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Who is Premier?

Premier is Europe’s largest Christian Media organisation. We exist to help people put their faith at the heart of daily life and to bring Christ to communities.

You may have interacted with a number of our brands: Premier Christian Radio, Premier Gospel Radio, Premier Praise Radio, Premier Lifeline, Premier Christianity, Premier Woman Alive, Premier NexGen, Premier Unbelievable?, Christian Marketplace, Garden of Eden Coffee, Premier Jobsearch, Premier Christian News, Premier Digital or any number of our campaign-specific brands we launch for a period of time as we seek to influence the world for Christ.

We fulfil our mission through a variety of communication channels including radio stations, daily e-newsletters, books and magazines, podcast series, digital subscriptions and training, apps, YouTube channels, social media accounts, digital event platforms and in-person events, in-bound and outbound telephone calling, SMS messages, and a variety of websites focused on content, resources, campaigns, merchandise, or services.

Since 1995, our success has largely depended on the generous funding we have received from donors and supporters like you. Premier Christian Communications Ltd is the data controller who determines the purpose and means of processing of all personal data shared with Premier Christian Communciations Ltd and Premier Christian Media Trust.

Premier Christian Media Trust is a registered charity (no. 287610) and a company limited by guarantee (no. 01743091) with two fully-owned trading subsidiaries: Christian Communication Partnership Ltd (no. 03422292); and Premier Christian Communications Ltd (no. 02816074). All three companies are registered in England & Wales with a registered office address of Unit 6, April Court Sybron Way, Crowborough, TN6 3DZ.

Introduction

We understand the importance of your personal data and are committed to handling your data with care, transparency, and integrity. We always aim to respect your preferences while meeting the requirements of Data Protection Legislation. We have developed this privacy notice to ensure that you are fully aware of;

  • the personal data we collect about you,
  • what we do with your information,
  • how we keep your information secure, and
  • the rights and choices you have over your personal information.

This notice applies to all of our data collection and processing activities including;

  • Your interactions with any of Premier’s teams
  • Your use of our websites and the data collected through them
  • Data collected by your interactions with our brands, promotions and offers, including promotions on third party platforms, such as Facebook.
  • Processing of your data to contact you by email, post, phone, texting or bespoke messaging on our websites.

Throughout this notice, where we refer to Data Protection Legislation, we mean the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA2018), United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 and any legislation implemented in connection with this legislation.

When you are based in the EU, it also includes the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR). This includes any replacement legislation coming into effect from time to time.

This policy is effective from 21 March 2023. We will use your information as set out in this Privacy Policy. We may edit this policy and update this page, so please check back from time to time. If we need to use your personal information for any other purpose not outlined in this policy, we will take steps to provide you with additional information and update this Privacy Policy.

If you disagree with this policy, please do not use our websites, mobile applications, social media pages, register for events, submit enquiries, participate in contests, request our products, or otherwise provide us with any of your personal details. If you previously provided us your personal details, you have the right to request deletion. Please see more under ‘Your Rights’ below.

The personal data we collect

We only collect personal information that we genuinely need to fulfil our interests and obligations as a charity, a commercial entity and to provide our services to you. All information is collected in accordance with Data Protection Legislation.

Most data we collect has been given to us directly by yourself or we have generated it through your interaction with us. For example, data we collect includes things like your:

  •  name
  • address
  • email
  • phone number
  • preferences
  • location **
  • financial and/or faith information
  • personal impact stories and testimonies
  • event purchases and attendance **
  • your interests and preferences
  • notes we take from phone calls and call recordings **
  • your interactions with our content, such as eBooks you downloaded, stories read, petitions signed, or SMS series you signed up to, complaints made **
  •  CCTV footage if you visit our offices or studios  ,
  • some technical information such as IP address, data collected by cookies, or a mobile device’s unique identifier ** .
    ** Not applicable on the Premier Plus App

In addition, we may also obtain indirect data about you from public sources. Public source data includes publicly available information (e.g., public social media postings, data maintained by government agencies made available to the public or commercial entities for post forwarding). We sometimes engage commercial enterprises to helps us supplement our records (e.g., if we only have your name and address, we may obtain your phone number from them; age information; we may obtain ‘wealth demographics’ e.g. ACORN classification, to ensure our fundraising is appropriate to the recipient).

Cookies on our websites

We use cookies to provide you with a better online experience. Please be aware the following section does not apply to the Premier Plus App.

The types of cookies used on our websites fall into one of five categories:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies services you have asked for, like shopping baskets or e-billing, cannot be provided.

Analytics Cookies

These cookies collect information about how people are using our sites, for example which pages are visited the most often, how people are moving from one link to another and if they get error messages from certain pages. These cookies don’t gather information that identifies you. All information these cookies collect is grouped together with information from other people’s use of our sites on an anonymous basis. Overall, these cookies provide us with analytical information about how our sites are performing and how we can improve.

