Stratford upon Avon and District Samaritans privacy statement

At Samaritans, privacy is at the heart of what we do.

We are committed to protecting your privacy and the personal information that we hold. The purpose of this statement is to be clear and transparent about how Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon uses your personal information. This statement applies to people who use our services, our volunteers, our supporters as well as the general public and visitors to our premises.

Who are we?

Samaritans offers a safe place for you to talk, any time, in whatever way is best for you.

Samaritans is made up of 201 branches in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, some of which are independent charities. Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon is an independent charity, registered with charity number 1165043. We are a separate data controller for the purposes of the data protection laws.

All Samaritans branches are coordinated and supported by Samaritans Central Charity (registered charity number in England and Wales: 219432; and in Scotland: SC040604). You can read Samaritans Central Charity’s privacy statement

Within this Privacy Statement ‘we’ and ‘us’ means Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon and/or Samaritans Central Charity, depending on the context.

Which laws apply to us?

Your ‘personal information’ is information that can be used to identify you. This can include your name, email address, postal address, telephone number, date of birth and credit/debit card details, as well as ‘sensitive personal information’ such as details about your ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, physical or mental health and details of criminal offences. Samaritans collects, stores and handles personal information for a variety of purposes, including to manage our volunteers, to process donations made to us, to engage with our supporters and to provide our services to the public.

The following laws apply to Samaritans, as an organisation that collects, stores and handles personal information:

the Data Protection Act 2018
the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 We will handle your information in accordance with these laws.

Changes to this Privacy Statement

As the service we provide changes, we may need to alter this Privacy Statement. If you have any queries about this statement please contact the Data Protection Officer at Stratford Samaritans, Tyler House, Tyler Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 6TY or email [email protected].

How we use personal information

If you use Samaritans’ service

Samaritans supports people in distress through its support services. Our service is available by telephone, email, letter, online chat and face to face.

Our helplines are designed so that Samaritans volunteers can’t see your contact details, however, some information that could be used to identify you is stored on our central systems and can be accessed by some Samaritans volunteers and employees

When you contact one of our helplines, and depending on the way you contact us, we will collect various personal information:

If you contact us by phone, we will collect your phone number If you contact us by email, we will collect your email address

If you contact us by letter, we will collect your postal address

If you contact us by online chat, we will collect a unique device ID (also known as a fingerprint) by placing a cookie on your device (you will be asked to consent to this beforehand).

We will also collect times and dates of your contact, your gender and age (if given) and the concerns you have discussed with us.

We take steps such as encrypting phone numbers and masking email addresses so that you can not be identified, unless you provide us with additional information. Contact information is only unmasked as part of official processes such as when we receive a request from law enforcement. This also applies if you withhold your phone number.

Where contact is electronic (by email or online chat) we keep copies of communication for 30 days. We use this information for the following purposes:

To provide you with support: we use your contact information to connect you with one of our volunteers and provide you with support. Where contact is electronic (for example, by email or webchat) we keep copies of the contact for a rolling 30 day period in order to allow our volunteers to respond.
To provide a follow-up call or additional support: in some circumstances we may offer to call you back or for us to call you as part of an agreed support plan. In these circumstances, we record information you’ve given us to complete the follow-up call or support plan. We may need to share this information internally, so that whoever you speak to is up to date with your situation.
To safeguard our callers and third parties: there are certain circumstances where we cannot guarantee confidentiality, for example, where we are made aware of a child or vulnerable adult at risk. In these circumstances we may be required to share the information we hold with other services including the police and emergency services. Please see our Safeguarding Policy for further information.
To manage our service and prevent inappropriate use: if we need to investigate a call or series of calls (e.g. we have received a complaint or a report of inappropriate use of our service) we may use unique identifiers such as your encrypted phone number, masked email address or device ID to identify specific contacts. If we become concerned about the way our service is being used, we may use this information to limit or restrict access to the service.
To protect our volunteers or staff from harm: If you are abusive or threaten our volunteers or staff, we may report you to the police, provide them with that information we hold on you and where available, circulate your CCTV image to local branches to ensure the safety of our volunteers.
To comply with a legal obligation: in certain circumstances, such as when we receive a court order from the police, we may be required by law to share your information.

