Community Links Bromley is dedicated to safeguarding and preserving your privacy when visiting our site or communicating electronically with us. This privacy notice explains what happens to any personal data that you provide to us, or that we collect from you while you visit our website, www.communitylinksbromley.org.uk. We use this information to process requests, deliver our services or to provide you with information about our services and any other relevant services or resources. We do not share your personal information with other organisations without prior consent, except as necessary to provide our services or as required by law.  We may sometimes share information about organisations with funders to satisfy reporting requirements, usually as anonymised statistics, but sometimes identifying organisation names only or the borough they are based in. Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the lawful basis we rely on for processing personal information is ‘legitimate interest’.  

 

The types of personal information we collect 

We currently collect and process the following information:

  • name and contact details;
  • date of birth if you contact us as someone interested in volunteering opportunities;
  • name and contact details of your organisation;
  • support needs for attendees at events and training;
  • the London Borough you are based in if you sign up to our ebulletin. 

We will keep your information for up to seven years (unless otherwise stated), unless you ask us to remove it before then.

 

How we get this information and why we have it 

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you for one of the following reasons:

 

People who use our services - newsletters

When you sign up to our ebulletin, we store the personal details you supply to email you news relevant to the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector in Bromley;

When you sign up to our Volunteer Update, we store the personal details you supply to send out regular newsletters with the latest volunteering news and opportunities available. 

We use Mailchimp, the mailing provider, to send our ebulletin and Volunteer Update.  Using Mailchimp, we have access to statistics about emails opened and links clicked, in order to improve the effectiveness of our communications.  We do not share your details with any other organisations. 

You can subscribe to our e-bulletin here.  You can unsubscribe by clicking unsubscribe at the bottom of an ebulletin or by getting in touch with us at admin@communitylinksbromley.org.uk.

You can subscribe to our volunteer update mailing list here.  You can unsubscribe by clicking unsubscribe at the bottom of a Volunteer Update newsletter or by getting in touch with us at volunteers1@communitylinksbromley.org.uk.

 

People who use our services – volunteering

When you sign up to receive information on volunteering opportunities, or to register information about volunteering vacancies in your organisation, we store your information on our secure VCConnect database. 

We only use information about potential volunteers to:

  • Pass on your details and any personal statement you may make to the organisation(s) offering the opportunity(ies) you have expressed an interest in;
  • Contact you to:
    • enquire about how your application to a volunteering opportunity is progressing
    • enquire whether you are interested in a new opportunity that may be suited to your skills and knowledge
    • provide information about any training opportunities, activities or events that may enhance your search for volunteering opportunities
    • ask you to complete a confidential survey about our services and the outcome of your expression of interest in volunteering;

We only use information about organisations with volunteering vacancies to:

  • Let your organisation know about a potential volunteer who is interested in a role in your organisation;
  • Pass on information you have indicated is not private to a potential volunteer who has expressed an interest in a volunteering vacancy you have registered;
  • Contact you and your organisation about:
    • requests for updates on the progress of a potential volunteer’s application or
    • any other information which may be of value to you about volunteer management issues.

We will remove your details from our database if you:

 

People who use our services - members of Community Links Bromley

When you apply to become a member of Community Links Bromley, your details are stored in a secure database. We may use your information to:

Pass on all or part of your details to another organisation(s) that may work in partnership with us which is offering the opportunity(ies) that you have expressed an interest in;

Contact you with information about issues relevant to the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector in Bromley which may enhance your organisation’s capacity to deliver services or activities;

Provide information relating to Community Links Bromley as an organisation;

Contact you to ask you to complete a confidential survey about our services. 

We will remove your details from our database if you:

 

People who use our services – registering a service or activity on the Simply Connect Bromley database

We store information about organisations, services and activities on the Simply Connect Bromley platform to enable local people to find information about local community services.  

We will remove or update the details for your organisation on the database if you email admin@communitylinksbromley.org.uk

 

People who use our services – bids for voluntary sector funding 

We use the Award Force platform to facilitate the submission and reviewing of bids for funding in the local voluntary community and social enterprise sector.  Information collected from individuals on this platform is retained on the Award Force platform. We use applicants’ contact details and other information required as part of application forms for the purpose of reviewing bids and contacting applicants following bid reviews.   We share applicants’ contact details with the relevant officers for each funding/ grant programme for the purposes of contacting (un)successful applicants.  These officers may be from the London Borough of Bromley, internal Community Links Bromley staff or other voluntary sector partners. We use contact details of reviewing panel members to provide access to review submitted bids. Read the Award Force platform privacy statement for more information about personal data collected by the platform.  

