Privacy and cookie policy

What this privacy and cookie policy covers

Oxford for Romania is committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold about you.

The purpose of this policy is to give you a clear explanation about how we collect and use the personal information provided to us by you or by third parties.

We ensure that we use your information in accordance with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal information. This policy explains:

What information Oxford for Romania may collect about you;
How we will use that information;
Whether we disclose your details to anyone else;
Your choices regarding the information you provide to us; and
How we use cookies to provide services to you or to improve your use of our website.

If you have any queries about this privacy and cookies policy, please contact us at info@oxfordforromania.org. The processing of your personal data is carried out by or on behalf of Oxford for Romania Registered Charity in England and Wales (1173125) and with registered office at Flat 18, The Hampden Building, High Street, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, OX5 2FN.

What information Oxford for Romania (OfR) may collect about you

We collect information in the following ways:

Information you give us. For example, when you apply to join one of our programmes, express an interest in taking up one of our programmes or services, register for an event, make a donation to us, engage with us via social media or message boards, respond to a call to action, or otherwise provide us with your personal information. When you register with us or contact us via a web enquiry form, we’ll ask for personal information, like your name, email address and telephone number to store with your account on our contact database.
Information we get from your use of our website and services. We collect information about the services you use, when you visit our website, interact with us via a portal or view and interact with our advertisements and content.
Information from third parties. Like all companies we are able to see what browser you are using, your IP address and what computer operating systems you are using. We may use this information to improve the services we offer.

We may collect the following types of personal data about you (and anyone at your organisation who we need to carry out due diligence checks on, for example):

contact and communications information, including:
- your contact details (including email addresses, telephone numbers and postal addresses);
- your communication preferences;
- records of communications and interactions we have had with you, including information provided through our website (e.g. in online RSVP forms for events) or via social media;
biographical, educational and career information, including:
- your name and date of birth;
- details of your education, including academic achievements;
- details of your professional activities and employment, including professional achievements;
- lifestyle information and social circumstances, only where relevant to your application;
- your interests and extra-curricular activities, where relevant to your application;
- information concerning your engagement with us, including attendance at our events, responses to surveys or focus groups, records of meetings, etc.;
technical data relating to your use of our website, collected through the use of cookies. A cookie is a small file which asks permission to be placed on your computer’s hard drive. Once you agree, the file is added and the cookie helps analyse web traffic or lets you know when you visit a particular site. (See the cookie policy at the foot of the page)
and any other information relevant to a grant funding application or award.

We may also collect sensitive personal data, including information concerning your health and medical conditions (e.g. disability and dietary needs), where this is necessary for the provision of an award to you or where you attend one of our events and we need to cater for your attendance.

If we lose touch with you over time, we may use external sources to ensure that our contact details for you are up to date, allowing us to continue to communicate with you about certain events and activities which may be of interest to you. If you do not wish OfR to do this for you, please contact us using the details at the bottom of this document.

We may also use external sources, such as information you have publicly shared on social media, to keep track of how your career has developed, for the purpose of our monitoring and evaluating how our programmes or grants have been used and will be best used in the future. In collecting this information, we are not intending to process it as your personal data so much as in an aggregated form for OfR's statistical purposes.

How we will use that information (legal basis)

The purposes for which we may use personal data (including sensitive personal data) we collect during an applicant's or grantee's with us are all at their heart designed to further our charitable objectives, which are essentially to support and promote access to high quality education. We do this by:

reviewing applications for our programmes and assessing their relative merits, including by considering whether the application fits our criteria and by consulting third party experts for peer review purposes as part of the charity’s two stage grant application process;
providing you with information about our activities and publishing case studies and news items about our beneficiaries, sponsors, work and other achievements on our website at www.oxfordforromania.org and in electronic and printed publications such as newsletters and invitations to events (which we may send to you by post, email and potentially by other means, depending on your communication preferences);
maintaining an archive with records of previous grants and previously supported alumni or grantees;
providing opportunities for OfR alumni including scholars to network and connect around academic interests;
administrative purposes, for example in connection with an event you have registered for or attended;
conducting surveys, focus groups and other research;
internal record-keeping, including the management of any feedback or complaints.

You can change your contact preferences at any time by clicking the ‘update preferences’ link at the end of our marketing emails. You can also change your contact preferences at any time by contacting info@oxfordforromania.org.

We will not use your personal information for marketing purposes if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted by us for such purposes. However, we will retain your basic details on a suppression list to help ensure that we do not continue to contact you.

Fundraising and philanthropy: We are passionate about providing a high-quality and engaging experience to all of our supporters and to raising vital funds to support our work. In order to ensure our communications with our current and potential supporters are relevant and tailored to your interests, we may supplement what we know about you with publicly available information to carry out due diligence on potential or actual donors. 

Whether we disclose your details to anyone else

OfR may disclose limited personal data to a variety of recipients including:

to our partner organisations (including your previous or current institutions of study) where necessary for the assessment of your application or administration of your award/grant, and afterwards where we seek to keep in touch with you or keep track of your career as an alumnus or scholar;
third party reviewers and experts selected by us for peer review purposes;
our Board of Trustees, staff and agents where there is a legitimate reason for their receiving the information, including third parties where we have engaged them to process data on our behalf as part of administering the award application process;
secure third party service providers such as MailChimp which hosts our mailing lists and Google suite applications which we use for regular operations, including email marketing, organising and storing;
when OfR is legally required to do so (by a court, government body, law enforcement agency or other authority of competent jurisdiction), for example by the Charity Commission.

