Privacy Policy

Orkney Folk Festival
Privacy Policy

The Orkney Folk Festival (in this policy collectively ‘Orkney Folk Festival’, the ‘Festival’, ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’) is committed to protecting the information we gather that identifies you as an individual (your personal information). We understand that your information is important to you and that you may have concerns. We have developed this privacy policy to give you all the details you need about how we process your personal information, why we process it and the steps we take to keep it secure. We may update this privacy policy when our safeguards change, and we recommend you check this page regularly. The current policy is effective from 25 March 2023.

Our website address is www.orkneyfolkfestival.com and we sell tickets for the Festival via the subdomain tickets.orkneyfolkfestival.com 

You do not need to share all the information outlined below, but there may be some of our services you cannot use to a full extent if you choose to withhold information.

We qualify for an exemption from registration with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as a not-for-profit organisation.

Orkney Folk Festival is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO), registered OSCR no. SC027280 with the address Orkney Folk Festival, Ferry Terminal Building, Stromness, Orkney, KW16 3BH.

You can contact us by emailing info@orkneyfolkfestival.com

Ticketing System and Online Accounts

Orkney Folk Festival Box Office sells tickets to our events through the website orkneyfolkfestival.com. You will create an online account as part of the booking process. Once set up, you can access your online account at any time. The account is hosted on Monad – a cloud based CRM system.  Monad is a software development company headquartered in the UK.

How We Collect Your Personal Information

We collect your personal information in ways you would expect when you interact with the Orkney Folk Festival, such as when you book a ticket for one of our events, join us as a Friend or use our website.

We collect your personal information:

  • When you buy a ticket and create an online account.

  • When you join us as a Friend, renew your membership, or manage your membership.

  • When you donate.

  • When you contact us by phone, in person, online or by post to make an enquiry or to access information.

  • When you use our website, such as filling in one of our online forms or entering a competition.

  • When you agree to receive communications from us.

  • When you sign up to our newsletter through our website, which is distributed through Mailchimp.

  • When you access our social media channels, including Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook: we only receive personal information that you share with us voluntarily and that is compatible with your privacy settings. To find out more about how these social media companies process your personal information, we recommend that you read their privacy policies. From time to time, we may collect your personal information from third parties.

The personal information we collect

We only collect personal information that is necessary to meet our business needs and to provide you with the services you have requested.

Creating an account or buying a ticket

When you create an account with us or buy a ticket to one of our events, we will obtain information directly from you including the following:

  • Title

  • First Name

  • Last Name

  • Address

  • Postcode

  • Email

  • Telephone number

  • Your communication preferences

  • Transactions and order fulfilment

When you buy a ticket for one of our events, we obtain information from you to fulfil the sales transaction including the following:

  • Name

  • Card details

  • Billing address

Joining us as a Friend or Donor

When you join us as a Friend or Donor we collect basic account information as above. We may also collect additional personal information including:

  • Card details

  • Gift aid information

Debit/credit card details will only be used for the purpose of handling your sales transaction. Debit/credit card details and personal information will be passed to third-party processors to ensure the payments you make are authenticated, submitted and authorised.

Using our website

When you use our website, we obtain information from your session, namely:

  • IP address

You can read more in the ‘Cookies’ section below.

How We Use Your Personal Information

We collect personal information from you where we have a valid legal basis for doing so, such as to fulfil a contract we have with you, or because you have given your consent to the sharing. We will always explain to you our purposes for collecting personal information at the point of collection and we will let you know if our purposes change. For our bookers, Friends and Donors, we will have to send a number of service emails related to sales and membership contracts.

Contracts

We use your information to meet our business needs, provide you with our services and to fulfil contracts. In relation to our bookers and Friends, we use your information:

  • to set up your account

  • to fulfil ticket requests, donations and Friends membership requests

  • to provide information and support in connection with your account type

  • to administer and manage your Friends membership

  • to process payments

  • to send you service emails related to your account, your ticket purchases and/or your Friends membership, for example, receipts and confirmations, acknowledgements and thank you communications, gift aid and payment verifications

  • to send you information about the events you have booked, such as cancellations and changes to the programme

  • to communicate with you when you initiate contact with us

  • for customer service

  • for general administration and recordkeeping

General

  • We take steps to combat fraud and credit risk

  • We ensure the security of our information systems

  • We respond to and record enquiries when you contact us

  • We administrate the Orkney Folk Festival as part of our daily business

  • We process donations, including in accordance with due diligence and our obligations under charity law

  • We keep records to comply with our legal and financial obligations

  • We deliver and improve our customer service to you

Marketing

We will only contact people who have expressly consented to contact from us with marketing information about the Festival. If you wish to opt out of receiving marketing communications, you can manage your marketing preferences at any time via your online account.

We measure the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and personalise our marketing communications so that they are more relevant to you as a booker and as an audience member.