 

People who use our services – events and training 

We collect contact information from people booking onto our training and events so that we can administer bookings, including contacting attendees with webinar links, providing information on session cancellations or changes and sending out follow up resources. We may ask about any support needs so that we can ensure that our training is accessible. 

We currently use Eventbrite, Google forms and Office365 forms to administer bookings for our events:

 

Visitors to our website 

When someone visits www.communitylinksbromley.org.uk, we use Google Analytics to collect standard internet login information and details of visitor behaviour patterns.  We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site.  We collect this information in a way that doesn’t identify anyone.  We will not associate any information gathered from this site with any personal information from any source.

If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will make this clear and will explain what we intend to do with the information.

The website uses cookies: these are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit.  They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.

We do this to:

  • store some information when you move between pages (for example, when you register or apply for a site).
  • know if you are logged in and, optionally, to remember you between visits (so when you return you will see the members or admin options that you are used to - when you use them, you will be asked to log in again).

Read more about cookies, and the way they are used on our website, which is managed by the Voice website builder.  The cookies are not used to gather personal information, they store no personal data, and we cannot use the cookies to tell us who you are nor track your individual use of the website.

This notice does not cover hyperlinks within the Community Links Bromley website which link to other websites.  We encourage you to read the privacy statements on any other websites you visit.

 

People who work for us as trustees, employees and volunteers 

We retain records of staff and volunteers throughout the period of their employment with Community Links Bromley.  Contact details are stored on our secure database and these and other records are stored in a secured filing cabinet. 

We maintain records of volunteers’ names, roles, start and end dates and limited information from application forms for a period of six months after leaving their role, for the purpose of providing references if requested. 

We retain records relating to individuals who have applied for paid roles with Community Links Bromley for six months, for the purpose of providing feedback to unsuccessful applicants. 

Records relating to trustees are deleted after they have been removed from the entries for Community Links Bromley at Companies House and the Charities Commission.

 

Your data protection rights

You have the rights to:

  1. request a copy of the information that we hold about you. If we do hold information about you, we will:
  • give you a description of it
  • tell you why we are holding it
  • tell you who it could be disclosed to
  • let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.
  1. ask us to correct personal information you think is inaccurate and to complete information you think is incomplete.
  1. ask us to delete your personal information in certain circumstances. If you do this, we will do so unless an exemption in data protection law applies. 
  1. ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
  1. object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
  1. ask that we transfer the personal information that you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.

 

You can see more information about these rights on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

There is no charge for exercising these rights.  We will respond to your request within one calendar month.  If we are unable to respond in this timescale we will contact you to tell you that we need more time and the reasons why.

You can contact us to exercise any of these rights by:

You can also contact the Information Commissioner’s Office.

 

How we store your personal information 

Your information is securely stored electronically: unless otherwise stated this is in The Cloud using Microsoft Office software.   Only staff and volunteers with relevant roles and who have received appropriate training are able to login to databases containing personal information.  

 

How to complain 

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at admin@communitylinksbromley.org.uk or by writing to us at Data Protection Officer, Community Links Bromley, South Street, Bromley BR1 1RH.

The Chief Executive Officer, Christopher Evans, oversees compliance with this privacy notice and can be contacted using the details above. Whilst this privacy policy sets out a general summary of your legal rights in respect of personal information, this is a very complex area of law. More information about your legal rights can be found on the Information Commissioner’s Office website. If you are unhappy about how we handle your data, you have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time. You can contact them on 0303 123 1113 or email casework@ico.org.uk. You can find more details at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/.

 

Changes to our privacy notice

We keep our privacy notice under regular review and we will place any updates on this web page.

Recent changes to privacy policy:

  • Addition of privacy policy information relating to how we capture information for our events and training
  • Addition of privacy policy information relating to signing up to our Volunteer Update
  • Removal of outdated Service/Activity registration form and terms and conditions for service providers registering onto Simply Connect Bromley
  • Addition of information relating to our grants management platform, Award Force
  • Addition of information stored about trustees, staff and volunteers
  • List of your data protection rights.

 

This privacy notice was last updated in July 2025.