OfR will not share, sell or swap your details with any third parties for the purposes of their own marketing, unless you have given us your consent to do so.

Under 18s. Young people are at the centre of our vision and we take the protection of young people seriously. We are therefore committed to protecting the privacy of the young people that engage with us through our programmes, at events and at schools. We require parental/guardian consent for under 18s to participate on these programmes, as well as to process their personal information.

Our fundraising events also request specific information about the age of participants. If you are under 18 and would like to get involved, please ensure that you have consent from a parent or guardian before giving us your personal information. When we collect information about a child or young person aged under 18 we will make it very clear as to the reasons for collecting this information and how it will be used.

Keeping your personal information

OfR keeps your personal information for varying amounts of time depending on your relationship with us.

Certain personal data relating to unsuccessful applicants is deleted within two years of the end of the application process, except that a record of the applicant's name, application answers, partner organisation with whom they are affiliated, and progress through the application process is retained indefinitely in OfR’s archive for statistical / research purposes.
For successful applicants, subject to any other notices that we may provide to you, we may retain your personal data indefinitely after you have finished complying with all the terms and conditions applicable to your scholarship/grant.
We will retain alumni and scholar personal data in order to support your life-long relationship with the Charity. However, if you wish to leave the alumni community, please let us know and we will delete your personal data (except for a skeletal record of your award details, for archiving purposes).
Where you have donated money to OfR, we will keep your personal data for as long as is required by financial and Charity Commission requirements. Where your information is no longer required, we will ensure it is disposed of in a secure manner.

Your choices regarding the information you provide to us

The website will collect personal information when you register in one of our programmes (summer school), such as name, email address, telephone number and other information for the purposes of the selection process.

As part of the registration process and continued use of OfR services, you agree that any registration information you give to OfR will always be accurate, correct and up to date. Please do get in touch with us should you need to amend any of your personal information.

We collect and retain information about your interactions with us so that we can process your interactions and deal with future queries.

Under the GDPR, with effect from 25 May 2018, you have the following rights in relation to our processing of your personal data. Please note that these rights are not absolute, and we may be entitled (or required) to refuse requests where exceptions apply:

to obtain access to, and copies of, the personal data that we hold about you;
to require us to correct the personal data we hold about you if it is incorrect;
to require us to erase your personal data in certain circumstances;
to require us to restrict our data processing activities in certain circumstances;
to object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to any of our particular processing activities where you feel this has a disproportionate impact on you;
to receive from us the personal data we hold about you which you have provided to us, in a reasonable format specified by you, including for the purpose of you transmitting that personal data to another data controller; and
where our processing is based on your consent, you may withdraw that consent, without affecting the lawfulness of our processing based on consent before its withdrawal.

Note: If you have given your consent and you wish to withdraw it, please contact us at info@oxfordforromania.org. Please note that where our processing of your personal data relies on your consent and where you then withdraw that consent, we may not be able to provide all or some aspects of our services to you and/or it may affect the provision of those services.

If you are not satisfied with how we are processing your personal data, you can raise a concern with the Information Commissioner. You can also find out more about your rights under data protection legislation from the Information Commissioner's Office website available at: www.ico.org.uk.

Changes to this privacy policy

We may update the terms of this policy at any time, so please do check it from time to time for changes. We will notify you about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by placing a prominent notice on our website(s), and by emailing individuals engaged with us personally if this has a significant impact on them. By continuing to use our website and services you will be deemed to have accepted such changes.

If you have any questions on the retention and disposal of your personal data please contact us on info@oxfordforromania.org.

Cookie policy

As is common practice with all professional websites, the OfR site uses cookies, which are small files of letters and numbers that are placed on your device by our website. This enables the website to distinguish you from other users of the site, and to understand users’ browsing patterns anonymously.

How we use cookies to provide services to you or to improve your use of our website

We use cookies for a variety of reasons detailed below. Unfortunately, in most cases there are no industry standard options for disabling cookies without completely disabling the functionality and features they add to this site. It is recommended that you leave on all cookies if you are not sure whether you need them or not in case they are used to provide a service that you use.

You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser (see your browser Help for how to do this). Be aware that disabling cookies will affect the functionality of this and many other websites that you visit. Disabling cookies will usually result in also disabling certain functionality and features of this site.

The Cokies We Set

Site preferences cookies

To provide you with a great experience on this site, we provide the functionality to set your preferences for how this site runs when you use it. To remember your preferences, we set cookies so that this information can be recalled whenever you interact with a page which is affected by your preferences.

Third Party Cookies

In some special cases we also use cookies provided by trusted third parties.

This site uses Google Analytics which is one of the most widespread and trusted analytics solution on the web for helping us to understand how you use the site and ways that we can improve your experience. These cookies may track things such as how long you spend on the site and the pages that you visit so we can continue to produce engaging content. This is important to understand statistics about how many of the visitors to our site actually view, download or apply to a programme and as such this is the kind of data that these cookies will track. This also help us accurately make predictions that allow us to monitor our marketing, offerings and report on our social impact.

Also, this site is made on the Wix platform, which uses two types of cookies including session (security) and those used to collect information about the user, such as web surfing behaviour or site performance.

If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy and Cookie Policy or the security of your personal data, please contact us by emailing info@oxfordforromania.org.

Oxford for Romania