Metta Theatre Privacy & Cookies Policy

Metta Theatre Ltd is a registered charity (no. 1140190) and a registered company (no. 07137926) limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales.

Registered office: 66 Lancaster Court, London SW6 5TA. VAT no. GB226772200.

We are committed to protecting your privacy and will only use your personal information in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), General Data Protection Regulation 25 May 2018 (GDPR) and other relevant legislation.

Our Privacy Policy is set out below: please read it with care as it describes the ways in which we use your data and how you can hold us accountable for that.

By disclosing your personal information to us online, by phone or in writing, you are giving us your consent to collect, store and process your personal information in the manner described in this Notice. The information we hold will be accurate and up-to-date within our knowledge. While we cannot guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur when it is under our control, we use our best efforts to try to prevent this.

If you have any questions regarding this Privacy Notice or your information, please contact the Data Protection Lead, William Reynolds, by email on: dataprotection@mettatheatre.co.uk or write to Data Protection, Metta Theatre, 66 Lancaster Court, London, SW6 5TA.

How we collect your information:

You give us your information whenever you:

• Sign up to our Email Newsletter
• Communicate with us by email or phone or on social media
• Take part in a survey from us
• Making a one off or recurring donation
• Join our Friends membership scheme
• Buy a ticket or sign for an event with one of our partners and you allow that partner to share your data with us.
• Sign up with us directly for one of our events or workshops
• Apply to work with us

Personal information we collect may include:

• Your full name and title and date of birth
• Postal address, email address and phone number
• IP (internet protocol) address
• Gift Aid status
• Your donation history
• Your contact and communication preferences

We only receive identifiable or personal data from our venue partners when you explicitly give them permission to share that information with us. They do however provide us with anonymised, aggregated statistical data.

We use the information you provide to:

• Process donations or other payments and verify financial transactions.
• Fulfil your requests – such as applications for membership, donations, competition entries, participation in campaigns and provision of information.
• Provide a personalised service to you when you visit our website. This could include customising the content and/or layout of our pages for individual users.
• Record any contact we have with you.
• Prevent or detect fraud or abuses of our website and enable third parties to carry out technical, logistical or other functions on our behalf in relation to prevention and detection.
• Carry out research on the demographics, interests and behaviour of our users and supporters to help us gain a better understanding of them and to enable us to improve our service. This research is usually carried out internally by our employees unless we notify you otherwise and have your prior consent.
• Communicate with our customers and supporters

We store personal data under strict safekeeping and confidentiality measures on secure servers. Only authorised staff will have access to your data.

Sharing information

We never share or sell your personal information to other organisations to use for their own purposes.

To undertake our business activities and to complete your requests to us we sometimes have to share your information with third parties such as our IT providers and our mailing list provider. We only choose partners we trust and will only pass personal data to them if we are confident that they will:

• abide by the requirements of the Data Protection Act
• treat your information as carefully as we would
• only use the information for the purposes it was supplied (and not for their own purposes or the purposes of any other organisation)
• allow us to carry out checks to ensure they are doing all these things.

We may need to disclose your details if required to the police, regulatory bodies or legal advisors.

Financial Transactions

We never store your payment card number (although we may keep a note of the last four digits to help us identify transactions). Our payment processors may store your payment card number with your permission to allow them to process recurring transactions. We do keep a record of your transaction history with us.

Fundraising to support Metta’s work.

As a charity, we fundraise from individuals, companies, public bodies and private trusts and foundations. This includes approaching those who want to support our mission to change the world by making exceptional theatre and opera that represents and celebrates the diversity of our world.

When fundraising, we may undertake research to explore shared interests with potential supporters. We may use profiling and screening techniques to analyse your personal data and create a profile of your interests and preferences. We may also make use of additional information about you including where you live, your age and similar demographics, and any publicly-available information (for example through LinkedIn, Social Media, Companies House, Charity Commission).

We want to contact you only when it may be relevant. By better understanding the background of our supporters we are able to make only the most appropriate requests for gifts that will help us continue to make pioneering, accessible, world-class theatre and learning programmes created by the most talented artists.

Children and Vulnerable Adults

If you are aged 16 or under, you must obtain your parent / guardian’s permission every time before you provide any personal information; we will always require their signature on any documentation when you sign up to a Metta project. We will always require the carer’s signature on similar documentation relating to vulnerable adults.

Email Newsletter

We use our Email Newsletter to provide you with information that we think may be of interest to you, including information on our upcoming productions and opportunities to get involved and to support us.

When you subscribe to our email newsletter we collect your:

• Email address
• I.P address
• Subscription time & date
• Marketing preferences

Email Newsletter messages that we send may contain tracking beacons and/or tracked clickable links or similar server technologies in order to track subscriber activity within email marketing messages. Where used, such marketing messages may record a range of data such as; times, dates, I.P addresses, opens, clicks, forwards, geographic and demographic data. Such data, within its limitations will show the activity each subscriber made for that email campaign.

We may then track any subsequent actions online, such as making a donation or buying a ticket.

You can easily unsubscribe or manage your preferences or the information we hold about you at any time by following the instructions in any Email Newsletter we send.