We rely on our legitimate interest in supporting our callers when providing support, as well as when creating a record of your contact in order to manage contacts and our service. Where we work with you to provide additional support we will create a support plan, and where possible give you the option to provide information that you feel will be relevant and helpful for volunteers to provide you with support. We will seek your consent to store additional information to facilitate this.

Where we have identifiable information about you, we may be required to use or share your information for compliance with a legal obligation or to protect your vital interests.

We occasionally receive requests from other individuals or third parties such as the police or missing persons organisations to make calls to individuals they believe would benefit from our support. In these cases we ask for the minimum amount of information in order to make the call, including the individual's name, phone number and the reason for the call. This information is destroyed once the call is complete.

If you donate to Stratford upon Avon Samaritans

When you donate to our branch, we ask you to provide certain information so that we can process your donation (including setting up a direct debit where you choose to do so). Information we may collect includes your name, email address, postal address, telephone number, bank details, taxpayer status, date of birth and history of previous donations. When you support us by signing up to take part in a Samaritans event, depending on the event, we may also collect information such as your age, gender identity, social media handle, next of kin information and information relating to your health. We use supporter information for the following purposes:

To process your donation: We work with payment processors who process your payment on our behalf. Our payment service providers use international recognised encryption standards and security methods to keep your data safe.
To facilitate event participation: Where you have signed up to an event we will use your information to provide you with supporting information and facilitate your participation.
To claim Gift Aid: If you have chosen to donate to us through Gift Aid, your full name and home address and details of your donation will be shared with HMRC. We rely on your consent to claim Gift Aid, and on our legitimate interest in raising funds for processing payments.

If you have donated to Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon via an online fundraising platform, such as Just Giving, they will pass your information onto us to allow us to record and process your donation.

We will contact you to confirm that we have received your donation and to see whether you would like to keep in touch in the future. Make sure you read the fundraising platform’s own privacy policy, as that will tell you how they use your information for their own purposes.

If you donate to Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon or Samaritans Central Charity via your mobile phone either on a one-off or monthly basis, the text-to-donate T&Cs will apply. Samaritans uses an external supplier, Open Fundraising Limited, to provide and administer the text-to-donate service. See our text-to-donate T&Cs for details of how your information will be used to process your donation and how you can let us know that you don’t want to receive additional communications from us.

As a charity that relies on donations, it is important that Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon keeps the public updated on our vital work and campaigns. We also need to understand how we can best attract and communicate with new and existing supporters, in order to target our resources effectively. These are examples of Samaritans’ ‘legitimate interests’ and are the lawful basis for us and Samaritans Central Charity using the personal information that you provide to us to:

invite you to participate in surveys or research (on a voluntary basis);
carry out research into how we can better engage with and attract new supporters;
carry out research into how we can better communicate with new and existing supporters;
keep a record of your relationship with us; and
keep in touch in relation to any legacy pledges you have made to Samaritans

You can update your contact preferences or let us know that you don’t want to hear from us any more by emailing [email protected].

If you apply to be a volunteer

Samaritans Central Charity works with Stratford upon Avon Branch to support the recruitment and management of volunteers. Samaritans Central Charity and our Branch need to collect, use, store and share certain information about applicants and volunteers to manage their application and involvement with the organisation. This is collated through our Branch Management Tool. This tool manages and processes potential and successful volunteer applications. We use information about volunteers and potential volunteers for the following purposes:

To answer your questions: If you contact us through our website, by phone, post or email in relation to volunteering you may be asked to give your personal details in order for us to get in touch. If you have done this through the Central Charity, they will share your information with our branch to allow us to get in touch to discuss volunteering opportunities at the branch.
To process your application: The information you provide on your application will be used to process your application and make a decision about whether you will be accepted on to a Samaritans training course.
The Central Charity monitors Equity, Diversity and Inclusion amongst applicants and volunteers: One of our goals is that our staff and volunteer teams are representative of the communities that we live and work in. In order to monitor how well we are progressing against this goal, you may be asked some questions relating to sensitive categories of personal information including your gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability status. We will seek your explicit consent to use this data for our purposes, which you can amend at any time by emailing [email protected]

If your application is successful, throughout the course of your onboarding and volunteering journey we may collect and store additional information about you for the following purposes:

