How your personal information is used by Women Emerging
This policy sets out most of your rights under the new laws.
Your information will be held by Let’s Breakthrough, the fiscal sponsor of Women Emerging, who is legally responsible for all data processing on behalf of the project.
More information can be found on www.womenemerging.org
How we use your personal information
This privacy notice is to let you know how Women Emerging will look after your personal information. This includes what you tell us about yourself, what we learn by having you as a participant on our expeditions, and the choices you give us about what marketing you want us to send you. This notice explains how we do this, tells you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.
Our Privacy Promise
We promise to:
- Keep your data safe and private.
- Never sell your data.
- Give you ways to manage and review your marketing choices at any time.
How the law protects you
As well as our Privacy Promise, your personal data is protected by law.
Under data protection laws like the GDPR, we are only allowed to collect, use, and share personal information if we have a valid legal reason to do so. These reasons include:
- To fulfil a contract we have with you (for example, when you sign up for an expedition),
- To meet our legal obligations (such as keeping financial records),
- When it is in our legitimate interest (meaning we have a clear reason related to running or improving our activities that does not unfairly affect your rights),
- When you have given us your clear consent.
A legitimate interest is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your information. But even then, it must not unfairly go against what is right and best for you. If we rely on our legitimate interests, we will tell you what that is.
Legal basis for processing data at Women Emerging
Here is a list of all the ways that we may use your personal information, and which of the reasons we rely on to do so. The law says we must have one or more of these reasons:
- Consent: where you agree to us using your information in this way, e.g. sharing your name and job title with the other participants on your expeditions
- Contract: your personal information is processed in order to fulfil a contractual arrangement e.g. in order to send you your expedition information
- Legal obligation: where there is statutory or other legal requirement to share the information e.g. when we have to share your information for auditing purposes.
- Legitimate interests: this means the interests of Women Emerging in managing our business to allow us to deliver our expeditions in the most secure and appropriate way, e.g. to transfer your data to certain third parties such as delivery partners.
This is also where we tell you what our legitimate interests are.
Serving you as a customer
| Purpose | Legal basis | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| To communicate with you about Women Emerging and our expeditions | Legitimate Interests, Contractual obligation, Legal duty | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
| To keep you up to date about our WE Fellows (alumna) offering | Legitimate Interests | Keeping our records up to date, working out which of our products and services may interest you and telling you about them |
| To send you occasional email updates and newsletters | Seeking your consent when we need it to contact you | Seeking your consent when we need it to contact you |
| To provide advice or guidance about our expedition | Consent | Seeking your consent when we need it to contact you |
| To publish your name, job title, employer organisation and expedition attended as part of our promotional materials | Consent | Seeking your consent when we need it to contact you |
| To publish your contact details strictly to members of your own participant group as part of the information distributed to participants | Consent | Seeking your consent when we need it to contact you |
Business management and improvement
| Purpose | Legal basis | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| To carry out statistical analysis | Legitimate Interests | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
| To share your information with third parties | Consent | Developing new programmes and thought leadership |
| To develop new ways to meet our explorers’ needs and to grow our business | Legitimate Interests | Defining types of customers for new products or services |
| To develop and carry out marketing activities | Legitimate Interests | To run our business in an efficient and proper way. This includes managing our financial position, business capability, planning, communications, corporate governance, and audit |
| To study how our customers use products and services from us and other organisations. | Legitimate Interests | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
| To run our business in an efficient and proper way. This includes managing our financial position, business capability, planning, communications, corporate governance, and audit | Legitimate interests, Legal duty | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations, Complying with rules and guidance from regulators |
| To exercise our rights set out in agreements or contracts. | Contractual obligation |
Managing our operations
| Purpose | Legal basis | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| To manage our relationship with you or your business | Legitimate Interests, Contractual obligation | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
| To make and manage supplier payments | Legitimate Interests, Contractual obligation | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
| To manage fees, charges and interest due on customer accounts | Contractual obligation | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
| To collect and recover money that is owed to us | Legitimate Interests, Legal duty | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations, Complying with rules and guidance from regulators |
| To deliver our programmes | Contractual obligation |
Manage security and risk
| Purpose | Legal basis | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| To manage risk for us and our customers | Legal duty, Fulfilling contracts, Legitimate Interests | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
| To obey laws and regulations that apply to us | Legal duty | |
| To respond to complaints and seek to resolve them | Legitimate Interests | Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual obligations |
Where we collect Types of personal informationpersonal information from
We use different types of personal information, and group them together like this.
