Privacy policy

IHE is committed to safeguarding your privacy and ensuring that your personal data is protected.

What personal data do we collect?

In this privacy policy, “personal data” means information or pieces of information about you that could allow you to be directly or indirectly identified. This may include:

• your name
• your job title
• your postal address
• your email address
• your telephone number
• your employer
• your dietary, mobility or additional needs requirements.

The only personal data we will collect is the information you provide to us voluntarily. You do not need to provide any personal data in order to browse this website.                                                                                                                                   

How will we collect and use your personal data? 

When you visit our website, we may store some information on your computer. This information will be in the form of a 'cookie' or similar file. We use cookies to improve the user experience of our website. For example, cookies allow us to tailor our website to better match your interests and preferences. With most internet browsers you can erase cookies from your computer’s hard drive, block all cookies, or receive a warning before a cookie is stored. You can read more about how we use cookies on our Cookies page.

When you register for an event, we will collect your personal data in order to process your booking. We use a third-party provider, Eventbrite, to process event bookings. Please see Eventbrite’s privacy policy for more information.

When you complete our website enquiry form, we will collect your personal data in order to determine the type of support you need from us. You can also opt in to receive communications from us about news, events, products and services that may be of interest to you. Based on this information we may send you, by email or social media, details about services from us or other businesses that we think could be useful to you. However, we don’t trade email lists with other organisations and we will never sell your data to third parties.

We use a third-party provider, HubSpot, as our CRM. Where you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence, or notes on our conversations, in HubSpot.

We also use HubSpot to send email campaigns, newsletters, and announcements. We gather statistics on engagement with our messaging using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our communications. For more information, please see HubSpot’s privacy policy. 

Your rights as an individual

You can unsubscribe from HubSpot communications at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails, or by contacting us directly at [email protected] and requesting to be removed from our mailing lists.

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a subject access request). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing.
• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please email us at [email protected].

Lawful basis

We use legitimate interest as the lawful basis for processing the data we collect, so we can communicate effectively and deliver benefits to the independent higher education community.

How long we will retain your data for?

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider:

• the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data
• the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data
• the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

From time to time, we may ask you to update your data.

Links to other websites 

Our website contains links to other websites. This privacy policy only applies to this website, ihe.ac.uk. Links to external websites are not our responsibility. When you visit other websites you should read their own privacy policies.

Changes to our privacy policy 

We keep our privacy policy under regular review and make changes from time to time in line with legislation or industry developments. Any updates will be posted on this web page. We recommend that you check this page occasionally for any changes to our policy.

How to contact us 

Please contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions about our privacy policy or personal data we hold about you.  

If you have a complaint

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Officer (ICO). Visit the ICO website to find out more.

This policy was last updated on 22 June 2023.