To check for relevant criminal history: We undertake background checks on all volunteers to help us to make safe recruitment decisions and determine whether an applicant with relevant offences is suitable to volunteer. We will keep a record of DBS checks for the duration of your volunteering. Where a potential volunteer’s application is declined due to risks identified during the criminal record check, records of this are retained for 7 years.
To monitor training: When releasing mandatory training we believe it is within our legitimate interest to monitor the completion of that training and take action such as removing volunteers from shifts where this is not complete. We may use data from different internal sources to identify when someone who is actively volunteering has not undertaken training.
To investigate caller complaints: Each contact received by volunteers is stored in our eLog system and linked to a volunteers Samaritans account. The data in eLog may be used to support investigation of specific incidents and complaints, for example, it may be used to identify which volunteer handed a call that gives rise to a complaint from a caller.
To conduct investigations into volunteer conduct: There may be circumstances where we are required to investigate your conduct as a result of a complaint or allegation made against you. This will be dealt with under our Volunteer Problem Solving Policy. As part of an investigation we may collect information from you and others involved for the purpose of assisting with our investigation of the matter and retain this for an appropriate period in order to evidence appropriate internal investigations into serious matters in line with our obligations to safeguard our callers, volunteers and staff.
To exclude you from volunteering: Under our Volunteer Problem Solving Policy, all volunteers who have been dismissed or have resigned from their duties before or during an investigation for serious misconduct are referred to the Criminal Records and Exclusions Panel, to consider whether their name should in included on the list of those who are unable to volunteer for Samaritans in the future. If the decision is made to permanently exclude you from volunteering your name and date of birth will be placed on a secure list which is accessible to a limited number of staff and all branch directors, to allow them to check for excluded volunteers during the recruitment process. We consider it within our legitimate interest to maintain a list of those who are no longer able to volunteer for us.
To make referrals to relevant bodies following investigations: In some cases it may be necessary for reasons of substantial public interest and under our regulatory obligations to share information relating to serious misconduct with third parties such as the charity commission, the disclosure and barring service or professional associations. Where there is a requirement to do this without your consent, we will always ensure that we have undertaken the appropriate assessments to ensure that this sharing is lawful.
To process expenses: If you are eligible to reclaim expenses associated with your role, we will process information about any expenditure including amount and type of expense, as well as your name and bank account details, in order to determine whether your expenses should be refunded and to make any resultant payment to you.
We keep all applicant and volunteer data for 6 years from the date of your last interaction with us. We consider that it is in our legitimate interests to process your personal data in connection with your volunteering journey with us as described above.

If you are interested in volunteering with Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon, you can contact us by emailing [email protected] or writing to Stratford Samaritans, Tyler House, Tyler Street, Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 6TY. If you have contacted Samaritans Central Charity, they will forward your details to the Branch.

If you take part in research at Samaritans

Samaritans carries out research into suicide and self-harm, effective ways of providing support to people in distress and the needs and experiences of people using our services. We use this to help us develop our services and to inform our work in influencing government policy. This research may be carried out by Samaritans Central Charity staff or volunteers in our branch, or external research teams that are supported or commissioned by Samaritans.

As well as the steps that we take to ensure your personal data is protected, Samaritans has a Research Ethics Policy which applies to all research that involves contacting and collecting information from current or past callers, volunteers and members of the general public.

The Research Ethics Policy requires informed consent from all individuals for all activities that involve contact between researchers (whether these are Samaritans Central Charity staff, volunteers or staff from an external institution) and research participants. This means that participants must be fully informed about the project, including how any personal data provided will be used and the degree of anonymity and confidentiality provided, before agreeing to take part. Participants must provide positive consent (which may be written or verbal) that they are happy with the basis of the project and how their data will be used before proceeding.

All electronic and hard copy data collected during research is stored securely and is accessible only by the designated researchers and for the purposes of the research project. Data is stored for a duration of time specific to each research project but will not be kept longer than is necessary for the purposes of that project. Once the data is no longer needed, it is destroyed.

