Mersea Island Festival
Camp 1 Sun 17 Aug - Fri 22 Aug 2025
Camp 2 Fri 22 Aug - Mon 25 Aug 2025
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Privacy Policy

Mersea Island Festival Trust Privacy Notice

This policy sets out how the Mersea Island Festival Trust will process the personal data you share with the charity. Personal data is information that can be used to help identify an individual, such as name, address, phone number or email address. We take your personal data seriously and aim to be clear when we collect your data and not do anything with it you wouldn’t reasonably expect.

Who are ‘we’?
In this policy, whenever you see the words ‘We’, ‘Us’ or ‘Our’, it refers to the Mersea Island Festival Trust, a registered charity number 1097455.

Your acceptance of this policy, and our right to change it.
By using our websites, social media pages, or providing your information you consent to our collection and use of the information you provide in the way(s) set out in this policy. If you do not agree to this policy please do not use our sites, social media pages or services.

We will amend this Privacy Policy when there is a change in legislation relating to the holding of data and/or personal privacy rights. We may also make changes to this policy from time to time. We will post the changes on our website and they will apply from the time we post them. If we make any significant changes in the way we treat your personal information, we will contact you directly. This policy was last changed on 20th June 2018.

Our Policy
This policy applies to our website, our use of emails for marketing purposes, and any other methods we use for collecting information. It covers what we collect and why, what we do with the information, what we won’t do with the information, and what rights you have.

What information does the Mersea Island Festival Trust collect and why?
We will only ever collect the information we need – including data that will be useful to help improve our services.

We collect personal information such as name, postal address, phone number and email address. Where appropriate we will collect date of birth, disability and health-related information and information about dietary requirements. We collect this information in connection with specific activities, such as your purchases of our services and other products; newsletter and brochure requests; feedback; donations and when you attend one of our events.

What do we do with the information?
We will use the information you provide to:

  • To administrate bookings for our events, donations, orders and information requests
  • To provide the appropriate services for our customers
  • To keep a record of your relationship with us
  • To see how we can improve our services
  • To keep you informed of any Trust developments
  • To help with our marketing and fundraising

In line with new Data Protection Regulations, we will only send marketing information to those who we believe have a legitimate interest in the Mersea Island Festival Trust and/or the Mersea Island Festival that it supports. Marketing information from us includes services and goods sold, fundraising appeals and information about our events and any other work we do.

We include information of how you can opt out when we send you marketing or fundraising material. However, if you do not wish to be contacted you can also email us at info@merseafestival.org.uk or call us on 01206 383226.

If you do want to receive this information but haven’t opted in, you can do so by contacting us on the details above.

Sharing your information
We will only share your information if:

  • We are legally required to do so, e.g. by a law enforcement agency legitimately exercising a power or if compelled by an order of the Court.
  • We believe it is necessary to protect or defend our rights, property or the personal safety of our people or guests/visitors to our premises or websites.

Storing your information
We place a great importance on the security of all personally identifiable information associated with our guests, supporters and users. We have security measures in place to attempt to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal data under our control. While we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur while it is under our control, we use our best efforts to try to prevent this.

Unfortunately, the transmission of data across the internet is not completely secure and whilst we do our best to try to protect the security of your information we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur whilst data is being transferred.

We will keep your information only for as long as we need it to provide you with the services or information you have required, to administer your relationship with us, or the preferences of guests and supporters, to comply with the law, or to ensure we do not communicate with people who have asked us not to. When we no longer need information we will always dispose of it securely.

We use a third-party provider MailChimp to deliver some of our information. We use MailChimp software to maintain email contact lists and help gather statistics on opening rates and clicks on links which help us monitor and improve our communications. Individuals can unsubscribe at any time from newsletters by clicking the unsubscribe link on each e-newsletter. You can view MailChimp’s privacy notice here

What we don’t do with your information
We never sell or share your information with other organisations to use for their own purposes.

Your rights
The Data Protection Act gives you certain rights over your data and how we use it. These include:

  • The right in certain circumstances to have inaccurate personal data rectified, blocked, erased or destroyed.
  • The right to prevent your data being used for direct marketing.
  • The right of access to a copy of the information We hold about you (known as a subject access request)

If you wish to exercise any of these rights or have any questions about this privacy policy or how we handle your personal information please contact the Festival Coordinator in writing at Mersea Island Festival Trust c/o Essex Outdoors Mersea, Rewsalls Lane, East Mersea, Colchester, CO5 8SX. We will provide this information within one month from receiving your request. We do not accept these requests by email so that we can ensure that we only provide personal data to the right person.

For more information about your rights under the Data Protection Act go to the website of the Information Commissioner’s Office at www.ico.org.uk

Third party Cookies
Cookies are small text files that are stored by your browser on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store such things as user preferences, allowing them to respond to you as an individual. The website can tailor their operations to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.

We don’t use cookies on our website but we embed photos and video content on our web pages from other websites (e.g. YouTube). When you visit a page with content embedded from another website you may be presented with cookies from that website. We don’t have control over these Third Party Cookies and you should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.

Google Analytics
When someone visits www.merseafestival.org.uk, Google Analytics collects statistical data and details of visitor patterns which tell us which parts of our website visitors use most often. None of this information uses, or requires the use, of personal information and is processed in a way that does not identify individuals. We do not make any attempts to find out the identities of individuals visiting our website.