Privacy Policy

Blesma, The Limbless Veterans is a registered charity in England and Wales (Number 1084189) and Scotland (SCO 10315) and a company limited by guarantee registered in England No 4102768 at 115 New London Road, Chelmsford, CM2 0QT

When you contact Blesma, we will only collect basic information from you such as:

• Name
• Address
• Contact details
• Donation details (card details are never stored)
• Gift Aid information
• IP Address (online only)

We do not usually ask for sensitive information from you such as health status, however in some cases, such as participating in a fundraising event where this information is required, we may ask you these details. Whenever we ask for sensitive information we will explain why we need this information and what will happen if you do not want to provide it.

Blesma takes the care of your data seriously and undertakes to protect your personal information in a range of ways. These measures include implementing specific technologies and procedures designed to protect your privacy, such as secure servers, firewalls and SSL encryption. We follow payment card industry (PCI) security compliance guidelines when processing credit card payments.

Any personal information transferred between locations will be both encrypted and password protected.

Blesma will use your personal information for a number of purposes including the following:

• To provide you with information, services or products you have requested
• To process your donations, process gift aid or to support your fundraising
• For internal record keeping in line with charitable laws and regulations
• To ensure your contact preferences are upheld
• To send you direct marketing (see below)

Blesma on occasion will contact you to let you know about the progress we are making, upcoming events, fundraising ideas and to raise funds for our work. We contact you by post or, with your consent through email.

It is important for us to spread the word about Blesma to raise awareness of the work we do. To help us achieve this goal we periodically obtain basic contact details for people who may be interested in our charity. The information is received from third parties and we ensure that any third party we deal with is compliant with all data privacy regulations and our legal basis is Legitimate Interest in order to achieve this.

We make it easy to opt out of communication from us. Any marketing material we send you will have clear contact preference options and any marketing emails we send you will contain an unsubscribe link. For more information on how to change your preferences or update any information we hold please see section 8.

We may also use your information for the purposes of supporter analysis. This helps us understand our supporters better and allows us to know who may be interested in our work. When we profile our supporters we use publicly available information by demographic, geographic and any other information which helps us build a better picture of our supporters. However we completely anonymise the information gathered, so we will never be able to see information specifically about you. If you do not wish for your information to be used in this way please see section 8 for more information on how to contact us.

We will only use your information within Blesma for the purposes for which it was obtained. Blesma will not, under any circumstances, share or sell your personal data with any third party for marketing purposes and you will not receive offers from other companies or organisations as a result of giving your details to us.

We may need to share your information with ‘data processors’ such as our service providers, associated organisations and agents who help us to prepare and send the materials relating to our fundraising and activities. These ‘data processors’ will only act under our instruction and we will not allow these organisations to use your data for their own purposes and will take care to ensure that they keep your data secure.

We will also comply with legal requests where disclosure is required or permitted by law (for example to government bodies for tax purposes or law enforcement agencies for the prevention and detection of crime, subject to such bodies providing us with a relevant request in writing).

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, for example we will keep a record of donations for at least seven years.

If you request that we stop sending you marketing materials we will keep a record of your contact details and appropriate information to enable us to comply with your request not to be contacted by us.

Legacy income is vital to the running of the charity. We may keep data you provide to us indefinitely, to carry out legacy administration and communicate effectively with the families of people leaving us legacies. This also enables us to identify and analyse the source of legacy income we receive.

Where you contribute material to us, e.g. user generated content or in response to a particular activity we will generally only keep your content for as long as is reasonably required for the purpose(s) for which it was submitted unless otherwise stated at the point of generation.

The accuracy of your information is really important to us. We want to ensure that we are able to communicate with you in ways that you are happy with, and to provide you with information that is of interest. If you wish to change how we communicate with you, or update the information we hold, then please contact us:

• email us at supporterservices@blesma.org
• write to us at: Supporter Services, Blesma, 115 New London Road, Chelmsford, CM2 0QT
• call us on 0208 590 1124 (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm)

Under the Data Protection Act & the General Data Protection Regulation you have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. Information requests are completely free but we require you to prove your identity with two pieces of approved identification.

Under the UK GDPR, you also have the right to;

• The right to be informed.
• The right of access.
• The right to rectification.
• The right to erasure.
• The right to restrict processing.
• The right to data portability.
• The right to object.
• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling.

Please address requests and questions about this or any other question about this Privacy Policy to the Operations Director, Blesma, 115 New London Road, Chelmsford, CM2 0QT

If we cannot deal with your complaint, you also have the right to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office on

• Website : ico.org.uk
• Write to them at: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
• Call on : 0303 123 1113

When you visit our website your device will create a small text file called a ’cookie’. Whenever you visit our website your browser will send the cookie file back to our server. This allows us to anonymously distinguish you from other users of the website which helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and helps us to improve our site for our supporters. For more information please see our Cookie Policy.

Blesma also uses Google Analytics to collect potentially personally identifying data and information. Blesma has implemented features for Google Display Advertising, Remarketing, and Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting. The purpose for the collection of this potentially identifying data is to identify trends in the usage of the website; these trends may be analysed and published in reports for internal use.

Blesma may also collect potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Blesma only discloses logged in user IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described above.

Visitors can at any time opt out of Google Analytics tracking with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on which can be found at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content to or anywhere on the Blesma website or otherwise engage in any disruptive behaviour on any Blesma service, we may use your personal information such as your IP address to stop such behaviour.

Where Blesma reasonably believes that you are or may be in breach of any of the laws of England and Wales (or the law of Scotland if you live there) (e.g. because content you have posted may be defamatory), we may use your personal information to inform relevant third parties such as your employer, internet provider or law enforcement agencies about the content and your behaviour.

This Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to Blesma. The date of the most recent revisions will appear on this page. If you do not agree to these changes, please do not continue to use the Blesma website to submit personal information to Blesma. If material changes are made to the Privacy Policy we will notify you by placing a prominent notice on the website.

Last updated: October 2021