From time to time Samaritans researchers use externally hosted websites to conduct surveys. These websites may be hosted in countries or jurisdictions which do not provide the same level of data protection as the countries within the European Economic Area. You will be told if a website is hosted outside of the European Economic Area before you begin the survey, as well as other information about the purpose of research and how your data will be used. You will also be provided with a link to the survey host’s privacy statement. All survey participants are required to indicate that they consent to take part before they proceed to complete the survey, so by agreeing to take part, you will be providing consent to the use of your personal details and sensitive personal data (such as information about your emotional wellbeing) and the transfer of your data outside of the European Economic Area (where applicable).

When you interact with us on social media

Both Samaritans central charity and Stratford-upon-Avon Branch operate accounts and groups across various social media platforms (Facebook, X, Instagram, etc.) in order to increase awareness of our services and events and engage in conversation with our supporters. We do not provide our emotional support services via any of these platforms.

If you share personal information on our social media posts, your information will be publicly available. Such information can be viewed online and collected by third parties. We recommend that you avoid sharing information that can be used to identify you (such as your age, email address or location) and always check the privacy policy of the platform you are using to ensure you are happy with how they may use your information.

When you visit our premises

Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon operates a CCTV system in Tyler House, so you may be recorded when visiting the premises. CCTV footage is installed for security, to protect all visitors. It will only be viewed when necessary and is only stored on a temporary basis.

When you follow any links to a third party website

Our website may contain links to the websites of other organisations that we believe may be of interest. We are not responsible for the content of these websites and we recommend that you read the Privacy Policy for the relevant organisation before sharing any personal or financial information.

How we keep your information safe

Where we store your information

Samaritans operates across the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man and stores our data within the European Economic Area (EEA). Three branches within Samaritans’ branch network are not within the EEA: Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. These jurisdictions are, however, on the European Commission’s “safe” list of countries for transferring personal data and are subject to the same policies and procedures as Samaritans branches in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

We do use ‘cloud-based’ applications provided by external suppliers to collect, store and handle some types of personal information. These suppliers (e.g. Microsoft) may be based outside of the EEA. Where this is the case, we ask suppliers to provide evidence that they have the appropriate measures in place to ensure that your personal information is kept safe.

Security safeguards

Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon uses various technical and organisational measures to keep your data safe. Electronic data and databases are stored on secure computer systems and we control who has access to information, using both physical and electronic means. Our volunteers receive data protection training and are provided with guidance that they are required to follow when handling personal information.

Although we do our best to keep your information safe, the transmission of information over the internet is never completely secure, so please bear this in mind when you share information with us via our website.

How long we keep your personal information for

We only keep your personal information for as long as required, depending on what it was collected for, and in accordance with legal requirements and tax and accounting rules.

If you have told us that you don’t want to be contacted by Samaritans, we will keep your details on a ‘suppression’ list to help ensure that we do not continue to contact you.

Your rights

The data protection laws give you certain rights over your personal information and how we use it. These include:

the right of access to a copy of the information that we hold about you;
the right to ask us to correct inaccurate information that we hold about you;
the right, in certain circumstances, to object to specific uses of your data; and
the right, in certain circumstances, to request the information that we hold about you to be deleted.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please:

Put your request in writing and email it to [email protected] for the attention of the Director, Stratford Samaritans, Tyler House, Tyler Street, Stratford-upon- Avon, CV37 6TY.
Provide proof of identity including your name and postal address. If you are requesting information relating to your use of the Samaritans helpline, we will ask you for information about your contacts with Samaritans and to provide a copy of the telephone bill for the number you use to make calls to Samaritans.

Help us to respond to you as quickly as possible by being specific about which information you would like to receive a copy of or that you would like us to amend/delete. Please note:

We will only send a response to a subject access request to you by registered mail at a postal address.
If we are unable to verify your identity, for example if you contact the service anonymously or use a different name to do so, it may not be possible to provide you with the information requested.
Samaritans Stratford-upon-Avon is not a ‘public authority’ as defined under the Freedom of Information Act and we will therefore not respond to requests for information made under this Act.

Keeping your information up to date

If your personal details have changed, let us know at:

Stratford Samaritans, Tyler House, Tyler Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 6TY. [email protected] or telephone on: 01789 332545

If you want to complain

Samaritans aims to provide support to the highest possible standard at all times. To help achieve this, we encourage anyone who is not completely happy with the service they have received to let us know immediately, by contacting us using the details set out above or Samaritans Central Office Quality Team on +44(0)20 8394 8300, or you can use the Complaints questionnaire here.

