Privacy Policy

Makan is committed to safeguarding your privacy rights and ensuring that your personal data is protected. We are also committed to complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force on 25 May 2018. 

This Privacy Policy sets out how and why we obtain, use and protect personal information. ‘Personal information’, means any data that could be used directly or indirectly to identify you – for example your name, email, telephone number or your computer’s IP address. This policy also explains the control you have over your personal information and the procedures we have in place to protect it. It applies to personal information we collect through our website, events, workshops, marketing communications, including our website, email, SMS, in person, post and by telephone.

Makan Rights never sells or exchanges our supporters’ information with other organisations. We take responsibility for the personal information we collect about you and we aim to be transparent about how we handle it and give you control over it.

Who we are

Makan Rights is a charitable company limited by guarantee in England & Wales. Our company number is 10228520 and our charity registration is1169254. Our registered address is The Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, London, EC4A 3DE.

This Privacy Policy relates to information which is obtained by Makan Rights and for which Makan Rights is the Data Controller.

Our privacy policy principles

We consider your privacy in everything we do and have tried to make our privacy policy as clear and as accessible as possible. At Makan Rights we are committed to protecting your privacy and handling your personal information in the right way, as you would expect it to be handled:

• We will ask for or collect the personal information that we need to talk to you about our work – such as fundraising, donating, campaigning and volunteering, and to process transactions.
• We give you control over the personal information we hold about you to make sure it is accurate.
• We make sure your personal information is always secure and protected.
• We are fair and transparent about how we use the personal information we hold.
• We only ever use your personal information for the purpose that you trusted us to use it for.
• We will never sell your personal information and only share it as outlined in our privacy policy, or when you ask us to.
• We respect your choices and will tell you if there are important changes that affect your personal information or how we use it.
• We take responsibility for the personal information that we hold about you.

What personal information does Makan Rights collect?

We will only ever collect the information we need – including data that will be used to help improve our services. We hold and process personal information from:

• Donors
• Campaigners
• Subscribers
• Workshop applicants
• Event registrants & attendees
• Website visitors
• Speakers & facilitators
• Volunteers
• Contractors
• Trustees
• Job applicants

We collect two kinds of information:

• Personal information such as an individual’s name, postal address, email address and phone numbers. We will also hold details of any donations, campaign actions or transactional services you may make with us, together with your marketing communications preferences. We will hold a record of our communications with you and any communications with us. We may use your name and address information to contact you and use other sources of publicly available information to ensure we hold relevant information about you.
• Non-personal information such as IP addresses (the location of the computer on the internet), pages accessed and files downloaded. This helps us to determine how many people use our website, the frequency of visits and how popular our pages are. This information doesn’t tell us anything about who you are or your address, it simply allows us to monitor and improve our service.

If you use a credit or debit card to make a donation to us, your card details are processed through Stripe. We do this in accordance with the Payment Card Industry Security Standards.

Legal bases

The law on data protection names six legitimate ways for organisations to collect and process personal data. Of those six, we consider three of them can be applied to Makan Rights’ operations.

Consent

Wherever possible, we will ask for explicit consent to send marketing information. For example, online donors will be asked if they want to be updated on Makan Rights’ programmes, campaigns, fundraising activities and appeals. Anyone can change their consent at any time by following the unsubscribe link at the bottom of marking email communications or contacting us directly.

Legitimate interest

In specific situations, we may process data to pursue our legitimate interests in ways that might reasonably be expected, and which do not materially impact people’s rights, freedoms or interests. Makan Rights’ use of legitimate interest includes sending direct marketing information to keep our supporters updated on our projects, fundraising activities and appeals. We will only do this where we have reason to believe that this information will be of interest.

When we use your information we will always consider if it is fair and balanced to do so and if it is within a supporter’s reasonable expectations. We will balance your rights and our legitimate interests to make sure that we use your personal information in ways which are not unfair or unduly intrusive.

You have the right to object to our lawful processing of your information and can withdraw consent to marketing communications at any time by following the unsubscribe link at the bottom of marketing email communications or contacting us directly.

Legal obligation

If the law requires us to, we may need to collect and process your data.

For example, Makan Rights has a legal obligation to process health and safety information for staff and volunteers, which may include personal information in relation to incidents on Makan Rights’ premises.

If you have added Gift Aid to a donation we must also process some information for HMRC.

How your information is used

Makan Rights uses personal information to:

• Deliver our charitable purposes, programmes and services
• Deal with enquiries and requests
• Administer and keep a record of donations made and actions taken by our supporters and our communications with them
• Send supporters updates about our projects, fundraising activities, events, campaigns and appeals
• Support community-based fundraising
• Analyse our fundraising and campaigning activities
• Understand how we can better improve our services and information
• Claim gift aid on donations
• Administer volunteer, staff, and consultant records and manage recruitment requirements
• Comply with legal obligations, prevent and detect fraud or other illegal activity
• Manage our organisation
• Ensure we do not send unwanted information to supporters or members of the public who do not want to be contacted

We may use publicly available data and profiling tools, as well as any information that you may have already provided to Makan Rights, to help us create a more personal and informed approach in the way we communicate with you.