| Contact information | Your name, contact details, including e.g. your email and phone number. |
| Background information | This includes background information about you and your work and profession, including your professional background, nationality, biography and social media accounts. |
| Billing details | Details about your fees and payments to and from you. |
| Personal arrangements | Information about specific accessibility requirements or dietary requirements you would like us to be aware of. |
| Expedition information | Details about any expeditions or events you have attended or will attend in the future. |
| Communications | What we learn about you from letters and emails you write to us, and conversations between us. |
| Consents | Any permissions, consents or preferences that you give us. This includes for example how you want us to contact you, whether you have opted into receiving central communications. |
| Forms | We use Microsoft Forms and WordPress forms to create our online forms such as Application, Contact Us and brochure download forms. When you submit a form, the following information is captured:
|
Where we collect personal information from
We may collect personal information about you when you interact with Women Emerging or participate in one of our expeditions. This includes:
Data you provide directly
- When you apply or register for an expedition
- When you talk to us by email, phone, or in person
- When you use our website or platform
- When you complete surveys or feedback forms
- When you share your details (e.g. on a business card)
Data we collect through use
- Information about your participation in our expeditions, such as session attendance, contributions, and materials shared
- Profile data from our learning platform (e.g. progress, reflections, submissions)
- Usage data, including how you interact with our online spaces (e.g. time spent on pages, clicks), gathered via cookies and similar tools
Data we may receive from partners
- Information from institutional partners who refer or sponsor participants
- Input from guides, mentors, or collaborators involved in the expedition
- Details from services we use to process payments, surveys, or communications
- Public data from social media, if you engage with our pages
We do not sell your data or use it for profiling or advertising. All data is held securely and used only to run our programmes and improve the participant experience.
Who we share your personal information with
We may share your personal information with trusted partners who are directly involved in delivering the expedition you are taking part in. This could include the host institution of your expedition, facilitators, or community managers. You will always be informed in advance if your information is to be shared with any partner specific to your expedition.
Any partner we work with will be required to handle your data in compliance with the locally applicable data protection laws, including the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and the EU GDPR.
If you choose not to share personal information
Some personal information is necessary for us to be able to offer you a meaningful and safe experience. If you choose not to provide this information, it may limit our ability to include you in the expedition or offer the full range of support.
Where providing data is optional, we will make this clear at the point of collection.
How long we keep your personal information
We will keep your personal information for as long as you are an explorer on a Women Emerging expedition and/or a subscriber on the WE Hub.
After you become a WE fellow, we will keep your data for the purposes previously outlined, or if we cannot delete it for legal, regulatory or technical reasons.
If you are not a current explorer, subscriber or Fellow of Women Emerging, we will keep your records for 3 years, for the purposes previously outlined, or if we cannot delete it for legal, regulatory or technical reasons.
We will always make sure that your privacy is protected and only use it for those purposes.
How to get a copy of your personal information
Letting us know if your personal information is incorrect
You have the right to question any information we have about you that you think is wrong or incomplete. Please contact us if you want to do this.
If you do, we will take reasonable steps to check its accuracy and correct it.
What if you want us to stop using your personal information?
You have the right to object to our use of your personal information, or to ask us to delete, remove, or stop using your personal information if there is no need for us to keep it. This is known as the ‘right to object’ and ‘right to erasure’, or the ‘right to be forgotten’.
There may be legal or other official reasons why we need to keep or use your data. Please tell us if you think that we should not be using it.
We may sometimes be able to restrict the use of your data. This means that it can only be used for certain things, such as legal claims or to exercise legal rights. In this situation, we would not use or share your information in other ways while it is restricted.
If you want to object to how we use your data, or ask us to delete it or restrict how we use it or, please contact us.
How to withdraw your consent
You can withdraw your consent at any time. Please contact us if you want to do so.
If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. If this is so, we will tell you.
How to complain
Please let us know if you are unhappy with how we have used your personal information. You can do this by contacting us on [email protected]
Data transfers out of the EEA
Women Emerging and other organisations we share data with for these purposes may send personal information to countries outside the European Economic Area (‘EEA’). When we do, there will be a contract in place to make sure the recipient protects the data to the same standard as the EEA. This may include following international frameworks for making data sharing secure.
You are entitled to request the following from Women Emerging. These are called your Data Subject Rights, and you can learn more about them from global data protection authorities, including the European Data Protection Board and the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.
- Right of access – to request access to your personal information and understand how we process it
- Right to rectification – to have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate or incomplete
- Right to erasure (also known as the right to be forgotten) – to request deletion of your personal data
- Right to restrict processing – to limit how your personal information is used
- Right to data portability – to receive your personal information in a usable electronic format
- Right to object – to object to how your data is processed, especially in cases of legitimate interest
- Rights related to automated decision-making and profiling – to request human involvement or challenge decisions made solely by automated processes
If you have any questions about these rights or wish to exercise any of them, please email us at [email protected]
