Privacy Policy

Membership records

Reading Civic Society currently holds its membership records offline, i.e. not on the internet. The records are held by the Membership Secretary. The information we may hold about our members is listed below. Not every item listed will be held for each member.

  • Name* and street address*
  • Telephone number*
  • Email address (if provided)*
  • Email and / or Postal opt-in
  • Category of membership
  • Subscription due in the current year
  • Method of payment* and date of the last payment
  • Name of the Gift Aid donor, and date of the declaration
  • Actual amount paid in the current and previous years
  • Notes

* Items marked with an asterisk are transferred to the email system described in the Privacy Policy below

As the Data Controller, Reading Civic Society may store and use your data to administer your membership, for the processing of financial transactions and maintaining accounts and to produce summary information for statistical, regulatory and audit purposes. We may use your data to inform you about events and activities being run by ourselves and occasionally by other organisations. You will only receive emails if you have specifically opted to do so. See the Privacy Policy below for more information about this.

The information that we hold is provided by members. The Society’s bankers provide details of payments made by standing order or by bank transfer. The information is held securely and is only accessed by officers of the Society for the purposes of the organisation, it is not kept by us outside of the banking system. Members’ data is kept and used for the duration of your membership. In the case of former members, the Society will retain details until the Gift Aid on any payments has been reclaimed, and may retain information about your name and dates of membership for historical reasons. However, former members can request to have their details removed from the record using the e-mail and postal addresses below.

On joining and at regular intervals members are asked to complete a General Data Protection Regulation Opt-in Form.

Disclosure of information

The Society discloses to HMRC donors’ names and addresses, plus the date and amount of the donation (including membership subscriptions) when it reclaims Gift Aid.

The Society will also disclose personal data if we are required to do so under a statutory or legal obligation.

Access to your personal data and queries

Under the Data Protection Act 1998 and the General Data Protection Regulations you have a right to change or have access to your information at any time. If you have any queries or want to see the personal data Reading Civic Society holds on you can make a Subject Access Request using the email address ReadingCivicSociety@gmail.com. Alternatively, write to Reading Civic Society at 69 Baker Street, Reading RG1 7XY.

The Society reserves the right to charge a fee of up to £10, though this will normally be waived. Should it transpire that any of the information we hold is inaccurate or incorrect you should inform us immediately so that it can be amended.

Electronic Mailings

The Society uses Microsoft Office to send out emails about coming events and other information we believe will be of interest. We also use it to email requests to renew membership, where necessary. In order to do this, we need your email address, and this is stored in the Microsoft Outlook email address file. This database holds the following information:

  • Your name, your address, telephone number (used only exceptionally)

New members will be asked to confirm they wish to receive emails, and we will record the date that confirmation is given.

If an email circulation cannot be delivered then it will bounce back to us. If three messages in a row bounce back we will delete your record.

If you no longer wish to receive circulars from us electronically, please email us at bennettbaker@msn.com. If you do this, we will immediately flag your information in the records to send no more messages, and remove your details from the email circulation list as soon as is practical. (If you are a member, you will continue to receive information from us by post).

We will delete your details should you cease to be a member of Reading Civic Society subject to our reclaiming Gift Aid and for historical record purposes only. The information we hold as manual records (off line) are:

  • Your category of membership.
  • The annual subscription payable, and how you pay (standing order, cheque, etc)
  • Details of when your details were entered on the records.

We will not disclose your personal details to any third parties, except in the very limited circumstances set out in our Data Protection Policy above, which also has an explanation of how to obtain details of the information we hold about you.

Internet log information

We do not currently collect standard internet log information to monitor the number of visitors to the various parts of the website, though this may be done in the future. If it is collected, the information would include your IP address, which could be used to identify the device used to look at the website. We will not, however, attempt to do this except if required to do so by law enforcement agencies, or to investigate and prevent abuse of the website.

Membership records

Our membership records are held on a computer but, apart from the information needed to email out information this is not uploaded to the internet. We need to hold this information in order to provide membership services. See our Data Protection Policy above for further information.