Privacy policy

Hope Church is committed to the protection of the privacy of all our customers. Your privacy is really important to us and we understand how important it is to you. Our aim is to be as clear and open as possible about what we do with your personal data and why we do it.

What is ChurchSuite?
ChurchSuite is a cloud hosted, web-based church management system (“the Services”) which is designed to help us administer our Church and provide all elements of pastoral care to our members and the community. Our members may be provided with access to a user account, which they can use to provide us with information (including personal information), update preferences and access options to allow the booking of events and recording attendance. The Services should bring benefits to everyone as we can stay in touch with you much more easily and you can provide us with information in a quick and efficient way.

In addition to ChurchSuite, we may also collect information from you in person or on paper forms or online forms within other systems. We have also included information about other forms of processing that we may carry out.

Sharing your information
The information we hold about you will be treated as strictly confidential and we will only share your data with third parties with your prior consent, or unless required to do so by law.

Your Rights and Information
Unless subject to an exemption under UK Data Protection Law, you have the following rights with respect to your personal data: -

  • Access to your information: You have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you.

  • Correcting your information: We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date and you may ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards.

  • Deletion of your information: You have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you where:

    • you consider that we no longer require the information for the purposes for which it was obtained or that we no longer need to retain it in accordance with our statutory obligations under UK Data Protection Law;

    • you have validly objected to our use of your personal information - see ‘Objecting to how we may use your information’ below;

    • our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations.

  • Objecting to how we may use your information: Where we use your personal information to perform tasks carried out in the public interest then, if you ask us to, we will stop using that personal information unless there are overriding legitimate grounds to continue.

  • Restricting how we may use your information: In some cases, you may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information. This right might apply, for example, where we are checking the accuracy of personal information about you that we hold or assessing the validity of any objection you have made to our use of your information. The right might also apply where there is no longer a basis for using your personal information but you do not want us to delete the data. Where this right is validly exercised, we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent, for legal claims or where there are other public interest grounds to do so.

  • Withdrawing consent using your information: Where we use your personal information with your consent you may withdraw that consent at any time and we will stop using your personal information for the purpose(s) for which consent was given. Please contact us in any of the ways set out in the ‘Contact information and further advice’ section if you wish to exercise any of these rights.

  • Lodging a complaint: If you feel we have used your information incorrectly or without lawful basis, or you dispute our lawful basis, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Further Processing
If we wish to use your information for a new purpose, not covered by this Privacy Notice, then we will provide you with a new notice explaining the new use prior to starting the processing and setting out the relevant purposes and legal basis for processing. Where and whenever necessary, we will seek your prior consent to the new processing.

Sharing your Personal Information

Other third parties

We may share your information with certain third parties including:

  • With other members of our church so that they can provide you with support and pray for you

  • Other churches – if you request us to pass on your information either to them or from them (if you move)

  • Support services and benefits providers (e.g. local authorities, your doctor)

  • Our suppliers for the performance of any contract we enter into with them or you

  • Our software providers who need to see your information in order to keep our website up and running

Analytics and search engine providers who analyse information about your use of our website and help us to tailor the product and offers that we offer to you and other users

We work with the following organisations:

  • ChurchSuite

  • HMRC (for claiming of Gift Aid)

  • Paypal (for the processing of online donations)

  • Google Drive

  • Dropbox

Legal Requirements and Law Enforcement
We may also disclose your personal information to third parties:

  • If we are required by law, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use. This includes exchanging information with other organisations such as law enforcement agencies.

Third Party Privacy Policies
This website may contain links to websites owned by other organisations.  If you follow a link to another website, these websites will have their own privacy policies.  We suggest that you check the policies of any other websites before giving them your personal information as we cannot accept responsibility for any other website.

How we store your personal information
The security of your personal information is important to us.

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to safeguard personal information and encryption technology where appropriate to enhance privacy and help prevent information security breaches.

Any personal information that we provide to you will be held within the EEA.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers or on secure servers operated by a third party. Information on our third-party providers can be found above.


Retention of information
We only hold your personal information for as long as necessary for the purposes for which we collected your information.

We have set these timescales in accordance with any applicable legislation and where none exists then we will keep your information for the duration of any contract that you have entered into with us and then for a period of 7 years after which time it will be deleted.


Emails
If you chose to send us information via email, we cannot guarantee the security of this information until it is delivered to us.