Academy of Ideas Ltd is strongly committed to protecting your privacy.

This privacy notice tells you how we collect, use and store personal information when you visit our websites - including academyofideas.org.uk, debatingmatters.com and battleofideas.org.uk - on all digital platforms and use our services.

We collect personal information from:

· visitors to our websites;
· people who subscribe to our email newsletters;
· people who contact us via social media;
· people who share our content via social media;
· people who donate;
· people who attend our events;
· people who participate in our events;
· people who email;
· people we meet in person;
· current and former staff.

What information do we collect and how?

The information we gather falls into two categories:

1. Information anonymously and automatically tracked that is gathered as visitors navigate through our site and/or use our email newsletters, share our content on social media, and those who donate to us or pay to become associates.

This information is collected by third-party service providers on our behalf.  Third parties featured on or linked to by our the website are Google Analytics, AddThis, Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, Eventbrite, Romancart and WorldPay. These third parties may be gathering information through processes we don’t control. Please click on the individual service names to read their privacy policies.

2. Information voluntarily supplied by visitors to the site when they register, sign up to receive our email newsletters, get tickets for our events, give us a donation or become associates of the Academy of Ideas.

We have third-party agents, subsidiaries, affiliates and partners that perform functions on our behalf, including, but not limited to, hosting, content syndication, content management tools, social media integration, marketing, analytics, billing and customer service.  These entities may have access to personally identifiable information if needed to perform their functions.  If such access is required, the third parties will be obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of that personally identifiable information. They are restricted from using, selling, distributing or altering this data in any way other than to provide the requested services to the relevant websites.

We use a third-party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log 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. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not allow Google to find out the identities of visitors to our website.  Read Google’s privacy policy.

Academy of Ideas Ltd also uses cookies on our websites
A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. We use cookies in a limited way to make interactive parts of the site (such as forms) more convenient to use, to identify unique browsers that visit us, and to track usage throughout our site.

Expression Engine and Wordpress
We use two content-management systems, Expression Engine and Wordpress. We do not collect, store or use any of your information on either system, except for Debating Matters (debatingmatters.com), where we keep a limited amount of information required to enable us to contact individuals at schools and colleges where necessary.

Email newsletters
We use two third-party providers, Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp, to deliver our email newsletters. Academy of Ideas Ltd can access the name you provide, your email and your geolocations as well as statistics around email opening and clicks using industry-standard technologies. For more information, please click on the relevant service’s name to see its privacy policy.

Social media
We use a third party, AddThis, for visitors to use when sharing the website’s content. For more information about how AddThis processes data, please see AddThis’s privacy policy.

Academy of Ideas uses Facebook and Twitter. For more information, please see Twitter’s privacy policy and Facebook’s data policy.

Donations and membership
Academy of Ideas Ltd uses WorldPay to collect and store information about donations. For more information about these third-parties, please see WorldPay’s privacy policy.

Academy of Ideas Ltd can view each donor’s name, email address if provided to the third-party, amount received and in some cases the location and address if the donor agrees to provide that information. Our financial control within Worldpay is limited to cancelling or refunding a donation. We may store some information from Worldpay for our own administrative or accounting records and we may occasionally contact someone who has paid through Worldpay in relation to current or future payments where this becomes necessary - for example, if a payment method needs to be changed.

Attending events
Academy of Ideas Ltd uses two third-party providers, Eventbrite and Romancart, to sell tickets to our events. Eventbrite stores and processes the name and email of people who get tickets to our events. We process this information for a guest list and registration purposes only and contact those attending via email, both directly or via Eventbrite as appropriate. In the email, we may ask if you would like to subscribe to our newsletter. We do not share names and emails with anyone.

For more information, please see Eventbrite’s privacy policy and Romancart’s privacy policy.

Tickets for the Battle of Ideas festival are sold by The Barbican. Basic contact details of ticket buyers for the most recent festival are shared with Academy of Ideas Ltd to enable a one-off follow-up email after the festival. See the Barbican privacy policy.

Emailing the team directly
We use Microsoft Exchange mail which uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt and protect email traffic by default. If your email service does not support TLS, you should be aware that any emails we send or receive may not be protected in transit.

We will also monitor any emails sent to us, including file attachments, for viruses or malicious software. Please be aware that you have a responsibility to ensure that any email you send is within the bounds of the law.

Event participants and partners
We keep emails, contact details and any other information provided by speakers, judges, teachers and other event participants in our inboxes and internal databases.

Current and former staff
For staff, we store name, email, address, and financial information for administrative and financial purposes.

Links to other websites
This privacy notice does not cover the links within this site linking to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.

Changes to this privacy notice
We keep our privacy notice under regular review. This privacy notice was last updated in April 2018. We are currently reviewing our Privacy Notice.

How to contact us
If you want to request information about our privacy policy you can contact Geoff Kidder:

E: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
T: +44 (0)20 7269 9224

or write to us at:

Academy of Ideas Ltd
Unit 208, Cocoa Studios,
The Biscuit Factory,
Drummond Road,
London
SE16 4DG