British School at Athens Privacy Policy
1. Purpose of this policy
The British School at Athens (BSA) is the UK’s academic hub for the humanities and social sciences in Greece and its wider Balkan, European, Mediterranean and Levantine contexts. People engage with the BSA as researchers, course participants, users of our Library, Archive or Laboratory, visitors, supporters and donors. Our mission is to conduct, facilitate and promote research of international excellence in all periods – from the Palaeolithic to the present – and across all humanities and social science disciplines and to help train future generations of researchers in these fields. In this we seek to maintain and grow a lifelong, mutually beneficial relationship between the BSA and all its stakeholders.
This privacy policy sets out how we manage and use your data to enable us to keep you informed about the BSA and provide opportunities for you to continue to be involved in the life and activities of the BSA. This includes providing you with services you have requested, for administration purposes, and to further our charitable and educational aims including fundraising, volunteering and other activities. Your data are stored securely and in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation 2018. We never sell your information to third parties.
2. What data are stored and processed by us
We record data about you (minimally your name and contact details):
when you apply to us (e.g., for employment, for an award, or to become a member, subscribing or regular)
when you request one of our services (e.g., permit processing, accommodation)
when you donate, or
when you ask to receive information on the BSA, particularly about our events
We update our records when you enquire about our services, register for events or activities, make a donation, request us to do so by email to bsacomms@bsa.ac.uk, or provide us with information. The majority of information we hold will have been provided by yourself and we may also update your record with information that is publicly available.
Information we hold may include:
Biographic information including names, titles, gender, date of birth, contact details
Education history from your time at the BSA and information about activities you were involved in (e.g. courses, fieldwork, research projects)
Employment details, employment history and biographies
Donation history to the BSA, including fundraising campaigns
Records of communications with and from the BSA
Registration, booking details and attendance at events and for volunteering opportunities
Communication preferences
We aim to keep your data up to date and accurate, and your rights in relation to this are set out at the end of this document.
3. Data collected by our websites and emails
In common with other websites, the BSA website uses cookies to provide functionality and collect anonymous statistical data. Find out more about how we use cookies in our Cookie Statement.
We may display links to external websites to provide you with information about events or services, these sites are not controlled by the BSA and we cannot be held responsible for the content or accuracy of these external links.
To help monitor and improve our communications we can track when an email we send is opened and how many links are clicked within the message. We may use this information to personalise the way our websites and emails are presented to you and improve the content of our communications.
We do not store any sensitive data, such as credit/debit card details, on our website. Payments are redirected to a third party payment processor. Our website uses secure socket layer (SSL) technology to encrypt communication.
4. Why and how we use your data
We use your information to keep you informed about the BSA, and to provide opportunities for you to continue to be involved in the activities of the BSA. This includes providing you with services you have requested, for administration purposes, and to further our charitable and educational aims including fundraising, volunteering, event invitations and newsletters. Information about your participation in the BSA’s charitable activities is also incorporated into our historical archive that reaches back to our foundation in 1886.
We want to send you timely, relevant and appropriate messages via mail, email and telephone. To do this we may segment our communications based on demographic, geographical and education information.
Fundraising is very important for the BSA. The BSA was founded with philanthropic support and we continue this tradition of giving through our fundraising efforts which provide additional resources to support all aspects of our activities in Greece, the UK and elsewhere.
We want to keep you informed about our fundraising in the most appropriate and cost effective ways. To help us do this we may carry out analysis and segmentation of the information we hold and add publicly available information. Our policy is to act ethically in receiving donations and we therefore make appropriate enquiries, where advisable, when a donation is received. These processes help us to understand better your interests, preferences and the type and level of donation you may be interested in giving. This allows us to make appropriate requests to our supporters, helping us raise more money, more cost effectively, and more respectfully than we otherwise could.
Our fundraising campaigns are managed in-house by permanent BSA staff and may include direct mail (both postal and electronic), social media, telephone and face-to-face visits. None of our staff are paid commission on donations they raise.
We do not use external fundraising agencies or external professional fundraisers to ask for donations on our behalf.
We are very grateful for the support of our donors and we like to publish their names in our newsletters and online to recognise their support and to encourage others to donate; we only publish names in this way with your explicit permission to do so. If you donate to the BSA and do not wish your donation to be publicly recognised, you can choose to donate anonymously. This means we will record your donation on our system, but will not publicly acknowledge or publish your name on donor lists or other stewardship materials either online or in written publications. We may from time to time publish case stories online and in our literature, but will always ask for permission from people involved in the case stories before publication.
5. Who is it shared with
We never pass information to third parties except in the following cases:
We use external service providers to manage our payroll services (in Greece and in the UK), we claim Gift Aid from HMRC in the UK, we share contact details with publishers (currently CUP and Routledge) to deliver publications as requested, we share information with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports in order to deliver services. We always make sure there are appropriate controls in place regarding how third parties handle your data and to ensure they never use the data for purposes unrelated to the BSA
We may need to disclose your information if required to by law
If we have obtained your permission to do so
We may use external service providers based in countries or jurisdictions outside of the EU. These countries may not provide the same level of data protection as the EU. If we do use these services, we will put appropriate controls in place to ensure your information is protected.
We will never sell your information to a third party.
6. Future changes
From time to time, we may use your information for new, unanticipated uses not previously disclosed in our privacy policy. If our information practices change at some time in the future, we will post the policy changes on this page.
If you are concerned about how your information is used, you should check this page periodically. We will only use data collected from the time of the policy change onwards for these new purposes.
7. Your rights
You may opt out of receiving our communications at any time by contacting us at bsacomms@bsa.ac.uk, or you may write to us at the address given below.
Should you object to the holding of your data by the BSA, the use of your data for any or all of the above purposes, want to complain about something we have done, to amend the type of communications you receive or the way in which the BSA contacts you, please contact us at dataprotection@bsa.ac.uk.
You have the right to request a copy of the personal information the BSA holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected, or to have your data deleted. Upon such a request we will provide you with access to all the information we maintain about you subject to the conditions of the General Data Protection Regulation 2018. Please request this service by writing to us via the addresses below:
dataprotection@bsa.ac.uk
The British School at Athens
10 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AH
UK