Functionality Cookies

These cookies allow us to remember choices you make and tailor our sites to provide enhanced features and content to you. For example, these cookies can be used to remember your user name, language choice or country selection, they can also be used to remember changes you’ve made to text size, font, and other parts of pages that you can customise.

Advertising Cookies

These cookies are used to deliver advertisements that are more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. They remember that you have visited a site and this information may be shared with other organisations such as advertising partners. This means after you have been to our sites you may see some advertisements about our services elsewhere on the internet.

Social Media Cookies

To enhance your internet experience and to make the sharing of content easier, some of the pages on our sites may contain tools or applications that are linked to third party social media service providers such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Through these tools or applications, the social media service provider may set its own cookies on your device. We do not control these cookies and you should check the social media service provider’s website for further details about how they use cookies.

Cookies can also be categorised as either be “first party cookies” if they belong to Premier and we place them on your device, or “third-party cookies” that are managed by another party and place on your PC or browsing device when you visit our websites.

Please see more information below regarding third-party cookies on our websites and how you can manage what cookies are on your device.

  • Google Analytics: These cookies allow us to see how you use our website and mobile application so that we can improve your experience. We encourage you to read the Google Privacy Policy. If you do not want data reported by Google Analytics, Google permits you to opt out by installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
  • Google AdWords: These cookies allow our vendors to serve ads based on your past visits to our sites and for remarketing purposes. Google may use this cookie and other tracking technology to show you our ads across the internet. Google permits you to opt out of Google’s use of these cookies by visiting Google’s Ads Settings.|
  • Social Media Features: Our websites may include social media features, like the Facebook recommend button or interactive mini-programmes that run on our site. If you use these features, they will collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our site, and set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Features may be hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our site. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy of the company providing the feature, not by our privacy policy.
  • Optimizely: These cookies allow us to optimize the look, feel and messaging of our website based upon how you use it. You can read the Optimizely Privacy Policy here.
  • Personyze: These cookies helps us identify individuals so that we can better understand our users’ experience by looking at things like behaviour (e.g. how much time you spend on which pages, which links you choose to click, etc.), and your device (type, screen size, country you are accessing website from, preferred language etc). This enables us to build and maintain our websites to better serve our audiences. Personyze stores this information in a pseudonymized user profile. Neither Personyze nor Premier uses this information to identify individual users or to match it with further data on any individual user.

How long do cookies last?

The length of time a cookie will stay on your browsing device depends on whether it is a “persistent” or “session” cookie. Session cookies will only stay on your device until you stop browsing. Persistent cookies stay on your browsing device after you have finished browsing until they expire or are deleted. Information about the cookies we use may be updated from time to time, so please check your browser on a regular basis for any changes.

How to remove cookies?

We aim to capture your consent to receive cookies when you initially visit our website. The easiest way to view, enable, disable cookies is to access the settings on the internet browser you are using. To do this, follow the instructions provided by your browser or mobile telephone (usually located within the “Help”, “Tools” or “Edit” settings). Please note that if you set your browser to disable cookies, you may not be able to access secure areas of our sites and other parts of our sites may also not work properly

Lawful basis for processing your personal data

We will only ever process your personal data if we have a lawful basis to do so. The lawful bases we rely on are:

  • Legitimate Interests: This is where we rely on our interests as a reason for processing, generally this is to fulfil our obligations as a charity and to work effectively and efficiently as an organisation. We will process your data to generate reports and dashboards, improve efficiency by automatically moving data from one place to another (for example from an online data collection form into a database). We’ll also rely on our legitimate interests to present you with opportunities to donate, purchase and access content in the most secure and appropriate way, including postal and telephone communication.
  • Consent: This is where we have asked you to confirm permission to process your data for a particular purpose. You would have taken a positive action – for example, completing a form or ticking a box in order to give us consent. We rely on consent to email and text you opportunities to support us and to hear from our trusted partners. We also rely on consent to call you if your number is registered on the Telephone Preference Service. The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 allows us to rely on a ‘Soft Opt In’ for email and text if you engaged with our brands that offer commercial sales. Practically this means when you provide your email or phone number we may email or text you unless you opt out.
  • Contract: This is where we process your information to fulfil a contractual arrangement we have made with you. For example, providing you with requested materials, emailing you regarding a purchase, or delivering a magazine to you in order to fulfil your subscription.
  • Legal Obligation: This is where we have a statutory or other legal obligation to process the information, such as for the investigation of crime.
  • Vital Interest: This is where we need to process personal information in an emergency to protect an individual’s safety

Your Rights

You have a number of Rights under the Data Protection Legislation. If you have any questions or concerns about how Premier respects your rights, or you would like to exercise your rights please get in touch. See the “Contact Us” portion of this policy.

