At Northern Star, we are committed to respecting the privacy of all the people we work with – our clients and participants in our research, events and training. This Privacy Policy tells you when and why we collect your personal information, how we use it, the limited conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it secure.

As part of the registration process for email updates, we collect personal information, which we use to send you updates about what we’ve been doing. We will never sell your personal information to other companies for marketing purposes. We use a third-party provider, MailChimp, to deliver our newsletter. We gather statistics around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. For more information, please see MailChimp’s privacy notice. You can unsubscribe to general mailings at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails.

Our events and research may be filmed, audio recorded or photographed and your personal information may also be used in images captured from these events, which we use for promotional and research purposes.

We keep personal information from clients for certain legitimate business purposes, such as to provide email communications which we think will be of interest to you. Whenever we use your personal information for this purpose, we will make sure that act in line with your personal data rights. You have the right to object to this processing if you wish, by emailing sarah@northernstarassociates.co.uk. Please bear in mind that if you object we may be unable to carry out tasks for your benefit.

We keep all our data securely on password-protected hard drives. We use certain trusted companies to help us analyse and store data, and we never to allow other companies to contact you. We use SurveyMonkey (for online questionnaires) and Dropbox (for secure storage of data) and Outsource Typing (for transcription of data). Click on the company names to read their privacy policies.

When we do research, we ask participants to give us personal information to show their consent to taking part; and to help us understand more about them. When we analyse data such as interviews and questionnaire responses for the research, we always remove names and anything else that could identify individuals, so that you will not be identifiable in results passed to clients. At the end of the study we will securely delete your name and any contact details you may have provided, leaving only anonymous research data. The anonymous research data will be kept for six years.

You have a right to view, amend or delete the personal information that we hold about you. If you’ve taken part in any of our research studies, Northern Star can provide a copy of your responses to this research, together with the personal information used to contact you for this research on request at any time before the results are anonymised. Email your request to our data protection lead, Sarah Stocks at sarah@northernstarassociates.co.uk.

This policy was written in April 2018 and will be reviewed every year.