Privacy Policy

LCGB Privacy Policy

The Lactation Consultants of Great Britain (LCGB) is a registered charity (Charity number: 1187793) whose charitable aims are supported through our members (donors) and subscribers. 

We are committed to protecting the personal information of all those we have contact with, whilst being transparent about what we do with their information. Irrespective of what that contact with us is, whether a donor or work, volunteering or advocating for us, using our services, requesting information or wishing to learn more about us and our work.

We are committed to only using your personal information in accordance with our responsibilities. We are required to provide you with this Privacy Policy under applicable law which includes:

• the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) (‘GDPR’) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (‘DPA’) referred to as the ‘data protection legislation’
• the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation (2003)

We will not do anything with your information you would not reasonably expect.

This notice, together with our website Terms & Conditions and our cookies policy tells you about how we collect, use and protect your personal information.

Contact us:

• If you have any questions about this policy, we will be happy to talk to you. Contact secretary@lcgb.org

What data do we collect - we collects the following data:

• Examples of when you give us information directly:
  • Submit an enquiry
  • Become a member or subscriber
  • Personal and professional identification information (Name, email address, phone number, IBCLC number etc)
  • Images uploaded to our website by you
  • Support of our charity through a donation
  • When you fundraise on our behalf
  • When you register for an event or a group
  • If you apply to volunteer with us
  • When you give us feedback
  • Make a comment or a review
  • If you make a complaint
• When you indirectly give us information:
  • When you interact with us on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X or LinkedIn we may also obtain some personal information about you. The information we receive is dependent on the privacy preferences you have set on each platform and the privacy policies of each platform. To change your settings on these platforms, please refer to their privacy notices.
  • We may obtain information about your visit to our site, for example the pages you visit and how you navigate the site, by using cookies. Please visit our cookies policy for information on this.

When you engage with us in person. telephone, mail or online, we may collect relevant information about you. This may include your name, address, email address, telephone number, IP address, user agent string, date of birth, place of work and details of your education and career, why you have engaged with us, and any other information relating to you personally which you may choose to share with us.

UK, data protection law recognises that particular areas of personal information are considered ‘sensitive’ or ‘special category’ personal information.  This information reveals ones racial or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs and political opinions, trade union membership, genetic or biometric data, information concerning health or data concerning a person’s sex life or sexual orientation.

‘Sensitive’ information will only be collected where necessary.  Clear notices will be provided at the time we collect this information, stating what information is required and why.

How and why we use your information:

LCGB will use your personal information for the following purposes:

• Becoming a member or subscriber of LCGB – we process your data on our online membership system, where you can see, edit, or delete your personal information at any time. It is your responsibility to ensure we have your correct information. We make contact with you through this data to share information and updates related to the work of LCGB.
• Members have access to the members only content on our website and designated membership benefits which includes full members having the option to share their data publically on our website.
• Fundraising or direct updates for members only – we will only send you this type of communication if you have given us specific consent to do so. Please contact secretary@lcgb.orgto opt-out
• Paper registration forms for all LCGB applications (membership, events etc) – these will be processed to electronic data held on our systems after which the paper forms are securely destroyed.
• Responding to a request- if you contact us with a request, we may use your personal information to provide you with a response.
• Monitoring and evaluating – we may use your information in order to improve current and future delivery of our services.
• Transactional purposes – We will need to use your personal information in order to carry out our obligations arising from the processing of payments and donation, this also includes us checking your eligibility to donate being within our compliance to the World Health Organisation Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes.
• Providing and developing our website – we may use your personal information to help us understand your usage of our website to help with accessibility and improve and develop it faster.
• Administration- we may use your information to record and deal with a complaint, record a request to not receive further marketing communications, recording what volunteers of LCGB have done for us and other essential internal recording keeping purposes.
• Market Research and surveys – LCGB may from time to time invite you to participate in surveys or market research to help us improve our services, strategic development website and fundraising,.  As always participation is voluntary and no participant is identified in the statistics gained from the survey unless you consent to us publishing your feedback.
• Legal, regulatory and tax compliance – Where required we are subject to a legal obligation, we may process your personal information to fulfil that request.
• Profiling and analysis – we may use your personal information to conduct profiling of our supporters or potential supporters.  This will help us to target in a more focused, effect and cost effective way, this helps us to prevent inappropriate or irrelevant communications. You can decline to use of your personal information for profiling at any time by contacting us at the details at the end of this Privacy Notice.
  • Profiling analysis can be broken down in to categories:-
    • Data matching – We may pair your information with data from external sources to tailor communications to better meet your needs or the need of others like you.  We won’t use this information to intrude on you and your privacy or privacy preferences.
    • Segmenting- Our membership may be analysed based on group, postcode particular area.  This is to ensure some of our communications are sent to those who most likely will respond and find it useful.  This type of activity is aimed to identify specific individuals who may fall within a certain segment of supporters. It is not aimed to identify specific individuals to be targeted.
    • Ethical screening and minimising risk as a registered charity - We follow a number of legal and regulatory obligations and standards.  Our integrity as a charity is reliant on being ethical and acting in an ethical manner.  We carry out appropriate due diligence of donors, we check donations and implement financial controls to help protect us as a charity from abuse, fraud and/or money laundering. We may carry out background and extensive checks on potential donors or anyone planning on making a significant donation or gift before we can accept it.  We also ethically screen supporters to minimise risk of creating an association with an individual or group that conflicts the standards we have as an organisation and the World Health Organisation Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes.

