Privacy statement

Please take a moment to read our Privacy Policy so you know what choices you have about the information we may ask you for. This policy may change so it’s a good idea to come back and read through it again, from time to time.

In order to provide you with the full range of Wiltshire Music Connect[1] and Music Connect CIC[2] services, we are sometimes required to collect information about you.

1. Wiltshire Music Connect and Music Connect CIC are committed to safeguarding your personal information.
Whenever you provide such information, we are legally obliged to use your information in line with all laws concerning the protection of personal information, including Data Protection Legislation (these laws are referred to collectively in this Privacy Policy as the “data protection laws”).

2. The Wiltshire Music Connect and any Music Connect CIC websites contain hyperlinks to websites owned and operated by third parties. These third party websites should have their own privacy policies, including cookies, and we urge you to review them. They will govern the use of personal information you submit or are collected by cookies whilst visiting these websites. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of such third party websites and your use of such websites is at your own risk.

3. What information will Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC collect about me? When you sign up to, participate in or receive a service from any Wiltshire Music Connect and / or Music Connect CIC website,  newsletters, training courses, questionnaires etc. we may ask for personal information about you. This can consist of information such as your name, email address, postal address, telephone or mobile number or date of birth. Different web pages may ask for different personal information.

Browsing the site – Our website is hosted in the UK in a data centre managed by WP Engine. When you visit our website or access one of the files stored on our web server information about this request will be automatically stored in our log files to provide usage statistics, enable security features and aid technical troubleshooting. This is on the legal basis of legitimate commercial interests. In these cases your IP address at the time acts as a unique identifier and is stored along with information about your operating system, browser version and the pages/files you access. These logs are retained on the server for up to 30 days, after which they are automatically deleted. WP Engine will also record a similar set of data for the purposes of data management and security. This data is retained by them for up to 3 months.

Like most businesses we use Google Analytics to help understand how our website is being discovered and interacted with and we use this information to help improve the experience for our visitors and make decisions about future development. Google Analytics presents us with aggregate information about the geographic location, device types and operating systems used by our website visitors, but not in a way that personally identifies you. Additionally Google will record your computer’s IP address and set a number of temporary cookies in your browser to help distinguish you as an individual visitor as you move around our site. In the interests of limiting the amount of data Google collects via our site we are using Google’s standard Analytics implementation and have not enabled any additional advertising features, such as remarketing tags which would tie your usage of our site in with your broader browsing habits.

Signing up to our mailing / bulletin lists – We use MailChimp for our email marketing. So when you sign-up as a to any of our mailing lists the information you submit, which can include your name, email address, job title, place of work and location, will be held securely by them and the information also made accessible to us. MailChimp’s servers are based in the United States, so your information may be transferred to, stored, or processed in the US. MailChimp participates in and has certified its compliance with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework, which certifies that is has adequate safeguards in place. As a respected email marketing provider MailChimp won’t share your information with any unauthorised third parties or contact you directly at any time – you can read their full privacy policy here: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/

To help ensure that only those who really consent to receiving our emails are signed-up we use a double opt-in process where a confirmation email will be sent to the email address supplied with a link to click. Only after clicking that link will you be opted-in to receive our emails. At this point MailChimp will also collect your IP address, which along with a timestamp helps provide our evidence of consent should we need to provide this to the regulator.

By default we will retain your data in MailChimp for as long as you choose to stay subscribed or such time as we consider your account to be in-active (ie. you are no longer opening or engaging with our emails).

You can update your details or opt-out of our emails at any time using the ‘Unsubscribe’ or ‘Email Preferences’ links found at the bottom of every email we send via MailChimp. If you unsubscribe MailChimp will retain your email address for the purposes of a suppression list to ensure that no further marketing messages can be sent unless you actively choose to opt-in again.

In addition to the information you supply at sign-up MailChimp will also capture data about your interactions with our emails and website, such as which links you click within an email which pages you go on to visit on our website. It does this using a combination of tracking pixels and cookies. You can learn more about those in the Cookies section of this privacy policy. We use this information to help improve our product and provide more personalised messaging.

We may also combine the information you provide us at sign-up with data from other sources, such as our website, to help us improve the relevance of the emails we send you. For example if you register to attend one of our events we may record that information in your MailChimp subscriber profile to ensure that the content of our emails reflects that.

Making a Payment
We use PayPal as an online payment processor for some services such as training the income for which is gathered through our CIC, so when you make a payment through our Eventbrite account some of the information you submit is sent to them to allow your payment to be processed. PayPal is committed to handling your customer information with high standards of information security and will not reveal your financial information to any third party except with your express permission or if required to do so by a court order or other legal process. You can read the detail of their full privacy statement here: https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full

All the information you submit at checkout is transmitted securely via an encrypted https connection and the information we receive from these transactions is just that needed to process or support your order. That includes your name, email address, billing address and contact phone number, but does not include any sensitive financial information such as credit card numbers or bank account details. We will retain this information, along with the details of your purchase, for 3 years as part of our financial records.

4. By entering your details in the fields requested, you enable Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC and its service providers to provide you with the services you select.

5. Who we collect personal data from. Where appropriate, pseudonymised data will be collected from schools and/or parents/carers to target support to and track the progress of pupils / students / young people. This data may be used to fulfil the requirements of funders and reporting mechanisms and secure (continued) support as well as informing those supporting and administering those pupils / students / young people’s support.