Profiling and Segmentation

We may combine information you provide to us with anonymised information available from external sources (e.g. Census data) in order to gain a better understanding of our audiences, newsletter subscribers, social media followers and website visitors. When building a profile we may analyse geographic, demographic and other information relating to you in order to better understand your interests and preferences in order to contact you with the most relevant communications.

We may use profiling and segmentation to offer an improved website experience, to provide more relevant content in Email Newsletters and to offer more relevant online and social media advertising.

Website Cookies

A cookie is a small text file that may be stored on the hard drive of your computer when you access the Site. A "session cookie" expires immediately when you end your session (i.e., close your browser). A "persistent cookie" stores information on the hard drive so when you end your session and return to the same website at a later date, the cookie information is still available. When you visit our website, we may use both a session and a persistent cookie. These cookies may contain information (such as a unique user ID) that is used to track your usage of our website.

These cookies allow us to

• Provide you with customized content and advertising
• Monitor Site usage
• Conduct research to improve our website.

You are free to decline cookies, but by doing so, you may not be able to use certain features of our websites. Check the “Help” menu of your browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences.  

A pixel tag (also known as a web beacon) is a small string of code that represents a clear graphic image and allows us to capture additional information about a visitor's actions on a web site, such as a visitor's cookie number, the time, date, duration and number of page views, and a description of the page where the tag is placed. Pixel tags help us analyze our customers' online behavior and measure the effectiveness of our website and our advertising.

Our websites are hosted by Squarespace and Wix.

We use both Google Analytics and our website hosts' own analytics services to analyse the use of our website - all of these services use cookies and/or pixel tags.

We use various social media platforms to communicate both publicly and privately with individuals; those platforms will process and store your data themselves according to their own privacy policies.

Third Party Advertising

We use third-party service providers to serve advertisements (banners or links) on our behalf across the Internet and on social media platforms.

These advertising service providers may collect information about your visits to our website and third party websites through the use of cookies and pixel tags, and may use this information to display relevant adverts to you.

We may display interest-based ads to you when you are using Facebook, based on your interaction with our website, your interactions with us on Facebook's platforms and your other activity on Facebook. We use Facebook's pixel tag to facilitate this.

We may display interest-based ads to you when on other websites through Google Adwords & Google Display Network, based on your interaction with our website and your interactions with Google services. We use Google's pixel tags to facilitate this.

You can opt out of these third-party services here:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ads/website_custom_audiences/

Google: http://www.google.com/settings/ads

You can learn more about online behavioural advertising here: https://www.youronlinechoices.eu/

Third Party Service Providers

We use some third party services such as mailchimp.com for our newsletters and JustGiving and btMyDonate to process donations on our behalf. We treat Information you enter on those sites just the same as information you give to us directly, though those providers will process & store your data according to their own privacy policies. We only use providers we trust, for example if outside the EU those signed up to the Privacy Shield scheme.

Tickets to our productions are sold through the venues where we perform and their agents, and data you provide to them is done so under their own privacy policies.

External links

Our website contains links to other sites whose information practice may be different to ours. You should consult other sites’ privacy notices as we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies and we have no control over information that is submitted to or collected by third parties.

Internet Security

The transmission of data across the internet is not completely secure and while we do our best to protect the security of your information we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur while data is being transferred.

Furthermore we cannot guarantee the privacy of personal information you transmit over the web or that may be collectable in transit by others.

Data Retention and Deletion

We will delete data that we no longer need after the periods below:

• We are required by law to keep financial records for 7 years.
• We keep HR related data for our staff and contractors only for as long as it is needed for our business purposes.
• If you have made a donation and a Gift Aid declaration, we are obliged to keep the declaration and the details of the person who made it for six years.
• For data supplied as part of a job application to us, we will keep your details for six months, then delete them.
• We do not store unsolicited CVs.
• We will keep information supplied by participants in our workshops or events for 6 months after the event.
• We will consider that your Email Newsletter subscription preferences last indefinitely while you regularly open our emails, and for any case five years unless you notify us otherwise. We may periodically ask you to reconfirm your subscription preferences, especially if you haven't opened our emails in a long time.

Update your permission preferences or stop Metta communication at any time

You can easily update your personal information and communications preferences, or unsubscribe, at any time in the following ways:

• clicking on the 'update' or ‘unsubscribe’ link within any newsletter.
• by emailing us at dataprotection@mettatheatre.co.uk

The permissions above relate to optional communications from Metta. We will continue to send you communications about transactions you make with us, for example when you contact us to book an event, or relating to active subscriptions you hold with us such as a membership.

Access to and deletion of your personal data held by us

You have the right to ask for a free copy of the personal information that we hold about you (to be supplied within one month of receiving request) to correct any inaccuracies in that information (to be corrected within 72 hours of receiving request) or to ask us to delete such record (to be done within one month of receiving request). Please direct all requests to dataprotection@mettatheatre.co.uk or write to Data Protection, Metta Theatre, 66 Lancaster Court, London, SW6 5TA.

You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office if we have not been able to satisfactorily resolve a problem about our handling of your personal information. For more information about your Data Protection rights, please visit the website of the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk