Who we are
Mobile International Surgical Teams Foundation (MIST) is a UK Charity with Registration Number 1132221.
Our Commitment
Mobile International Surgical Teams Foundation (MIST) is fully committed to protecting your personal information and using it in the ways that you want and expect us to.
We are also committed to complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other relevant legislation.
This Privacy Policy sets out how and why we obtain, use and protect personal data. ‘Personal data’, means any information we hold about you if we can link it to you in any way. The policy also explains the control you have over your personal data and the procedures we have in place to protect it.
This policy applies to personal data we collect through our events, communications, website, email, SMS, in person, post and by telephone.
MIST never sells or exchanges our supporters’ information with other organisations.
We take responsibility for the personal information we collect about you, and we aim to be transparent about how we handle it and give you control over it.
Our Privacy Policy Principles
MIST is committed to protecting your privacy, and handling your personal information in the right way and as you would expect it to be handled:
1. We will ask for or collect the personal data that we need in order to talk to you about our work – such as fundraising, campaigning and volunteering – and to process transactions.
2. We give you control over the personal information we hold about you to make sure it is accurate.
3. We make sure your personal information is always secure and protected.
4. We are fair and transparent about how we use the personal information we hold.
5. We only ever use your personal information for the purpose that you trusted us to use it for.
6. We will never sell your personal information and only share it as outlined in our privacy policy, or when you ask us to.
7. We respect your choices and will tell you if there are important changes that affect your personal information or how we use it.
8. We take responsibility for the personal information that we hold about you.
What personal information does MIST hold?
This policy applies to the personal data we hold and use about people who support our work. This includes:
- Donors and community fundraisers
- Campaigners
- Volunteers
We collect two kinds of information
Personal information such as an individual’s name, postal address, email address and phone numbers. We will also hold details of any donations, campaign actions or transactional services you may make with us, together with your marketing communications preferences. We will hold a record of our communications with you and any communications with us. We may use your name and address to contact you by telephone and use other sources of publicly available information to ensure we hold relevant information about you.
Non-personal information such as IP addresses (the location of the computer on the internet), pages accessed, and files downloaded. This helps us to determine how many people use our website, the frequency of visits and how popular our pages are. This information doesn’t tell us anything about who you are or your address, it simply allows us to monitor and improve our service.
If you use a credit or debit card to donate to us, your card details are processed through third parties’ payment providers who comply with the Payment Card Industry Security Standards. This means that your card information is never captured or stored by MIST or its card payment provider.
Legal Bases
The law on data protection names six legitimate ways for organisations to collect and process personal data. Of those six, we consider three of them can be applied to MIST’s operations.
Consent
Wherever possible, we will ask for explicit consent to send marketing information. For example, online donors will be asked if they want to be updated on MIST’s activities with a choice of post, email, telephone and text being offered. Anyone can change their consent at anytime by emailing us at info@1mist.org.
Legitimate Interest
In specific situations, we may process data to pursue our legitimate interests in ways that might reasonably be expected, and which do not materially impact people’s rights, freedoms or interests. MIST’s use of legitimate interest includes sending direct marketing information by post, to keep our supporters updated on MIST’s projects, fundraising activities and appeals. We will only do this where we have reason to believe that this information will be of interest.
When we use your information we will always consider if it is fair and balanced to do so, and if it is within a supporter’s reasonable expectations. We will balance your rights and our legitimate interests to make sure that we use your personal information in ways which are not unfair or unduly intrusive.
You have the right to object to our processing of your information and can withdraw consent to marketing communications at any time by emailing us at info@1mist.org.
Legal Obligation
If the law requires us to, we may need to collect and process your data.
For example, if you have added Gift Aid to a donation we must process some information for HMRC and hold this for seven years.
How your information is used
MIST uses personal information of supporters to:
- Deal with enquires and requests
- Administer and keep a record of donations made, and actions taken by our supporters and our communications with them
- Send supporters updates about our projects, fundraising activities, events, campaigns and appeals
- Support community-based fundraising
- Analyse our fundraising and campaigning activities
- Understand how we can better improve our services and information
- Claim Gift Aid on donations
- Ensure we do not send unwanted information to supporters or members of the public who do not want to be contacted
Sharing your information
MIST never sells or exchanges our supporter’s information with other organisations.
We will only share your information if:
- We are legally required to do so, for example by a law enforcement agency legitimately exercising a power or if compelled by an order of the Court
- We are working with a trusted service provider that is carrying out work on our behalf. These partners may include mailing houses, marketing agencies, IT specialists and research firms. Where this service is undertaken on behalf of MIST, this is done under contract, in compliance with strict Data Protection requirements, and security measures are taken.
- We believe it is necessary to protect or defend our rights, property or the personal safety of our people, visitors to our premises or websites
Transfer of personal information overseas
Information about supporters is stored by MIST in the UK whenever possible. If we transfer the data abroad (for example when we make use of services provided by internet companies) we will ensure that it remains properly protected.
How long will we keep your data?
