Privacy Policy

The Sheldon Centre, the Sheldon Open-Air Theatre and the Sheldon Hub share the same database and offices, and are staffed by the same team (the Sheldon Community and our staff and volunteers)

The Privacy Principles and Policy detailed below cover both the 'real world' and 'online' aspects of Sheldon's ministry.

Our Privacy Principles

We will look after any personal information that you share with us.

This is central to our values as an organisation. We want everyone who supports us, or who comes to us for support, to feel confident about how any personal information they share will be looked after or used.

You can be confident that:

• We only use personal information in the ways we need to and that are expected of us.
• We will keep you up to date with information about Sheldon and the Sheldon Hub. 
• We will make it easy for you to tell us how you want us to communicate with you, including how to opt out from future communications - and your request will respected straight away.
• We will never release your information to outside organisations.
• We take all reasonable care to safeguard your personal information through security policies and secure business processes.
• We will always provide easy ways for you to contact us and are happy to answer your queries at any time. 

Our Privacy Policy

We know that your privacy is very important to you.
We promise that it is just as important to us.

1. How we collect personal information about you

We may collect personal information from you when you interact with Sheldon. There are many occasions when this could happen, for example: if you enquire about our activities, register with us, make a donation to us, purchase something, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity, if you chose to provide some optional feedback or otherwise provide us with personal information. And, this may be when you phone us, go onto our website, through the post, or in person.

2. What information do we collect?

The personal information we collect might include your contact details such as name, email address, postal address, telephone number, dietary needs and ministry details, as well as information you provide in any correspondence between us.

We also gather general information about the use of our websites, such as which pages users visit most often and which services, events or facilities are of most interest. We may also track which pages users visit when they click on links in Sheldon emails. We may use this information to personalise the way our websites are presented when users visit them, to make improvements to our websites and to ensure we provide the best service for users. Wherever possible we use aggregated or anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our websites.

3. Cookies

'Cookie' is a name for a small file, usually of letters and numbers, which is downloaded onto your device (computer, mobile phone or tablet) when you visit a website.

They let websites recognise your device, so that the sites can work, or work better, and also gather information about how you use the site. A cookie, by itself, can't be used to identify you.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you come to our website and also allows us to improve our site.

The cookies we use

We use the categorisation set out by the International Chamber of Commerce in their UK Cookie Guide.

We use three categories of cookies:

• Strictly necessary cookies are essential for you to move around our website and to use its features, like your account.
• Performance cookies collect anonymous information about how you use our site, like which pages are visited most. No information that identifies you is kept.
• Functionality cookies remember choices you make to improve your experience, like your text size or location. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. They are anonymous.

No cookies, please

You can opt out of all our cookies (except the strictly necessary ones). Find out how to control and delete cookies in your browser.

But, if you choose to refuse all cookies you may not be able to use our website properly.

4. How do we use personal information?

We may use your personal information to:

• Provide you with a good experience when you stay at Sheldon.
• Provide or administer activities relating to all our services: updating you with important administrative messages, to help us identify you when you contact us, and help us to properly maintain our records;
• Improve your experience with us. We may use your information to enhance the service that our staff provide, to fulfil your orders and gift aid declarations, to improve our information and communications, or to personalise the website to better suit your needs;
• Provide you with information about our plans. This may be letting you know about new activities and resources we hope will be useful and interesting to you, and may include fundraising updates. You can ask us to remove your details at any time by contacting us;
• Analyse the personal information we collect about you so that we can better understand our visitors, supporters and Hub members - their preferences and needs and important trends.
• We may need to disclose your information if required to do so by law (for example, to comply with applicable laws, regulations and codes of practice or in response to a valid request from a competent authority).

To do some of this, Sheldon may share your information with our trusted partners and suppliers, but is always carried out under our instruction, and is never for their marketing approaches. We ensure that they store the data securely and delete it when it is no longer needed.

A special note about any Sensitive Information we may hold

If you contact us at Sheldon by phone, in person, or in other more general communications with us such as blogs or general emails, you may choose to provide details of a sensitive nature.

We only use it for the purposes of dealing with your enquiry, training, and quality monitoring or evaluating the services we provide. We will not pass on your details to anyone else without your express permission except in exceptional circumstances. Examples of this might include anyone reporting serious self-harm or posing a threat to others.

If you provide us with any Sensitive Personal Data by telephone, email or by other means, we will treat that information with extra care and always in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Your personal information and details of the enquiries received are stored on a secure database for no longer than is necessary for the purposes of its use. We carry out periodic deletion of data whose retention period has expired and/or when the need to continue holding such data is no longer necessary.

5. Your choices

We’d like to keep all our guests, Hub members and supporters up to date with our progress. So, to update you on what we’re doing and ask whether you’d be able to support us, we’d like to keep in touch with you (by post, phone, email, text and other electronic means) about our activities.

Please be reassured that respect lies at the heart of everything our committed staff and volunteers do: we respect any information that you share with us and you can change your mind and ask us to remove your details at any time, by simply contacting us.

6. Who sees your personal information?

The personal information we collect about you will be used by our staff (and volunteers) at Sheldon so that they can support you; also, by a few selected organisations that work with us or on our behalf to deliver our services; and possibly to legal and regulatory authorities if required to by law.

This never involves us selling or sharing 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.

7. Your Information Security

We take the security of your personal information extremely seriously.

We've implemented appropriate physical, technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction and loss.

And, we only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary, which may be to fulfil statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid).

Here are some of the ways we protect your personal information:

• Your personal information is kept securely in our databases and offices, or, where relevant, by our partner companies.
• We will take all reasonable steps to protect your personal information, but data can never be guaranteed as 100% secure. Please note that we will not be liable for any breach of security unless we have been negligent.
• Our websites may contain links to other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content or the privacy practices employed by other sites. Please be aware that websites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you. This privacy statement does not cover the information practices of those websites.
• Any credit card details we receive on our website are passed securely to PayPoint our payment processing partner, according to the Payment Card Industry Security Standards.

8. Your communication with our teams at Sheldon

Your communications with our teams (including by telephone or email) may be monitored and/or recorded for training, quality control and compliance purposes to ensure that we continuously improve our customer service standards.

9. How to update or access your personal information

You may ask us at any time to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate.

You have a right to know what personal information Sheldon holds about you.

You can ask us to update your details, or request a copy of your personal information we hold, by contacting Sheldon:

Writing: Sheldon, Sheldon Lane, Doddiscombsleigh, Exeter EX6 7YT

Tel: 01647252752

Email: dataprotection@sheldonretreat.com

10. Changes to our Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy is reviewed regularly to ensure that it reflects how we use your information. Any changes will be notified to you by updating this policy so please check this Policy to see if any changes have been made that are important to you. Where appropriate, changes will be notified to you by email.

This Privacy Policy (version 1.1) was last updated on 24 May 2018.