DATA PROTECTION AND PRIVACY POLICY
OUR COMMITMENT
Bellona’s mission is to build an African Sorority of women who lift as they rise, and we recognise that this sense of community can only be built on trust and accountability. Our impact is dependent on your engagement which is something that we value deeply and treat with the utmost care.
We collect information to provide customised content to you, to update you on our community’s impact, to send important notices such as communications about changes to our terms, conditions and policies, and to keep you updates on the latest features and upcoming events.
In our continued effort to protect your privacy and respect your digital footprint, our Privacy and Data Protection Policy outlines what information we collect and the ways in which your information is used. We have not, do not, and will not share or sell your information to third parties.
Approved on: 01.01.2020
Effective on: 01.01.2020
We have updated our policy to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). If you have any questions regarding our policy, please feel free to contact us at info@bellonanetwork.com.
WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT
For you to be part of the mentorship programme, we must collect your personal information starting at the application stage. Throughout your engagement with Bellona, we will continue to track and monitor your progress through programme-related calls, surveys, and email
correspondence, where we take down qualitative and quantitative data related to your personal and professional interests, goals, and achievements. These will include but are not limited to academic achievements, graduation information, current occupation, and place of work.
When you download and sign up on the Bellona mobile we may collect a variety of information, including your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, device identifiers, IP address, location information, credit card information and profile information where the contact is via social media.
When you share our content with family and friends using the mobile application or invite others to participate in Bellona services or forums, Bellona may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number. Bellona will use such information to fulfil your requests and provide the relevant product or service.
DONORS AND PARTNERS
Donors and Partners are individuals or organisations who support Bellona’s mission, either financially or through collaborative work. The information we collect will pertain only directly to the nature of your support or our collaboration, and as needed, may be used for the purposes set out in our policy and to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements and protect Bellona’s legal rights.
WEBSITE SUBSCRIPTIONS, EVENT ATTENDEES AND MORE
Those who subscribe to the general newsletter through our website or event sign-up sheets and/or follow us on social media channels are agreeing to share with us general contact information (i.e. email addresses, social media usernames or handles). We appreciate your keen interest in following our activities and spreading the good word, so we strive to ensure we send content in limited amounts and frequencies to respect your digital space. This also applies to unsuccessful applicants to our mentorship programme, and includes any information collected throughout the application and selection process.
HOW YOUR INFORMATION IS USED
The information you give us permission to use is vital to help us in the following ways:
To keep you posted on Bellona’s latest product announcements, software updates, and upcoming events. If you don’t want to be on our mailing list, you can opt-out anytime by updating your preferences.
To find the most relevant and rewarding business and leadership opportunities and determine your eligibility for such opportunities;
To refine your leadership development experience, and further develop our programmes and services;
We may use your personal information, including date of birth, to verify identity, assist with identification of users, and to determine appropriate services. For example, we may use date of birth to determine the age of Bellona account holders.
To help you monitor your individual leadership progress and goals;
To manage donations and partnerships in a way that is necessary for us to fulfill any contract or obligation, as well as provide relevant updates with regards to our relationship or collaboration;
To perform statistical analysis, market research and consulting projects from time to time, with which we may use anonymized data and share it with business partners and academic researchers.
From time to time, we may use your personal information to send important notices, such as communications about your account and changes to our terms, conditions, and policies. Because this information is important to your interaction with Bellona, you may not opt out of receiving these communications
We may also use personal information for internal purposes such as auditing, data analysis, and research to improve Bellona’s products, services, and customer communications.
If you enter into a sweepstake, contest, or similar promotion we may use the information you provide to administer those programs.
If you apply for a position at Bellona, or we receive your information in connection with a potential role at Bellona, we may use your information to evaluate your candidacy and to contact you. If you are a candidate, you will receive more information about how Bellona handles candidate personal information at the time of application.
We will contact you for your consent to share your photos, videos, and personal stories and reflections for use in social media campaigns, presentations to partners and donors, and marketing and awareness campaigns.
Bellona has not, does not, and will not ever share or sell your information to third parties.
In all other cases, where use of your personal data may be deemed necessary or lawful for business use, we will do so in a way that does not negatively impact your rights, freedom or interests, and in a way that complies with the entirety of our Policy:
Sometimes the law says we need to collect and use your data. For example, tax laws require us to retain records of pledges and payments made through our Services.
