Privacy Policy

YouthLink Scotland is the national agency for youth work and we strive to keep any data we hold in line with the highest standard of data protection.

The safety of your personal information is something that we take very seriously and we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is effective from 25th May 2018, and changes how your personal data can be stored and used. This updated Privacy Policy is written in accordance with GDPR.

This Privacy Policy explains how we use, process and protect your personal information for the purposes of communications, marketing and delivery of certain services. This includes data that we gather from you for email updates that we send for the use of our website, and at the events and networks run by us (or on our behalf) which you attend. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal information and how we will treat it.

If you have any questions about what we have set out below or would like to request a change in how we handle your personal data then please contact us at info@youthlink.scot.

 

How do we collect your personal information?

Personal information is anything that can identify you, for example your name, email address, how you found out about our services, or how you’ve accessed our sites. We collect information about you if you have:

  1. Consented to our youth work briefing
  2. Consented to one of our national projects briefings: NKBL, AoP, AoS
  3. Accessed our website
  4. Attended one of our events by signing up online
  5. If you have signed up as a member of YouthLink Scotland
  6. If you have joined a YouthLink Scotland Network
  7. Taken part in research, evaluation or a survey
  8. Applied for funding

 

How do we share your information with other companies or organisations?

In this policy we will go through each of these areas and explain how we collect your personal information and use it.

  1. If you have consented to our youth work briefing

When you subscribe to our newsletters or emails from us, we require:

We will collect this information as part of your subscription to our mailing lists.

A subscription to our mailing lists means that you will automatically receive email updates. We will not email you unnecessarily or for a purpose that is not related to the business of YouthLink Scotland.

Our use and storage of personal information for email marketing and communications is based on your consent for us to do so. Therefore you will only receive emails and other information that you have consented to receive. We make sure that our consent process is double-opt in, which means that your consent is validated before we send any communications to you.

You may withdraw your consent at any time by using the ‘unsubscribe’ link on any of our newsletters.

If you unsubscribe from our emails or withdraw your consent for us to use your personal information in this way, we will retain your information within our systems to prevent emails being sent to you by us. We will retain this information only for as long as we require it for these purposes.

We use external platforms to manage our email marketing and communications. Such platforms may be located outside the EEA, however any such platforms shall be compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. In the case of the Youth Work Briefing we use Mailchimp. Find out more about Mailchimp’s privacy policy.

Our emails may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

  1. If you have consented to one of our national projects briefings: NKBL, AoP, AoS.

When you subscribe to our newsletters or emails from us, we require:

We will collect this information as part of your subscription to our mailing lists.

A subscription to our mailing lists means that you will automatically receive email updates. We will not email you unnecessarily or for a purpose that is not related to the business of YouthLink Scotland.

Our use and storage of personal information for email marketing and communications is based on your consent for us to do so. Therefore, you will only receive emails and other information that you have consented to receive. We make sure that our consent process is double-opt in, which means that your consent is validated before we send any communications to you.

You may withdraw your consent at any time by using the ‘unsubscribe’ link on any of our newsletters.

If you unsubscribe from our emails or withdraw your consent for us to use your personal information in this way, we will retain your information within our systems to prevent emails from being sent to you by us. We will retain this information only for as long as we require it for these purposes.

We use external platforms to manage our email marketing and communications. Such platforms may be located outside the EEA, however any such platforms shall be compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. In the case of AoS, AoP and NKBL the platform is Mailchimp – find out more about Mailchimp’s privacy policies.

Our emails may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

  1. If you have accessed our website

Accessing our website

For security purposes we do collect some personal information about you, for example your IP address. This is so that we can block someone if they try and get into our site.

Browsing our website

Whilst using our website we collect anonymous information about your browsing session to help us improve our website. We are committed to ensuring that this information is collected, stored and used in an ethical way which observes UK data protection legislation.

We use a tool called Google Analytics to collect this data. All of the data is stored securely on Google’s servers. In order to track your browsing across sessions, Google analytics will place a ‘cookie’ on your machine (a small text file that websites use to track and remember information across several browsing sessions). You can tell your web browser not to accept cookies if you don’t your data to be collected in this way (refer to your web browser’s help file for more information).

For further details on Google Analytics, and the Google Analytics privacy policy, please visit the Google Analytics website.

You can read our cookie policy here.

The data we collect includes the pages that you visit on the website, the number of times that you visit them, your operating system, your screen resolution, the version of your web browser and the country you are visiting from.

This data helps us:

Giving us your information via our website

Sometimes we may ask you to provide us with your personal information on our website if you are subscribing to services advertised via our website such as the Youth Work Briefing (see above) or when submitting a vacancy or event that you would like us to advertise for you, or to book onto an event. When you use these elements of our website, we may require:

We will use this information:

The use and storage of any personal information within the website will be based on legitimate interests. The legitimate interests we are pursuing are the operation of our website and provision of our services.