6. Legal basis for processing. Our processing of pseudonymised data is lawful because ‘processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the Wiltshire Council.

7. Wiltshire Music Connect and Music Connect CIC also use cookies and collect IP addresses. Cookies are small pieces of information stored by your internet browser on to your computer’s hard drive. Like most website providers, we use cookies to enable us to make a link between you and the information you have provided to our website and therefore provide you with personalised content so that we can give you a better experience when you return. If you access form protected content, we’ll store a cookie on your device for 30 days to allow your continued access to that content. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, although you can choose not to.

Essential / Non-essential cookies
From time to time we may embed videos and audio files from well-known media sharing sites. These sites may use cookies to track your behaviour via our pages,

Google Analytics – We anonymously track the behaviour of all visitors to this site using Google Analytics. This includes the use of the Google Analytics tracking cookie. We use this data to understand how people use our website and to improve and update our content. Read more on this cookie and how it is used by the Google Analytics service. IP addresses are provided to Google Analytics but are anonymised with the Google Analytics service.

8. How will Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC use the information they collect about me? We will use your personal information for a number of purposes including the following:

  • for “service administration purposes”, which means that our team may contact you for reasons related to the service you have signed up for (e.g. to provide you with password reminders or to notify you that a particular service has been suspended for maintenance);
  • to contact you about a submission you have made to the websites, including any content you provide.
  • to personalise the way our content is presented to you, IP addresses are used to identify the location of users, the number of visits from different countries and also to block disruptive use; and
  • to analyse and improve the services offered on our websites e.g. to provide you with the most user-friendly navigation experience.
  • to enable us to review, develop and improve the products, services and special offers online.
  • to occasionally carry out market research.
  • to send you details of our promotions, products, services, special offers and rewards that we think will be of interest to you. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to receive this information.
  • Where we propose using your personal information for any other uses we will ensure that we notify you first. You will also be given the opportunity to withhold or withdraw your consent for your use other than as listed above.

9. When will Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC contact me? We may contact you:

  • in relation to the functioning of any service you have signed up for in order to ensure that we can deliver the services to you;
  • where you have opted to receive further correspondence;
  • in relation to any contribution you have made to our work, e.g. uploading notes or taking part in a blog
  • to invite you to participate in surveys about our services (participation is always voluntary); and for marketing purposes where you have specifically agreed to this

10. Will Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC share my personal information with anyone else? Generally, we will only use your information within Wiltshire Music Connect and Music Connect CIC. However, like most businesses we rely on a number of third-party providers to support our day-to-day operations, for example in areas such as maintaining or improving our website and other digital services or evaluation and research. Some of these service providers will by necessity have access to or be directly involved in processing or storing a subset of the personal information you share with us.

All our third-party data processors have been carefully chosen as service suppliers who also practice responsible data handling. We believe that each has in place appropriate protections to ensure the security of the data we store or process with them and have clear policies for how they treat that data. But if in doubt you should review their individual Privacy Policies.

Before using or sharing your information with third parties in ways not described here or previously authorised by you, we will provide you with notice and an opportunity to control the further use or disclosure of your personal information.

11. Will Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC share my personal data with anyone beyond the European Economic Area (EEA)? In rare circumstances we will transfer your information outside of the European Economic Area. We will only do this with your informed consent, when it is necessary to perform a contract we have with you or where the receiving organisation has adequate safeguards in place – for example certification under the EU-US Privacy Shield framework.

12. Protecting your information. Any information sent to us is stored on a secure server so that it can only be read by authorised personnel.

13. Marketing our products and services – We may, subject to your consent, use your personal information to contact you with information about our promotions. If you no longer wish to receive such information from us, please hit the unsubscribe link in our communications.

14. Offensive or inappropriate content –  If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content anywhere on the our websites or otherwise engage in any disruptive behaviour on a website, we may use your personal information to stop such behaviour. Where we reasonably believe that you are or may be in breach of any of the laws of England or Wales (e.g. because content you have posted may be defamatory), we may use your personal information to inform relevant third parties such as your employer, school e-mail/Internet provider or law enforcement agencies about the content and your behaviour.

15. What if I am a user aged 16 or under? If you are aged 16 or under, please get your parent/guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide personal information to our websites. Users without this consent are not allowed to provide us with personal information.

16. How long will Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC keep my personal information? We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant service or promotion.Where you contribute to our websites we will generally only keep your content for as long as is reasonably required for the purpose(s) for which it was submitted.

17. Can I find out what personal information Wiltshire Music Connect and/or Music Connect CIC hold about me? Under the Data Protection Act you have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected.


Contact Us – If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information you should write to Wiltshire Music Connect and Music Connect CIC at the address below.
Wiltshire Music Connect or Music Connect CIC, c/o Wiltshire Music Centre, Ashley Road, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1DZ

E: info@wiltshiremusicconnect.org.uk


[1] Wiltshire Music Connect is part of Wiltshire Council. We will not share your personal data with other departments of Wiltshire Council or other organisations unless specified at the point of collection.

[2] Music Connect CIC is our Community Interest Company which has been set up to support and complement the efforts of the Wiltshire Music Connect music education hub. It will not share your personal data with other organisations unless specified at the point of collection