Privacy Policy

Introduction and Purpose

Mind in Brighton and Hove (known as Mind throughout this policy) wants everyone who comes to us for support to feel confident and comfortable with how any personal information shared with us will be looked after or used. This Privacy and Cookies Policy sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information (this means any information that identifies or could identify you).

Who we are

Mind is committed to protecting your personal information and making every effort to ensure that your personal information is processed in a fair, open and transparent manner.
We are a “data controller” for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). This means that we are responsible for, and control the processing of your personal information.
For further information about our privacy practices, please contact our Senior Responsible Person (SRP) by:

For further information about our privacy practices, please contact our Senior Responsible Person by:

Writing to Senior Responsible Person, Mind, 51 New England Street, Brighton, BN1 4GQ
Calling us on 01273 66 69 50
Emailing info@mindcharity.co.uk

How we collect information about you

Everything we do, we do to ensure that we can help people experiencing a mental health problem get both support and respect. We want to make sure you receive the communications that are most relevant to you, be it through visiting our website or receiving emails, post or phone calls. We want to make sure you receive the best attention when you book onto an event, become a member or make a donation.

We collect information from you in the following ways:

When you interact with us directly: This could be if you ask us about our activities, register with us for training or an event, make a donation to us, ask a question about mental health, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you phone us, visit our website, or get in touch through the post, or in person.

When you interact with us through third parties: This could be if you provide a donation through a third party such as Just Giving or one of the other third parties that we work with and provide your consent for your personal information to be shared with us.

When you visit our website: We gather general information which might include which pages you visit most often and which services, events or information is of most interest to you. We also use “cookies” to help our site run effectively.

See the section below on ‘Cookies’ for more information.

We use this information to personalise the way our website is presented when you visit to make improvements and to ensure we provide the best service and experience for you. Wherever possible we use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website.

Information we collect and why we use it

Personal Information

Personal information we collect includes details such as your name, date of birth, email address, postal address, telephone number, as well as information you provide in any communications between us. We may collect personal information about you when you visit our website. We may also record personal information when you contact us regarding one of our services, to make a donation, register for an event, or any of the other ways to interact with us.

We will mainly use this information:

To process your donations or other payments, to claim Gift Aid on your donations with consent and verify any financial transactions
To provide the services or goods that you have requested
To update you with important administrative messages about your donation, an event or services you have requested
To comply with the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016 and follow the recommendations of the official regulator of charities, the Charity Commission, which require us to identify and verify the identity of supporters who make major donations so we can assess any risks associated with accepting their donation
To keep a record of your relationship with us
Where you volunteer with us, to make arrangements

If you do not provide this information, we will not be able to process your donation, sign you up for a particular event or provide goods and services you have requested.

We may also use your personal information:

To contact you about our work and how you can support Mind (see section on ‘Marketing’ below for further information)
To invite you to participate in surveys or research

Sensitive Personal Information

If you share your personal experience or the experiences of a friend or relative, we may also collect this information. If you provide us with any Sensitive Personal Information by telephone, email or by other means, we will treat that information with extra care and confidentiality and always in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

You can of course decide to remain anonymous, if you are happy to share your personal details with staff members or if you would like us to share your story with the media or other parties as part of our work sharing stories about mental health from people with lived experience.

Legal basis for using your information

In some cases, we will only use your personal information where we have your consent or because we need to use it in order to fulfil a contract with you. However, there are other lawful reasons that allow us to process your personal information and one of those is called ‘legitimate interests’. This means that the reason that we are processing information is because there is a legitimate interest for Mind to process your information to help us to achieve our vision of ensuring that everyone experiencing a mental health issue gets both support and respect.

Whenever we process your personal information under the ‘legitimate interest’ lawful basis we make sure that we take into account your rights and interests and will not process your personal information if we feel that there is an imbalance.

Some examples of where we have a legitimate interest to process your personal information are where we contact you about our work via post, use your personal information for data analytics, conducting research to better understand who our supporters are, improving our services, for legal purposes (for example, dealing with complaints and claims), or for complying with guidance from the Charity Commission.

Promotion / further contact

We will only contact you about our work and how you can support Mind by phone, email or text message, if you have agreed for us to contact you in this manner.

However, if you have provided us with your postal address we may send you information about our work and how you can support Mind by post unless you have told us that you would prefer not to hear from us in that way.

You can update your choices or stop us sending you these communications at any time by contacting info@mindcharity.co.uk or calling 01273 66 69 50.

Sharing your Information

The personal information we collect about you will mainly be used by our staff (and volunteers) at Mind so that they can support you.

We will never sell or share 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.

Mind may, however, share your information with our trusted partners and suppliers who work with us, on or on our behalf to deliver our services. Processing of this information is always carried out under our instruction. We make sure that they store the data securely, delete it when they no longer need it and never use it for any other purposes. An example of where we may share your information is with partners who help us to process donations and claim Gift Aid.

We enter into contracts with these service providers that require them to comply with Data Protection Laws and ensure that they have appropriate controls in place to secure your information.

Legal disclosure

We may 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); or, in order to enforce our conditions of sale and other agreements.

Keeping your information safe

We take looking after your information very 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.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us in this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to our site.

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 or advertisers.

How long we hold your information for

We only keep your information for as long as is reasonable and necessary for the relevant activity, which may be to fulfil statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid).

Your rights

You have various rights in respect of the personal information we hold about you. If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting us at Senior Responsible Person, Mind in Brighton and Hove, 51 New England Street, Brighton, BN1 4GQ, by email at info@mindcharity.co.uk or by phone on 01273 66 69 50. You can also make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, https://ico.org.uk/

You have various rights in respect of the personal information we hold about you including:

Access to your personal information: You have the right to request access to a copy of the personal information that we hold about you, along with information on what personal information we use, why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it for and whether it has been used for any automated decision making. You can make a request for access free of charge.
Right to object: You can object to our processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
Consent: If you have given us your consent to use personal information (for example, for marketing), you can withdraw your consent at any time.
Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information held about you.
Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, you have withdrawn consent, or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
Portability: You can ask us to provide you or a third party with some of the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form, so it can be easily transferred.
Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the personal information we use about you where you have asked for it to be erased or where you have objected to our use of it.
No automated-decision making: Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. You have the right not to be subject to automated decisions that will create legal effects or have a similar significant impact on you, unless you have given us your consent, it is necessary for a contract between you and us or is otherwise permitted by law. You also have certain rights to challenge decisions made about you. We do not currently carry out any automated decision-making.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting us at Senior Responsible Person, Mind, 51 New England Street, Brighton, BN1 4GQ, by email at info@mindcharity.co.uk or by phone on 01273 66 69 50. You can also find more information about your rights or make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office – https://ico.org.uk/

Please note, some of these rights only apply in certain circumstances and we may not be able to fulfil every request.