Welcome to The Crowd!

This Privacy Policy sets out how The Crowd treats your personal information when you use our services and how the Crowd uses and protects any information you give The Crowd when you use this website.

It describes the types of personal information collected and created in connection with your use of the Crowd, how and why we use such information, who we share it with, and your legal rights.

What is The Crowd?

Birmingham and Solihull are one of Sport England’s Local Delivery Pilots set up to find out what works to help build happier, healthier and safer communities. The Active Communities initiative is led by The Active Wellbeing Society, Birmingham City Council and Solihull MBC and aims to create innovative solutions to make it easier for people to access social and physical activity. 

The Crowd is a free network created to help people feel more connected to and involved in their local community.  The Crowd is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected.  Where we ask you to provide information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

The Active Wellbeing Society decide the purpose for which personal information supplied by visitors to the Crowd website/Crowd members is processed and are the “data controllers” responsible for handling members’/visitors’ personal information in line with UK data protection laws.

Personal Information that you provide is collected and stored securely by The Active Wellbeing Society Ltd (Information Commissioner’s Office Reg. No. ZA266982 who work in partnership with Solihull MBC (Information Commissioner’s Office Reg. No. Z5888433).

The Crowd may change this policy by updating this page.  You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes.  If we materially change this policy, we will take steps to notify you in advance of the change. This policy was last updated on 05.03.20.

What personal information we collect

We collect identity information provided by you when using our services, e.g. by signing up to the Crowd, posting to the community feed, filling in surveys, registering for events, subscribing to our newsletter or contacting us with enquiries.

For individuals the sign-up information will include your name, address, email address, date of birth, gender and ethnicity. We need to collect this personal information to allow us to identify you as an individual on our single customer view.

This information is required in order for you to use The Crowd and for us to provide and improve our services, ensure the security of your account and facilitate interactions with other Crowd members and groups.

For organisations sign up information will include  your name, job title, your organisation name and contact information including your email address.

Interests

We will also ask you about your interests so that we can provide content that links to these.  If you want to connect and communicate with other Crowd members about specific interests, you might also post this content on The Crowd.  We require this information to understand your needs and provide you with a better service.

Survey data

If you choose to take part in surveys/quick polls or other general research that The Crowd undertakes you may provide data in response. This data will only be used for the purposes stated within the individual survey.

Automated Interactions – as you interact with the Crowd website, we may automatically collect technical data about your equipment, browser type, time zone settings, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal information by using cookies and other similar technologies. We use this information for our internal system administration, to administer our website, and to monitor and improve the user experience. For further details, please see more on cookies below.

Why we collect your personal information and UK Data Protection laws allow us to use your personal information as described

UK data protection law specifies a limited numbers of grounds on which an organisation is permitted to handle personal information. 

This is known as the ‘legal basis for processing’. We are required to inform you which of these grounds we rely on. We use the information about you, which is described above, to the extent lawful and appropriate, for one or more of the following purposes and legal grounds:

We legally use and retain your personal information where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you, such as on registering you to the Crowd.

Legitimate Interests in circumstances where these interests are not outweighed by the need to protect your privacy, for example: Administering a central single customer view of activities provided by the Active Communities programme allowing us to offer you a holistic customer experience and permitting us to keep up-to-date with your participation across the board;  Keeping track of the content you post to better target and plan the provision of services to you; Monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the Crowd platform and activities by conducting analysis and research; Responding to your enquiries; and providing you with information and updates about our Services or to the website.

Compliance with a Legal Obligation – we use and retain your information for fulfilling our legal and regulatory obligations, e.g. for crime prevention and in the event of actual and potential legal claims. This may involve disclosing your personal information to third parties such as the police and our legal advisors.

Equalities Monitoring – to allow us to target our efforts to tackle inequality and help the most disadvantaged in communities, e.g. by collecting aggregated information around certain protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010.

Consent – if we cannot lawfully handle your personal information on the above or other permitted grounds, we may need to rely on having your consent in order to be able to do so. This might be the case where you have agreed to receive electronic marketing from us or if we are dealing with personal information which falls into so-called “special categories”, which cover information that the law considers to be inherently sensitive, such as that relating to race/ethnicity, political opinions, health, religious or similar beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation and biometrics. Please note that you may withdraw consent at any time after you have given it (see more about how to do this under ‘your right’s’). This would not affect the lawfulness of any prior use of that information by us. In certain situations, however, withdrawing consent might impact on our ability to offer you a specific service.

Once you register to use the Crowd website your information is used to populate your profile.

