Leicester Church of Christ
LeicCoC New Logo

Leicester Church of Christ Privacy Policy

Who we are
The Leicester Church of Christ is an independent church congregation that meets and is registered at 9 Sanvey Lane, Leicester, LE2 8NG.  

Your personal information will be held by the Leicester Church of Christ (We, us, our). 

The law in the UK requires us to manage personal information in accordance with data protection principles.  This notice tells you what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we may share it with, steps we take to protect and secure it, your rights under data protection law and finally, how you can contact us with questions or concerns.
We are committed to the privacy of the personal information that is entrusted to us and we want to ensure you can exercise your privacy rights.

What personal information we may hold about you
We use a wide range of personal information about you that we have put into the following categories:

  • Contact – Information we can use to make contact with you and where you live.
  • Transactional – Information relating to payments, credit and debit payments.
  • Consents – Information relating to permissions, consents and contact preferences.
  • Disclosure & Baring Service (DBS) Checks – Information relating to checks completed on individuals within the church who work with children and vulnerable adults.
  • Course and Event Management – Information relating to your attendance at conferences, courses or special events you have attended.

Where we collect personal information from
We may collect personal information about you from the following sources:

  • In application forms you complete, from emails and letters you send us, when registering for events, courses and special events and when using our websites.
  • The Disclosure & Baring Service (DBS) when you ask to work with children or vulnerable adults.

What we use your personal information for
We will use your personal information for the following purposes:

  • Managing our relationship with you, including administering membership records; 
  • Responding to your enquiries and complaints;
  • Running the church in an effective way, including managing finance, maintaining accounts and records, business capability, planning, charity governance and audits;
  • Providing you with services and notifying you about either important changes or developments to the features and operation of those services;
  • Updating, consolidating, and improving the accuracy of our records;
  • Informing you of news, events, activities and associated ministries;
  • Ensuring we comply with the law for example when responding to court orders, or legal processes; to establish or exercise our legal rights or, defend against legal claims;
  • To investigate, prevent or detect crime or illegal activities and situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person or child;
  • HM Revenue & Customs or other authorities require it; and
  • Testing new systems and checking upgrades to existing systems.

Recipients of personal information
When we use your personal information in the ways described above, we may need to share it with other organisations outside our group of churches, as detailed below:

  • HM Revenue & Customs or other lawful authorities;
  • Our agents, service providers, contractors and others involved in running church events and activities;
  • Banks and other debit/credit card providers when managing payments or refunds.

We will never sell your personal information to third parties.

Holding and using your personal information
We will use your personal information to keep in touch with you, for example providing updates on church life including news about special events, services, courses, highlighting ways you can engage in church life and general information which we believe will be of interest to you, as well as information related to any roles you may carry out on our behalf.

We will ask all members to sign a consent form to hold your data, list you in our church directory, and to have permission to contact you, and we will always act upon your separate preferences.

This consent form also gives us permission to hold data about your children, and requires parental approval for all children under the age of 13.

We treat all data about children with extra sensitivity and not for distribution beyond those who have a genuine or legal need to know, including teachers and youth workers who may work directly with your children, or child protection agencies. All workers and helpers in our children’s ministry are DBS cleared, and strictly only those who are DBS cleared may work with our children at any time. This is also covered within our separate Children’s Policy.

We maintain a “Church Directory” which is circulated to all local Church Members who agree via the consent form above to be included and not to pass this Directory in whole or part to any parties outside those on the list. Only adults will appear on the “Church Directory”.

We also maintain a “Birthday Year Calendar” which will contain the first names of children and adults, and their birth dates, excluding year of birth, of all who consent to allowing their data to be included, and who similarly consent not to pass this “Birthday Year Calendar” in whole or part to any parties outside those on the list.
We will not contact you if you have asked us not to. 

You can ask us to stop sending you communications or change your contact preferences at any time by contacting us, using any convenient means.  
We will not provide information about you to organisations outside of the Leicester Church of Christ unless you have given us your explicit consent to do so.

How long will we retain your personal information?
We will continue to hold your personal information for as long as you wish to maintain a relationship with us.  You also have the right to ask us to delete your personal information if you believe we no longer have a valid reason to continue holding it.

Confidentiality and security of personal information
The security of your personal information is of paramount importance to us and we use a wide range of technical and organisational security measures to safeguard it, including physical, electronic, and procedural controls.
From time to time we may publish photographs or video, captured at church events and meetings, on our websites or social media to help publicise events or demonstrate church life.  We do not normally process personal information when using such content, but nonetheless want to provide you with the opportunity to object if you would rather not have images of yourself used in this way.  Please use the contact page link on this site, email or write to us at our registered address to object.  We will ask for your explicit consent when displaying your name alongside any such content.

Obtaining a copy of your personal information
You have the right of access copies of the personal information we hold about you by emailing us at:
[email protected]
If any personal information is inaccurate or incorrect, please let us know and we will correct it.

Other important Rights
You have the following additional rights:

  1. The right to request that we correct any personal information if it is found to be inaccurate.
  2. The right to request that your personal information is erased where we no longer have a valid basis to continue processing it.
  3. The right to withdraw your consent to us processing your personal information.
  4. The right to object to the processing of personal information in certain limited circumstances.
  5. The right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Contacting us about privacy concerns
If you have a privacy concern regarding us or this Privacy Policy, and if you cannot satisfactorily resolve it through the use of this website, you should contact us using the contact page link, email or by writing to us at our registered address.
In some instances, honouring your requests (for example requesting that we erase your personal information) may preclude your ability to use our website or access other services.
You can also contact the Information Commissioner’s Office on 0303 123 1113, via email (see https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/email/) or in writing at The Information Commissioners Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, SK9 5AF.

Changes to the Privacy Policy
If there is ever a change to how we use or intend to use your personal information, we will post that change to this policy and, where necessary, we will seek your consent to such new uses.
We keep our privacy policy under regular review.  This policy was last updated on 5th August 2023.

Cookies

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These are known as cookies; they often include an anonymous unique identifier that is sent to your browser from a web site’s computers and stored on your computer’s hard drive.

You can configure your browser to accept all cookies, reject all cookies, or notify you when a cookie is set.
However, if you reject all cookies, you may not be able to use our products or services that require you to “log in” and you may not be able to take full advantage of all our offerings.

These cookies are used to improve services for you, for example, by:

  • enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task;
  • recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested;
  • measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast;
  • analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with Woodlands Group of Churches website so we can make it better

We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you.

However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by our websites, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org/ which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your machine as well as more general information about cookies.

Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of our website.

If you wish to view your cookie code, just click on a cookie to open it. You’ll see a short string of text and numbers. The numbers are your ‘identification card’, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.

For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.

To opt-out of third-parties collecting any data regarding your interaction on our website, please refer to their websites for further information.