Your rights under the Legislation are:

The right to be informed about our collection and use of personal data

You have the right to be informed about the collection and use of your personal data. This Privacy notice gives you this information.

Right to object to Direct Marketing

You have the right to object to receiving direct marketing from us even if we believe that we have a legitimate interest to communicate with you in this way. You can request that we stop sending you mail, text messages, calling you or sending you emails. Please note we have a variety of email lists and you are able to specify your preferences. At the bottom of every email we send, you can unsubscribe from that particular email list or choose to be removed from all emails. Please see the ‘Contact Us’ section for details on how to get in touch with us if you would like to update your Direct Marketing preferences. Alternatively, you can unsubscribe to marketing communications by completing this online form: Direct Marketing Opt Out Form

Right to access your personal information

You have the right to access the personal information that we hold about you. For your own safety and security, we will ask for you to present proof of your identity prior to processing your request. We may also enquire about your interaction with our brands and gather sufficient details from yourself in order to fulfil the request. If we agree that we are obliged to provide personal information to you (or someone else on your behalf), we will provide it to you or them free of charge and aim to do so within 1 month from the point that we are able to confirm your identity. Please note if repeated access requests are made and this becomes burdensome for Premier, the law does allow a fee to be charged to compensate for the administration.

Right to correction your personal information

If any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, you can ask us to correct it. You can update your information by contacting our customer services team at [email protected]

Right to restrict processing

You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal data. For example, this may be because you have issues with the accuracy of the data we hold or the way we have processed your data. This right is not absolute and only applies in certain circumstances.

Right to erasure

You have the right to have personal data erased. This is also known as the ‘right to be forgotten’. The right is not absolute and we may not be able to delete your data on request. For example, Premier is obligated to keep financial records for seven years in order to meet our obligations to HMRC. Therefore, if you have made a donation to us in the last seven years, we would not be able to exercise a deletion request from you.

Right to portability

The right to portability gives you the right to receive personal data you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. It also gives you the right to request that we transmit this data directly to another controller.

Right to object

You have the right to object to our processing of some or all of the personal data that we hold about you. This is an absolute right when we use your data for direct marketing but may not apply in other circumstances where we have a compelling reason to do so, for example if we have a legal obligation.

For more information about your privacy rights:

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) regulates data protection and privacy matters in the UK. They make lots of information accessible to consumers on their website and they ensure that the registered details of all data controllers such as ourselves are available publicly. You can access the ICOs consumer information at https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public.

Regarding complaints

We encourage you to raise any complaints or concerns directly with us in the first instance. This is the fastest way to resolve your concern. Please see our Complaint Policy here. You also have the right to make a complaint to the ICO at any time about the way we use your information.

Your preferences and experiences are extremely important to us, and we will always do our very best to solve any problems you may have.

How we use your personal data

We will use your personal information for a number of purposes namely to fulfil our obligations as a charity and to ensure we are providing our services to you in the ways that you would expect. We will particularly use personal information for the below purposes –

To fulfil your expectations, send you appropriate messaging and opportunities:

  • We will use your personal data to fulfil your expectations when you provided it to us. This may involve using your data from a signed Petition to lobby the government, register you at an event, send you a free sample of our magazine as requested, update your record or send you the text series that you signed up to receive.
  • We use the information we collect about you to understand your interests and context in order to send you the most appropriate fundraising messaging, advertisements and opportunities to engage. For example, if we know you signed a Petition in the past, Premier may contact you regarding the need to lobby government in future.
  • If you agreed to receive promotional offers from us on behalf of non-Premier business and charity partners, we may send you offers about Christian mission, travel/holidays, leisure/lifestyle, education/events, home improvement/automotive, and financial services that may be of interest to you. Please let us know at any time if you changed your mind. See ‘How to contact us’ below with details.

To process payments, pledges, and Gift Aid:

  • Payment methods may include Direct Debits, Standing Orders, bank transfers, payments via charity accounts, cheques, cash, or card payments. Premier also accepts and records pledges of future payments. Payments can be collected online, over the phone, by SMS or sent to us in the post.
  • All donations and payments are recorded against individual records where possible as part of our accounting procedures. Gift Aid declarations are also recorded on individual records and this data is used to place a claim to HMRC.

To manage and improve our websites and our online interactions with you:

We will use certain personal and technical information including information from cookies to-

  • analyse and understand our supporter base
  • understand the effectiveness of our advertising and fundraising campaigns
  • develop new products and services
  • secure our network
  • investigate and respond to service or security issues
  • ensure our websites operate on multiple platforms and browsers
  • troubleshoot, test, support and maintain our websites, apps and other services.
  • for logistical and demand forecasting.