We only keep your information for as long as we need to, to be able to use it for the reasons given in this privacy policy.
Where someone has left MIST a gift in their will, we will maintain our records of that pledge to carry out legacy administration and communicate effectively with the families of people leaving us a legacy.
If you have kindly added Gift Aid to a donation we must record the fact that you are a UK taxpayer. HMRC requires that we maintain a record of that Gift Aid for seven years after your last donation to us.
Four years after your last donation, or if you request to receive no further contact from us, we’ll continue to keep some basic information about you in order to avoid sending you unwanted materials in the future.
How do we protect and secure your personal information?
We are committed to protecting your personal information. We use appropriate technical and organisational measures, including encryption, to protect personal information and privacy, and we review them regularly. We protect your information using a combination of physical and IT security controls, including access controls that restrict and manage the way that information and data is processed, managed and handled. We also make sure that our staff are adequately trained in protecting personal information.
Our procedures mean that we may sometimes ask for proof of identity – for example to check that we are speaking to the owner of that personal information.
In the unlikely event of a security breach that compromises our protection of personal information, and we need to let you know about it, we will do so.
How can I change my information and can I access it?
Contact us at info@1mist.org if you’d like to:
- Update your personal information
- Change your personal information
- Change your contact preferences
You have a number of rights under data protection legislation:
- You can request a copy of any information we hold on you verbally or in writing. If possible, email us at info@1mist.org for this. We’ll supply any information you ask for as soon as possible, but this may take up to 30 days. You may be asked for proof of identity.
- You have the right to ask us to stop using or to restrict the processing of your personal data in certain cases, e.g. where it’s not needed to do what you provided it to us for, or if there is some disagreement about its accuracy or legitimate use.
- You can withdraw your consent to us processing your data at any time (where such processing is based on consent e.g. to send you electronic direct marketing).
If you believe our records are inaccurate or incomplete you have the right to ask for those records concerning you to be updated. To update your records please get in touch with us using the details above.
In some cases, you have the right to be forgotten (i.e. to have your personal data deleted from our database), or transferred to another organisation (“data portability”). Where you have requested that we don’t send you marketing materials we’ll need to keep some limited information in order to ensure that you’re not contacted in the future.
If you have any concerns about the way your data is being used or if you’d like to make a complaint please contact us at info@1mist.org.
Marketing and Communications Preferences, cookies and third party websites
To help ensure our communications with you are relevant, we analyse geographic, demographic and other key characteristics and behaviours relating to you; as well as your previous responses to our marketing communications. This helps us to personalise and improve your supporter experience with MIST and minimise wastage. Some of this analysis is based on data provided by you and some of this is provided by external organisations.
We only want to send communications that are of genuine interest and relevant to you. You are in control of how we use your personal information for marketing and fundraising purposes. If we contact you by email, every message we send will include a link to opt out of receiving future messages.
Facebook Marketing
You may come across MIST naturally on Facebook through your own networks, or you might be presented with a promoted advert from us. We use targeted advertising on Facebook which allows people who are interested in our work to connect with us and become a supporter. We do this to inform, educate and engage new potential supporters. We may provide your email address, mobile number and address to Facebook, so they can determine whether you are a registered account holder with them. Our adverts may then appear when you access Facebook. Facebook deletes the data that we provide them in an encrypted format if it does not match with an account, however we want to remind our supporters and users that information shared by you or your contacts on timelines, on our page, or in private messages may be used and sold by Facebook for commercial purposes.
Other Social Media Sites
We operate a number of social media pages (including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram). Although this policy covers how we will use any data collected from those pages it does not cover how the providers of social media websites will use your information. Please ensure you read the privacy policy of the social media website before sharing data, and make use of the privacy setting and reporting mechanisms to control how your data is used.
Cookies
Cookies are small text files on your device. They are made by your web-browser when you visit a website. Every time you go back to that website, your browser will send the cookie file back to the website’s server. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device.
You can find more information about cookies at: www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu.
Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improving the user experience.
They can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you and your interests.
Why does MIST use Cookies?
Like many websites, MIST uses cookies in order to provide you with a more personalised web service.
Cookies help us identify which bits of our website people are using, and help us do work on those sections of the website to improve the user experience. We also use cookies to help show content on our site which is relevant to you and your interests, for example if on a previous visit you went to our pages about emergencies, festivals or events, we might find this out from your cookie and show you other information on our website related to emergencies, festivals or events on subsequent visits.
Information supplied in cookies also allows us to measure the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns for MIST. This enables us to ensure any money we spend on digital marketing gives us a good return on investment.
How to Control your Cookie Preferences
Cookies are used to enable us to improve services for you through, for example:
- remembering if you are logged in so you can move around the website without having to log in again on each page
- measuring how many people are using each page of the website, and for how long, so that we can try to improve the quality of our website
- enabling you to view content shared on other sites e.g. YouTube or Twitter
However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by the MIST website, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘help’ function within your browser should tell you how.
Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your computer as well as more general information about cookies. For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.
Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of the MIST website.