Sharing your information

Makan Rights never sells or exchanges our supporter’s information with other organisations. We will only share your information if:

• We are legally required to do so, for example by a law enforcement agency legitimately exercising a power or if compelled by an order of the Court
• We sometimes work with trusted service providers that are carrying out work on our behalf.  Where this service is undertaken on behalf of Makan Rights, this is done under contract, in compliance with strict Data Protection requirements and security measures are taken.
• We believe it is necessary to protect or defend our rights, property or the personal safety of our people, visitors to our premises or websites

Transfer of personal information overseas

Information is stored by Makan Rights in the UK, we may also store information in paper files. We may when necessary transfer the information to other offices and third party organisations – these may be situated inside or outside the UK. In this event, we will ensure the transfer is subject to the appropriate safeguards.

How long will we keep your data

We retain personal data as long as it is necessary and relevant for Makan Rights. The criteria used to determine the retention periods include: 

• how long the personal data is needed to provide the services and operations
• the type of personal data collected; and 
• whether we are subject to a legal, contractual or similar obligation to retain the personal data.

How do we protect and secure your personal information

We are committed to protecting your personal information. We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information and privacy, and we review them regularly. We protect your information using a combination of physical and IT security controls, including access controls that restrict and manage the way that information and data is processed, managed and handled. We also make sure that our staff are adequately trained in protecting personal information.

Our procedures mean that we may sometimes ask for proof of identity before we share your personal information with supporters or members – for example to check that we are speaking to the owner of that personal information.

In the unlikely event of a security breach that compromises our protection of personal information, and we need to let you know about it, we will do so.

How can I change my information and can I access it?

Contact us at [email protected] if you’d like to:

• Update your personal information
• Change your personal information
• Change your contact preferences

You have a number of rights under data protection legislation:

• You can request any information we hold on you. Email us at [email protected] and ask for it in writing. We’ll supply any information you ask for as soon as possible, but this may take up to 30 days. You may be asked for proof of identity.
• You have the right to ask us to stop using or to restrict the processing of your personal data in certain cases, e.g. where it’s not needed to do what you provided it to us for, or if there is some disagreement about its accuracy or legitimate use.
• You can withdraw your consent to us processing your data at any time (where such processing is based on consent e.g. to send you electronic direct marketing).
• If you believe our records are inaccurate you have the right to ask for those records concerning you to be updated. To update your records please get in touch with us using the details above.
• In some cases, you have the right to be forgotten (i.e. to have your personal data deleted from our database), or transferred to another organisation (“data portability”). Where you have requested that we don’t send you marketing materials we’ll need to keep some limited information in order to ensure that you’re not contacted in the future.

If you have any concerns about the way your data is being used or if you’d like to make a complaint please contact us at [email protected].

If your complaint is not dealt with to your satisfaction you can raise this with the Information Commissioner’s Office via their website or on 0303 123 1113.

Marketing and communications preferences, cookies and third party websites

To help ensure our communications with you are relevant, we analyse geographic, demographic and other key characteristics and behaviours relating to you; as well as your previous responses to our marketing communications. This helps us to personalise and improve your supporter experience with Makan Rights and minimise wastage. Some of this analysis is based on data provided by you and some of this is provided by external organisations.

We only want to send communications that are of genuine interest and relevant to you. You are in control of how we use your personal information for marketing and fundraising purposes. If we contact you by email every message we send will include a link to opt out of receiving future messages.

Facebook Marketing

You may come across Makan Rights naturally on Facebook through your own networks, or you might be presented with a promoted advert from us. We use targeting advertising on Facebook which allows people who are interested in our work to connect with us and become a supporter. We do this to inform, educate and engage new potential supporters. Our adverts may then appear when you access Facebook. We want to remind our supporters and users that information shared by you or your contacts on timelines, on our page or in private messages may be used and sold by Facebook for commercial purposes.

Other Social media sites

We operate a number of social media pages (including Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and Instagram). Although this policy covers how we will use any data collected from those pages, it does not cover how the providers of social media websites will use your information. Please ensure you read the privacy policy of the social media website before sharing data and make use of the privacy setting and reporting mechanisms to control how your data is used.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files on your device.  They are made by your web-browser when you visit a website.  Every time you go back to that website, your browser will send the cookie file back to the website’s server. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device.

You can find more information about cookies at: www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu.

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improving the user experience. They can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you and your interests.

Why does Makan Rights use cookies?

Like many websites, Makan Rights uses cookies in order to provide you with a more personalised web service.

Cookies help us identify which bits of our website people are using, and help us do work on those sections of the website to improve the user experience.  We also use cookies to help show content on our site which is relevant to you and your interests, for example if on a previous visit you went to our pages about emergencies, festivals or events, we might find this out from your cookie and show you other information on our website related to emergencies, festivals or events on subsequent visits.

Information supplied in cookies also allows us to measure the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns for Makan Rights. This enables us to ensure any money we spend on digital marketing gives us a good return on investment.

How to control your cookie preferences

Cookies are used to enable us to improve services for you through, for example:

• measuring how many people are using each page of the website and for how long so that we can try to improve the quality of our website
• enabling you to view content shared on other sites e.g. YouTube or Twitter
• However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by the Makan Rights website, 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 computer as well as more general information about cookies. For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.

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

Changes to our privacy policy

This privacy policy may change from time to time. For example, we will continue to update it to reflect new legal requirements. If we make any significant changes in the way we treat your personal information, we’ll make this clear on our websites or by contacting you directly.