To run reports that guide decision-making:

  • We use your data to run reports, which allows Premier to evaluate, plan, review our ministry impact, income and expenses, content engagement and overall performance.
  • We may also contact you directly to complete surveys or gather information to help us gain understanding and plan future products.

To follow up with you on any customer services enquiries:

  • If you contact us through email, social media, phone or through our website we will use your information to answer your questions and to correspond with you.
  • We will record phone calls and maintain copies of your interactions with us and will use this on an ongoing basis for quality monitoring and to help us improve our services.

To meet our legal and regulatory obligations:

  • We use your data to ensure we comply with any requirements imposed on us by law or court order, including disclosure to law or tax enforcement agencies and authorities or pursuant to legal proceedings.
  • We will share data with regulatory and other official bodies if they make formal requests.
  • We will maintain records to meet regulatory and tax requirements.

To Prevent and Detect Crime:

  • We use your account information, order history and payment history to assist in monitoring for fraudulent transactions.
  • When you contact Premier, we will use information on your record to verify your identity.
  • We may use your information if necessary to protect our property and the vital interests of other persons
  • We use device identifiers and IP addresses to maintain network and data security.
  • We may use CCTV to investigate and prevent illegal activity on our premises.

How long we retain your personal data?

We retain a record of your personal information in order to provide you with a high-quality and consistent service and to evidence the actions we have taken on your behalf.

In line with the Data Protection Legislation we only keep your personal information for the length of time we need it to

  • Deliver our services to you
  • Meet our charitable and business needs
  • Meet our legal obligations

Generally, we will keep records where we still have the ability to provide you with content directly. We must also retain all donation records for at least 7 years according to HMRC.

Who we may share your personal data with

In some circumstances we may need to share your personal data with third parties in order to

  • Provide you with the service that you have asked for,
  • Meet our legal obligations,
  • Run and manage our commercial and charitable operations,
  • To meet your expectations

We may share your personal information with:

  • Law Enforcement or other public authorities that require us to release information
  • To any organisation where it is necessary for us to establish a legal claim or to defend ourselves against such a claim
  • Our professional advisors including accountants, legal professionals or insurers
  • Payment services providers who process payments on our behalf
  • Delivery service companies who send you items in the post
  • Providers of ancillary business support services such as Information Technology services (as a processor on our behalf)
  • Providers of software such as databases, subscriptions, and eCommerce platforms (as a processor on our behalf)
  • Marketing service providers (as processors on our behalf) including organisations that help us communicate with you
  • Online advertising providers that help us in showing advertising material to you on our site, on the internet and on social media (if you are opted in to Marketing)
  • Public officials who are the subject of a petition that you have signed.

In all cases we:

  • only provide the minimum personal information that each party requires to carry out their duties
  • only disclose personal information to organisations who we have a contractual relationship with or have an overriding legal requirement to hold the information
  • or in the case of a petition, the information that is necessary to share your participation.

International transfers of personal data

In some instances your personal information may be processed outside the UK and the European Economic Area. For example, we work with suppliers and partners who may make use of cloud and /or hosted technologies across multiple geographies and jurisdictions.

If and when this is the case we take steps to ensure there is an appropriate level of security so your personal information is protected in the same way as if it was being used within the UK or the EEA.

Where we need to transfer your data outside the UK or EEA we will use one of the following safeguards:

  • The use of standard contractual clauses in contracts for the transfer of personal data to third countries or
  • Transfers to a non-EEA country with privacy laws that give the equivalent protection as the EEA.

How we protect your personal data

Data security is of great importance to us and to protect your data we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure any information that we control.

At a high level we have put the below measure in place:

  • Limiting access to our buildings to those that we have determined are entitled to be there;
  • Implementing access controls to our information technology estate;
  • Limiting the availability of personal information to those that require access to that information;
  • All our employees and agents who have access to or are involved in the processing of personal information are contractually obliged to protect the confidentiality of personal information;
  • We provide regular data protection training to all employees, volunteers and people who are contracted to work at Premier.

Our websites may include links to external websites operated by other organisations. They may collect personal information from visitors to their site. We cannot guarantee the content or privacy practices of any external websites and do not accept responsibility for those websites.

Changes to this Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time (for example, if the law changes). If the changes are material, we will take steps to inform you via email, post, websites, phone call or through our radio programmes.

How to contact us

If you would like to

  • exercise one of your rights as set out above,
  • have a question or a complaint about this policy, or
  • have a question or complaint about the way your personal information is processed

You can contact us using the details below:

  1. By emailing us at – [email protected]
  2. By writing to us at –
    FAO Data Protection Officer
    Premier
    Unit 6, April Court
    Sybron Way
    Crowborough
    TN6 3DZ
  3. By calling our customer services team on 01892 611180