We will retain this information only for as long as we require it for these purposes.

We will store information you provide to us on our secure servers or on secure servers provided by our service providers. All data will be stored within the EEA or with service providers that are compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework.

Security of our website

This website was designed, and is maintained by Primate, an independent strategic and creative digital marketing agency who take the security of any personal data processed on their websites seriously. View Primate’s privacy policy.

Linking to other websites

Our website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. You can also share articles or features of our website through other sites such as Facebook or Twitter. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

  1. If you have attended one of our events  

When you attend one of our events, we require:

We will collect this information as part of your confirmation of attending an event. We also ask for information on any special requirements to assist people to attend the event. This information is optional. We use it in order to meet any specific needs that you have in order to remove any potential barriers to your participation as part of our commitment to equality and diversity.

Our use and storage of personal information in relation to events is based on your consent for us to do so, and this is indicated by a tick box ‘opt-in’ at the bottom of the booking form, either through our website or through an external platform (please see below). By opting in to booking a place at one of our events, you also enter a contractual basis which may include cancellation fees for late withdrawals.

We use this personal information to effectively organise and administer the event. Personal information will only be shared with other organisations where it is necessary to do so for this purpose. This includes, for example, providing the names of attendees to venues we are using.

We will retain this information only for as long as we require it for these purposes.

We may use external platforms to manage some of our events. Such platforms may be located outside the EEA, however any such platforms shall be compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. Eventbrite  and Survey Monkey are two of the platforms that we use.

If you attend our events as part of the group of presenters, sponsors or speakers, we may note your involvement in our emails relating to the event and on communication platforms, including social media. Such platforms may continue to store and use personal information according to their own processes.

  1. If you have signed up as a member of YouthLink Scotland

If you have signed up as a member of YouthLink Scotland we will ask you for:

The use and storage of any personal information relating to our membership services is based on the legitimate interests of the company. The legitimate interests we are pursuing are the operation and provision of our services to members.

  1. If you have joined a YouthLink Scotland Network

If you have signed up as a member of one of YouthLink Scotland’s networks we will ask you for:

The use and storage of any personal information relating to our networks is based on the legitimate interests of the company. The legitimate interests we are pursuing are the operation and provision of services to our network members.

  1. If you take part in research, evaluation or a survey

We may ask you to take part in research to evaluate either our services, website or activities related to the work of the YouthLink Scotland. This means we may ask you for your personal information such as:

We will only contact you about your responses if you have consented to being contacted. All results that we publish will be anonymised unless you consent to be identified for any particularly reason (for example you want to provide a quote in support of our work).

  1. Applied for funding.

If you have applied for funding through one of the grants that YouthLink Scotland administers we will ask you for:

The use and storage of any personal information relating to grants is based on the legitimate interests of the company and in compliance with our contractual and legal obligations with sponsors who provide the funding, such as the Scottish Government.

The legitimate interests we are pursuing are the operation and provision of grants.

  1. How do we share your information with other companies or organisations?

We do not provide any personal information to third parties for commercial purposes, so we will never rent or sell your personal information to other organisations.

If you have given us permission to contact you, we may pass on your details to third party companies and/or individuals to perform certain functions on our behalf (including delivering events, sending postal mail or email, academic/research projects related to our work, delivering certain aspects of our service, and processing card payments). If they require access to your personal information then we will make sure that:

We may also share your personal information with a third party if:

Your Rights

Where we use or store personal information relating to you, you have the following rights:

These rights apply to certain situations, but do not apply to others. View the Information Commissioner’s Office’s guidance on each of your access rights. If you do want to exercise any of these rights then please contact us at info@youthlink.scot.

Personal data breaches

We take any suggestion of a personal data breach seriously and will fully investigate it. As per the requirements of GDPR, we will alert the ICO within 72 hours if we believe a breach has occurred, and depending on the circumstances, also contact those who may be impacted.

You can learn more about the obligations of organisations regarding personal data breaches on the ICO’s website here

Where we feel it necessary in the event of a breach, we may employ an external independent consultant to assist our Data Protection Officer to investigate the matter.

Complaints

If you are concerned about any aspect of our processing or personal information, please contact us at info@youthlink.scot.

Should we fail to resolve your concerns, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Contacting Us

Please read this notice carefully and contact us if you have any queries by emailing us at: info@youthlink.scot.

Changing this policy

We reserve the right to change this Privacy Notice from time to time and suggest therefore that you review it periodically. We will make sure that if we do change this policy then it will be in accordance with GDPR.

This version of the Privacy Notice was last updated on 7 July 2023.