Privacy Policy

We have always protected your personal information and will continue to do so and be transparent about the information we hold about you. Using personal information allows us to develop a better understanding of your needs and allows us to provide you with relevant and timely information about the events and services we offer you.

The purpose of this policy is to give you a clear explanation about how and why we are using your personal information.

Affinity Studios trades as Affinity Studios and Affinity Events, www.affinity-studios.co.uk

The registered address is Affinity Studios
7 Bignell Croft
Loughton
Milton Keynes
MK5 8BF

The personal information we collect on you
Affinity Studios may use the personal information that you provide to keep you informed about our planned studio events and location events run by Affinity Studios or Affinity Events. We will store your personal information securely and use it in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR) 2012.

Information collected from you
We aim to be clear when we collect your personal information and to use it in ways that you would reasonably expect us to do so. We will collect your personal information including for example, your name, address, telephone number and email address when you:

Book for Studio Event, Wedding or Location Event.
This included any of the following methods
Telephone
Text
Email
Via the studio Web Site or App
Social Media Facebook, Twitter Messenger, Instagram or others
Active Campaign
Post

Information about your interaction with us
We keep a record of your booking history and payments on our database and marketing system.

When you visit our website or book an event, we collect information about your interaction with us. When we send you a mailing by post or email we store a record of this and for email communication, we keep a record of what emails you have opened, and which links you have clicked.

Information from other organisations
We do not use data from 3rd party organisations.

We also use information from online sources including:

Social media including Facebook and Instagram; for targeted advertising.
Google Analytics; to understand how you use our website.
When you subscribe to an event we use Active Campaign or Spectra to send you email communications.

Sensitive information
Affinity Studios recognises that certain categories of personal information are sensitive. For example, health information, gender, race, religious beliefs and political opinions. We do not usually collect this information unless there is a clear reason for doing so. Customers must confirm that they are 18 years or over to make a booking or join our mailing list.

Whether you need to provide personal information
You are not legally obliged to provide Affinity Studios with your personal information. However, if we do not have this information it may affect our ability to provide the service or contract requested. For example, if we do not have your contact details, we may not be able to inform you if an event is cancelled.

How we use your personal information
Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

Where we need to perform the contract that we are about to enter or have entered into with you.
Where we have your consent before using your personal information in that specific situation. Generally, we do not rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal information, but where consent has been given, you have the right to withdraw it at any time by contacting us using the details at the end of this policy.
Where we have a legitimate interest to do so and provided that your interests and fundamental rights do not conflict or override the interests of Affinity Studios.
Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
For the performance of a booking contract
When you make a booking with Affinity Studios or Affinity Events you are entering into a contract. To fulfil this contract, we will collect, process and securely store your personal information to complete your booking. We will use this to keep you informed about essential information related to your transaction. This might include notification of a change to the scheduled event or issues processing payment. We will also provide a booking confirmation by email where an email address has been provided.

Consent
There will be circumstances when we will ask for your consent before using your personal information. We will obtain your consent before:

Sending marketing communications by email relating to studio & location events and special offers.
In circumstances where we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. This will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.

Legitimate interest
In certain situations, we collect and process information for purposes that are in our legitimate organisational interest. We will always consider the impact on our customers and will use your personal information only in ways that you might reasonably expect us to do so.

We will use legitimate interest as our legal basis to process your personal information in the following situations:

To segment our database so that you receive the information that is most appropriate to you, and for the purposes of internal reporting and analysis. We will use your bookings history as well as any interests you have specified to help do this.

Legal obligations
We may be required to disclose personal information to comply with the law or to enforce our legal right and account practice.

How we keep your personal information safe
Our procedures and the technology we use have appropriate safeguards in place to keep information as secure as possible. The information you send us via email will be stored on the relevant email server and our secure hard drives and backed up on by our Studio Management Software (Spectra).

Personal information is stored in our booking database and certain information, for example, some sensitive information is additionally controlled and is only accessible to members of staff who have a reason to work with it. All staff are required to adhere to current data protection legislation in line with our data protection policy and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

If you use your credit or debit card to make a booking, we will ensure that this is carried out securely and in accordance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Card Payment is carried out by Barclaycard using the approved and certified card reader. Payment by BACs or Bank Transfer or PayPal nor personal information is transferred or stored other than name, payment date and amount.

Network devices are managed within a secure management network and servers are secured by firewalls. In both instances, SSL/TLS secure encryption protocols are used.

Our Studio Manages Software is a cloud-based service which meets all required data security standards. We do not hold client data locally.

We will not transfer, process or store your personal information anywhere that is outside of our standard CRM service (Spectra).

We will not supply your personal information to or allow use by third parties.

We use Active Campaign to help with our marketing activities and agreed communication with you. When we do this, we will only give authority for the personal information to be used for the purpose it has been provided for. We will ensure that any third parties have safeguards in place to keep your personal information secure.

How long we keep your personal information
We store personal information for as long as it is necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of legal, accounting, reporting or booking requirements. We store your personal information so that any subsequent purchases or bookings can be linked back to the record that we hold for you on our system.

We retain personal information based on the nature, sensitivity and purpose the personal information was collected for. Any objections you make to how we use your personal information will be stored against your record on our system so that we can comply with your requests.

We will review our data retention processes regularly.

Your rights to your personal information
You have the right to:

Request a copy of personal information held about you
Request that inaccuracies be corrected
Request us to stop using your personal information
Withdraw consent
There is no fee for you to exercise any of these rights.

If you choose to exercise any of these rights, we may need to request certain information from you to help us confirm your identity. This is a security measure to ensure that personal information is not shared with anyone without the right to receive it.

We aim to carry out all requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex. In this case, we will notify you.

Notifications of changes to our privacy policy
This privacy policy may change from time to time. We will notify you of any fundamental changes to this policy where you would reasonably expect to be informed. Please visit the website for our most up-to-date policy.

Updating your personal information
To change any of the information we hold about you or to make changes to the way we contact you, please email info@affinity-studios.co.uk or call 01908 234138 or write to us using the contact details below. You can cancel or revise your email subscription at any time by clicking the relevant link in the footer of any email you receive from us.)

Contact details and further information
If you have questions about any aspect of this privacy policy, please contact us by:

Emailing: info@affinity-studios.co.uk