be contractually required to ensure your data is secure and will not be retained once that service has been fulfilled. Whilst Strength & Stem is responsible for the safety of your data, we are not responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other organisations or websites, even if accessed using links through our website. It is recommended that you check the policy of each external website you visit and contact them directly if you have any concerns or questions.

Examples of such purposes and the companies we work with include:

-          CAF Donate, for the processing and storage of Direct Debit information for regular donations set up and made through their website

-          Google and Facebook, to identify similar customers to our audience, or to provide personalised advertising through third party websites. The data, which is shared with these advertisers, through visiting our website, is anonymised to protect your personal information.

-          Squarespace, to store your email when you sign up to our newsletters

How we store your personal information

We have security measures in place to protect the personal information that we have under our control, and to protect it from unauthorised access or improper use. Data you share with us through our website is encrypted. We do not store any payment information ourselves. All Strength & Stem employees who have access to, and are associated with the processing of data, are legally obliged to respect the confidentiality of our volunteer, staff, and donors’ personal information.

We will retain your personal information on our IT systems only for as long as is reasonably necessary to carry out the purposes set out in this privacy notice, and to fulfil our legal obligations. We will not keep more information than we need. The retention period will vary according to the purpose we are holding your information for, however in general we will store your data for up to five years from the date of your last interaction with us e.g., the last time you asked for information from us, donated, or attended an event. After five years, we will remove all personal data we hold on to, except for the bare minimum we need to keep such as your name and donation history. If you exercise your right to be forgotten, we will ensure that your personal information is removed from our database, except where our legal obligations require us to retain it (such as with Gift Aid claims). In these instances, we will retain the minimum information necessary, and for the legally required length of time only. Please contact us using the contact details at the bottom of this notice should you wish to find out more about how long we will keep your information.

Our current IT systems for storing personal data include Microsoft Office (Word and Excel) and Squarespace, which are all password protected.

Cookies

To make the Strength & Stem website easier to use and improve our service, we sometimes place small pieces of information on your computer. These are known as cookies, and they are used by most major websites. Strength & stem currently uses cookies when you visit this website: www.strengthandstem.co.uk or www.strengthandstem.com , hosted by Squarespace. You can reject the use of cookies by going to the settings section of your web browser, however, please note that this may limit your use of this website and some key functionality.

Appendix

Your data protection rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

Your right of access - You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.

Your right to rectification - You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.

Your right to erasure - You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to restriction of processing - You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to object to processing - You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to data portability - You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us at hello@strengthandstem.com if you wish to make a request.

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at hello@strengthandstem.com