St John’s Data Protection Policy

At St John’s we are committed to protecting your privacy and we have this policy in place to ensure that is upheld.

What personal information do we hold?

We only collect data that is necessary to the day to day running of the church at the point when it is needed. All data is only held for the amount of time it is needed, after this it is deleted. More detailed information on the specifics we collect is listed below.

• Through registration we collect information on all individuals, including: first name, surname, address, telephone number and email address

• Through registration of children into one of our groups we collect the following information in addition to the above: medical information, photo consent, group attendance and permission relating to taking part in children’s/youth activities and groups.

• For those working with children and vulnerable adults we hold a DBS check and a character reference.

• We may also hold information on roles that you fulfil within the church, groups that you are part of, your availability, your attendance to events and pastoral information.

How do we use your information?

• Primarily your information will be used to contact you or your child in relation to church activities, e.g. to communicate information on what is going on in the life of the church such as weekly newsletters.

• Your contact information will also be used for administrative purposes for arranging rotas and other such church administration.

• Your data will also be used for the purposes of providing anonymised statistics about church membership.

Who will use your information?

• Church staff and key leaders will have access to all basic personal information such as names, address, phone number, email, roles within the church and groups you are part of.

• Small group leaders will have access to the contact details of those people who are in their small group.

• Ministry overseers who are not church staff will have access to the contact details for those people who volunteer for that ministry, e.g. foodbank.

• The pastoral care team will be given basic personal information such as names, address, phone number, email for those people who have requested contact.

• Children’s/youth leaders will have access to all of the personal information of the children within their groups.

• Other church members will have access only to the information you choose to share through the ‘My ChurchSuite’ App.

• We will never pass your information on to anyone outside of the church unless required to by law, except in circumstances where it is of vital interest to pass the information on. For example, if a child in our care has to be taken to hospital we will pass on any relevant information we have to medical staff.

Your Rights

In some cases, we may need your consent to hold your data and process it and in this case we will ask you for this and at that stage explain what it is to be used for. Where this is the case you have the right to withdraw that consent and for the data to be deleted. Requests to be forgotten must be made to the church office. All requests will be responded to within one .

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Please note there are some cases where we may need to keep your data without your consent and therefore you cannot request for it to be deleted. This would be for legitimate reasons as determined by data protection regulations. Examples of this may include the need to keep names and addresses from Gift Aid declarations where the Gift Aid has already been claimed, accident reports, DBS checks and marriage registers. Please note this is not an exhaustive list.

At any time, you have the right to request all of the information that we hold for you. All requests must be made in writing to the church office and we will reply as promptly as possible but at the latest within one month. Before we are able to action your request we will need to take reasonable measures to verify your identity. No charge will be made for providing the information unless the request is unfounded or excessive.

In all cases you have the opportunity to keep your information up to date, please contact the office to notify us of any changes to your personal information.

If you have any concerns please contact our data controller James Banks via dataprotection@sjbchurch.co.uk

If you believe that your data is not being processed lawfully then you are able to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office, more information can be found on their website.