We will collect and obtain data that we believe to be important to design and offer the best service, in a way that might reasonably be expected as part of running our organisation.
COLLECTION AND USE OF NON-PERSONAL INFORMATION
We also collect data in a form that does not, on its own, permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. The following are some examples of non-personal information that we collect and how we may use it:
We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where the Bellona mobile application is used so that we can better understand customer behaviour and improve our products, services, and advertising.
We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered nonpersonal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.
We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. This information may be used to improve the relevancy of results provided by our services. Except in limited instances to ensure quality of our services over the Internet, such information will not be associated with your IP address.
If we do combine non-personal information with personal information the combined information will be treated as personal information for as long as it remains combined.
RETENTION
We will retain your information as long as your account is active and/or you are subscribed to our mailing lists, as necessary to provide you with the Services or as otherwise set forth in this Policy. You can stop receiving communications from us at any time by unsubscribing, and we will remove your data if you have exercised your “Right to be Forgotten”.
We will also retain and use this information as necessary for the purposes set out in this Policy and to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements and protect Bellona’s legal rights. We also collect and maintain aggregated, anonymized or pseudonymized information which we may retain indefinitely to protect the safety and security of our Site, improve our Services, or comply with legal obligations.
DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION
Unless you have specifically asked us not to, we share your personal data for the sole purpose of supporting our business mission and the services with which you are provided. This may include:
Matching with your mentor/mentee
Recipients of a free course, or scholarship
Presentations and updates to partners and donors
Online and offline community engagement purposes
Verified or official partners who are interested in providing business and leadership opportunities to our community
For use in reporting, marketing and awareness campaigns, we will always obtain written permission via our forms or contact individuals directly for permission to use their content (interview responses, quotes, photos, videos), and limited personal information (first name, age, profession, school, etc).
Bellona has not, does not, and will not ever share or sell your information to third parties.
USER RIGHTS
HOW TO VIEW YOUR INFORMATION
Data transparency is critically important – both to us, the GDPR, and POPIA. We want to make this easy for you, so to view your personal information, simply ask and you shall receive! We will follow up as soon as possible with a detailed report on the personal information that is stored with Bellona.
All requestors must verify they are the owner of or have legal rights to personal information before anything is distributed. For your privacy and security, requests must come from the email address that you use with Bellona.
HOW TO REMOVE YOUR INFORMATION
You have full authority over your information, and you can ask us to remove any or all of it at any point in time.
As long as you are involved with Bellona, we will retain your information as necessary to provide you with our services and to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements and protect Bellona legal rights.
Removing your information is easy – simply send us a request! Please keep in mind that the information you provide us with guarantees you access to our mentorship programme and services. By requesting to have your information removed, you may be restricting yourself from Bellona’s programmes and thus may not be eligible for continued leadership opportunities, mentorship, or other facets of our programmes and services.
If you have any questions, concerns, or would like to learn more, please contact us at info@bellonanetwork.com.
DATA PROTECTION SERVICES
If you have a concern or complaint about our privacy practices, including the way we handled your personal data, you can report it to the Information Regulator (South Africa) on inforeg@justice.gov.za.
SERVICE PROVIDERS AND COOKIES
Bellona uses third party service providers to deliver our services to you, including our website. All service providers have either been carefully vetted and/or are industry standard (Google, WordPress, Salesforce, Mailchimp). We encourage you to familiarize yourself with their data protection policies as well.
While we currently do not use any custom-developed cookies on our website for any purpose, our third-party service providers may so please take note when you are being directed to another website. When you visit Bellona website, we only collect aggregate statistics on browsing activity and do not track anything which can be used to identify you.
We do not use any custom developed cookies for any purpose.
CONTACT US
Our Policy is periodically reviewed to make sure we continue to serve your privacy interests and that it remains relevant as our business operations evolve. If our data protection practices change materially, we will notify you of these policy changes by posting them on this webpage and updating you via email.
Should you have any questions, concerns, requests or anything you would like to call our attention to related to this Policy, please contact info@bellonanetwork.com and we will aim to address the matter as soon as possible.