We classify our audience into groups and segments on the basis of booking history and ticket purchases, attendance over time and information that is provided when you create an account, such as your postcode. We use anonymised data for this profiling.

We conduct analytics to better understand our development as an organisation. We use anonymised data for this analytical research. We consider the growth and sales rate of our tickets and combine this with other relevant data such as interaction with our website and social media.

We conduct in-depth audience research by email, online and/or in person every year to better understand the overall experience of the Orkney Folk Festival from the perspective of our audience. This research is based on a random sample of our attendees who self-select to take part. You are under no obligation to participate. Full details of the process are provided when we approach you to participate.

How We Share Your Personal Information

We have clear agreements with all of our service providers who process your personal information on our behalf. In these cases, Orkney Folk Festival is the data controller and any third party is the data processor. Data processors will only use your personal information for the purposes we specify and as outlined in this privacy policy.

  • We will not sell, rent or trade your personal information to third parties for marketing or research purposes.

  • We also share your information with companies who provide services on our behalf, including mailing, processing orders and card payments, email delivery, website hosting, cloud services and customer service. You can read more in the ‘Security’ section.

  • We may disclose your personal information to a government agency or other authorised body where we are required to do so in order to comply with a law or court order, for example, charity law.

Managing the Personal Information That We Hold About You

We are committed to giving you control over the personal information you share with us. You can update and manage your personal information in different ways.

You can easily manage the personal information we hold about you through your online account. You have options to update your contact details and to manage your communications preferences for the Orkney Folk Festival should you wish to. You can update your marketing preferences at any time.

Electronic marketing communications sent by the Orkney Folk Festival will always include functions to opt-out of similar communications in the future. Communications will also contain information and links that will allow you to manage your account preferences as above.

If you prefer, you can contact us directly about amendments to your personal information using our contact information provided in the by emailing us at info@orkneyfolkfestival.com.

Cookies

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to distinguish you from other users which helps to provide you with a good experience when you browse that website.

Essential cookies

In order to keep track of your order it is essential that we store a “session cookie” on your computer. This cookie will last for 24 hours.

Non-essential cookies

We use a few non-essential cookies to customise your booking experience and help make it easier and more enjoyable for you. These extra cookies are used to store thinks like your login details so you will be automatically logged in each time you visit our site.

We may also install cookies to monitor the success of online marketing activity for this website.

Before storing any of these cookies for the first time, we will alert you and ask your permission before proceeding. If you do not wish to store these cookies you will not be able to use that particular feature, but the rest of the site will continue to work correctly.

Security

We take the safeguarding of your information seriously. Our primary systems, including our internal systems, our CRM partner Monad use servers located in the UK.

USA-based data processors we currently use are Google Analytics provided by Google; Facebook and Business Manager provided by Facebook, and Mailchimp. To find out more about how these organisations process personal information, we recommend that you read their privacy policies.

Every credit card purchase you make at our website is done through our Secure Server Technology. This provides many security features, including:

  • authentication: this assures your browser that your data is being sent to the correct computer server, and that the server is secure.

  • encryption: this encodes the data, so that it cannot be read by anyone other than the secure server.

  • data integrity: this checks the data being transferred to ensure it has not been altered.

Our online ticketing facility accepts:

  • MasterCard; American Express; Visa; Visa Debit and Maestro.

Our secure server software encrypts information, ensuring that Internet transactions stay private and protected.

If you have any questions or concerns about our security, please contact our box office by emailing info@orkneyfolkfestival.com.

Retention

We will only collect and retain personal information from you in order to meet our purposes outlined in this privacy policy.

We will not retain information that is unnecessary for our business purposes. Generally, we will retain ticket and membership purchase information for a minimum of seven years in order to comply with our financial auditing requirements. Should you wish to be removed from our marketing lists and those of our venue partners, we will have to retain a minimum amount of information about you on our system in order to fully comply with your request.

Your Choices and Rights

  • You can make choices and exercise your rights in relation to the personal information we hold about you.

  • You have the right to be informed about how we collect and process your personal information.

  • You have the right to withdraw your consent where it has been given, for example to receive marketing information from our core venue partners.

  • You have the right to correct your personal information in cases where the information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete. The easiest way to ensure your information is accurate is to update any incorrect information through your Orkney Folk Festival online account.

  • You have the right to ask us to stop processing your personal information.

  • You can further request that we delete your personal information in a number of circumstances including when you withdraw consent, when you successfully object to processing and when the personal data we hold about you is no longer required for the purpose we collected it.

  • You have the right to obtain and reuse your personal information across other services.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation, you can request to see full details of the personal information that the Orkney Folk Festival holds about you. In order to initiate a request with us about your personal information, please send us a description of the information you would like to access to info@orkneyfolkfestival.com.