We use the information you provide to manage, understand and improve the services provided by Active Communities and the Crowd, to facilitate community conversations and deliver community benefit. This includes managing and facilitating the exchange of contact details between participants in the Crowd.  We collect personal information  including  information which falls into ‘special categories to; monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of our programmes and Target and plan the provision of services.

Do we disclose your personal information to third parties?

Sharing Data

We will only share anonymous or aggregated information about you with our third-party partner organisations and funders. Examples of the organisations we currently share data with include:

• Torque 2
• Do it Life
• Birmingham City Council
• Sport England
• Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council

Data Processors

We share personal and special information with our 3rd party service providers who perform services and function at our direction and on our behalf.     This includes our technology suppliers or research partners who are contracted as data processors to help provide data management services such as data capture, data warehousing, engagement tools and research, evaluation and statistical analytics.   We and our partners will hold all information in confidence and comply with all our responsibilities under the UK data protection laws.  For further details on who these processors are, please see https://theaws.co.uk/our-policies/privacy-policy/ and their own prospective privacy policies found on their websites.

Activity providers

The Crowd may partner with third party organisations to offer members the ability to access a range of different services and offers. These offers may be integrated into The Crowd or The  Crowd may contain links to other websites featuring the offers.

Content shared with The Crowd community

The Crowd is a platform for local communities to share helpful information with each other and so content that you post into the community feeds and public groups, such as posts, replies, recommendations is visible to other members.

Your rights

You may choose to restrict the collection or use of your personal information in the following ways:

• If you have agreed to us using your personal data to contact in relation to the Crowd and our other services or products you may change your mind at any time by writing to or emailing us.
• You may request details of personal information that we hold about you under the Data Protection Act 2018. If you would like a copy of the information held on you, please write or email us at: The Active Wellbeing Society Studio 309, Custard Factory, Birmingham B9 4AA. Email: [email protected]
• If you believe that any information we are holding about you is incorrect or incomplete, please write to or email us and we will promptly correct any found to be incorrect.
• You may request the erasure of your data under the Data Protection Act 2018.  You can write or email us and we will respond to you within 20 working days from receipt of the request.
• You have the right to lodge a complaint to the Information Commissioners Office https://ico.org.uk/

Withdrawing consent

By signing up to The Crowd, you agree to our privacy policy.  You have a right to withdraw your full or partial consent at any time or to change your preferences.  You can do this by visiting the preference centre link in your profile page.

How long is my information kept

We will keep this information during the time of your involvement with our services and up to a period of 3 years afterwards.  Your details will be automatically removed from our database if you have not used your account or our services for more than three years.

How is my information protected

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure.  In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and keep your data secure.  Personal information will be stored on servers hosted within the EU

We endeavor to provide reasonable security for information we process and maintain, however no security system can prevent all potential security breaches. All our staff and data processors who have access to, and are associated with the processing of, personal information are legally obliged to respect the confidentiality of the personal information of our visitors, email subscribers, members, supporters, and all those who engage with us’.

Account Security

The Crowd uses technical measures to keep your data secure. Please ensure that you keep your password safe and do not share it, ensuring that the details that you use to log in are kept confidential.

How we use cookies

A cookie is a small piece of text stored on your computer, phone or whatever you use to access the Internet. Cookies have many uses, but fundamentally they are used to store information about you on your computer. On this website cookies are used for Google Analytics, as explained below.

Google analytics is a web statistics package. We use Google Analytics to gather information about how you use our website. Google sets a cookie so we can see which pages people have landed on and how they have navigated through the site. We cannot obtain personal information from this data. For more information visit the Google privacy policy and the Google Cookie Usage page.

The data we collect helps us to understand:

• which pages people visit on the site;
• which internet browsers are being used;
• How long users stay on our website
• How users use our website

Google have developed a browser Add-on which excludes Google Analytics recording your activities on any websites using Google Analytics. It’s totally free and can be installed on most browsers.

Other services and websites

In using The Crowd, you may come across content posted by and services operated by third parties and our website may contain links to their websites.  However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website and are not responsible for their privacy practices.

These third parties will have their own privacy policies, which will apply to any personal  information that they collect, and we do not accept responsibility or liability for such external sites’ privacy and security practices.  We encourage you to be aware when you leave our website and to read the privacy statements on the other websites that you visit.

If you have any questions or comments in relation to this privacy statement, please write or email us at:

The Active Wellbeing Society Studio 309, Custard Factory, Birmingham B9 4AA. 

Email: [email protected]