All complaints will be investigated fully. It is important that you give as much information as possible to enable us to investigate your complaint. Your information will not be passed on to anyone outside of Samaritans but in most cases we will need to involve the Director of our branch and the Samaritans Central Office Quality Team. With your prior consent, our Branch Director will contact you directly to try to resolve your complaint.

It is our aim to resolve a complaint within 14 days of receiving it. In some cases, this isn’t possible but we will do our best to resolve it as soon as we can.

If you have any questions or wish to add information concerning your complaint, please contact a member of our Samaritans Central Office Quality Team on +44(0)20 8394 8300 or email [email protected]. Please be aware that if you call our central office number, your telephone number will be visible to the Quality Team and may be logged for administrative purposes.

You can read the full Complaints Procedure here.

Using our website

Do we use 'Cookies'?

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites. You can find more information about cookies here.

Our cookies help us to:

Make our website work as you'd expect
Improve the speed/security of the site
Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
Continuously improve our website for you
Make our services more efficient
Save you having to login every time you visit the site

We do not use cookies to:

Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
Pass data to advertising networks
Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
Pay sales commissions

Our cookies

Our website uses a number of different cookies:

SERVERID – used for load balancing, to ensure we deliver the website as quickly as possible
has_js – identifies whether your machine has Javascript, a very common piece of technology that allows forms to work, or open new windows, amongst other features
Kissmetrics cookies, which track how users behave on the site so we can improve how it's used

Third party cookies Google Analytics cookies

These cookies tell us how many people have been to the site before, what time people visited the site and what pages were looked at:

utma stores each user’s number of visits, time of the first visit, the previous visit and the current visit. Expires two years after your last visit to the site
utmb and _utmc checks how long a visitor stays on the site: when a visit starts and ends. These expire 30 minutes after your visit, or after 30 minutes of inactivity, or when you close your browser.
utmz tracks where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link). Expires six months after it was last set

No personal information is stored. For more information, see Google’s help pages and Google’s privacy policy here.

Cookies when sharing content

So you can easily “Like”, “Tweet” or share our content on Facebook, X and other social media platforms, we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by AddThis, Facebook and X.

Add This provides the sharing mechanism to Facebook and X. Their cookies are:

ssc – records the network you are sharing to
ssh and sshs – optimises the appearance of the sharing settings
uid – tracks your login to the service. Expires 2 years after creation.

You can read the Add This privacy policy here. You can opt out of Add This cookies here.

Tweeting a page link automatically creates two cookies on your machine:

guest_id - This cookie is used to identify you to X. This cookie will expire two years’ after creation.
X_sess - This cookie remembers changes from page to page You can read the X privacy policy here.

Facebook sets a number of cookies when you log into its website. For more information, click here.

Cookies when making donations

Single donations

Sage Pay is our payment processing provider. The following Sage Pay cookies allow the online payment processing facility on our website to identify how much you wish to donate, so it can charge your credit/debit card appropriately:

JSESSIONID - assigns you a unique ID so it can differentiate you from other users
NSC_wjq-tbhfqbz-dpn – this cookie is used to store the session identifier of your Sage Pay session.

No personal information or card information is recorded in the cookies, and the transaction takes place on secure web pages. These cookies are deleted when you close your browser.

Sage Pay's privacy policy can be read here.

Regular donations

Globalsign provides identity services and uses the following cookie to protect our site:

cfduid - this cookie is a mechanism to protect from malicious traffic. No identity or personally identifiable information is associated with this cookie.

Globalsign's privacy policy is online here.

Samaritans also uses a session cookie to make sure your browser remembers your details if you need to go back and change anything. This cookie is deleted when you finish the donation.

Paypal donations

If you choose to donate to Samaritans using PayPal, a number of cookies are placed on your machine to allow the transaction to go ahead. These are managed by PayPal.

You can find out more about PayPal’s privacy policy here.

Removing cookies

If you want to prevent our cookies being stored on your computer in future, you may do so by referring to your internet browser's instructions. You can do this by clicking on the "Help" menu. You can find out how to do this on your computer here.

If you wish to prevent Google from collecting any information about your presence on our website, they offer a tool here.