Who do we share your information with?

• We will not share your data with anyone outside LCGB, we will not under any circumstances, sell, or share your personal information with any third party for their own purposes.
• We will only add you to our mailing list if you have given your consent for us to do so.
• We will use the data we collect to keep you informed about our news, events and sponsorship opportunities.
• Third party suppliers – we may need to share your information with data hosting providers or service providers to help us deliver our services, projects or fundraising.  These providers will only act under our instruction.
• Where legally required we will comply with request where disclosure is required by law.

Record retention:

• We will keep your contact details on our mailing list until you unsubscribe.
• Once we have received your information, we will use appropriate procedures and security features as far as possible, to prevent unauthorised access.
• We will securely destroy any paper copies of information once no longer required.
• If you cancel your LCGB membership - your details will be removed from our active system and you will be informed of our plans for your details.
• If you do not renew you LCGB membership - once it has expired we will remove your details from our active system. When one month has lapsed it will be considered cancelled.
• LCGB Subscriptions – your details will be held for one calendar year after which you will be contacted to renew for the next year. If we do not have a response from you within one month we will consider your subscription cancelled and your details will be removed from our systems.
• Users that register on our website LCGB-OWL.org, we store the personal information you provide in your user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (the user cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

To maintain a high level of security:

• We limit information to a need-to-know basis, and information is only used in accordance with this Privacy policy.
• We undertake reviews of who has access to information we retain to assure that your information is only accessible to those volunteering/working within LCGB whose role requires access.
• If you use your credit or debit card to donate to us, process a membership payment or make a purchase online via our MembershipWorks platform the processed payment is through Stripe (Stripe privacy policy).  We do this in accordance with industry standards and do not store the details on our website.
• When accessing your information we will log out on completion of the task.
• We will make sure confidential information is stored in password protected files or a locked container.
• We will keep computer passwords private.
• We will not share a member’s password with anyone.
• We will use memory sticks and external hard drives with care.
• We will dispose of any paper copies of information that are no longer required securely.

Be aware that there are always risks in sending information by public networks or using public computers therefore we cannot 100% guarantee the security of data (including personal information) disclosed or transmitted over public networks.

How long we will keep your information?

We will keep your personal information in respect of financial transactions for as long as the law requires use to for tax and accounting purposes (which can be up to six years after a particular transaction)

A request to no longer contact you for marketing will result in your details being kept in a suppression file to enable us to comply with your request not to be contacted.

Other personal information will be retained no longer than for the purposes for which it was collected, taking in to account guidance issued by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO).

Third party software tools:

Third party services collect certain technical information from your device including standard internet log information i.e. Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser type and version, and page interaction information.

• We use a third-party provider, Mail Chimp, to deliver our newsletter and direct messaging. See Mail Chimp privacy policy.
• We use a third-party provider for our membership system and events booking, Membership Works.  See MembershipWorks privacy policy.
• We use LearnDash and Woo Commerce on our site LCGB-Owl.org. Here are their privacy policies. See Learndash privacy policy and Woocommerce privacy policy

Privacy policies of other websites:

The LCGB website contains links to other websites.  Our privacy policy only applies to our website, so if you click on a link to another website, you should read their privacy policy.

Information and courses on our site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has directly visited the other website.  

See Vimeo’s privacy policy https://vimeo.com/privacy.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Your rights to your personal information:

Data protection legislation gives you the right to request access to your personal information which is processed by LCGB and to correct any inaccuracies.

You also have the right to ask us to erase your personal information, ask us to restrict our processing of your personal information or to object to our processing of your personal information. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes. Please email secretary@lcgb.org to initiate these rights providing full information regarding the nature of your contact with us, this will assist in locating your records.

You have a right to withdraw your consent to be on our mailing list at any time by completing the Unsubscribe-from-mailing-list form, clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ on the bottom of Mail Chimp emails or emailing secretary@lcgb.org.

Unsubscribe-from-mailing-list form:

Click here to unsubscribe from the LCGB mailing list or send the following details to: secretary@lcgb.org, and use ‘Unsubscribe’ in the Subject line.

Your name:                                  Your email address:

How to make a complaint or raise a concern:

To request more information, or ask any questions about this policy, to make a formal complaint about our approach to data protection or raise privacy concerns please contact us at secretary@lcgb.org