The All-Island Better Democracy Network is an initiative to bring together people interested in ways to enable high quality, impactful participation and deliberative democracy on the island of Ireland.

It has been developed to create opportunities for learning, networking and informal connection with others interested in improving democracy.

It is a project of Involve and has been made possible by a grant from St Stephens’ Green Trust. The Network is hosted by Involve, the UK’s leading public participation charity.

Involve is the UK’s leading public participation charity, on a mission to put people at the heart of decision-making.

Our legal name is The Involve Foundation and we are a registered charity and company limited by guarantee in the UK. Our charity and company numbers are in the banner at the bottom of this page.

Visit our About Involve page to find out more.

Involve is committed to looking after your personal data. We will:

• Comply with our legal obligations on data protection,
  
• Carefully look after any personal data that we hold or use, and
  
• Be open and transparent about how we do this.
  

cookies

Like most websites, Involve uses cookies to collect information. Cookies are small data files which are placed on your computer or other devices (such as smartphones or tablets) as you browse this website. They are used to ‘remember’ when your computer or device accesses our website. Cookies are essential for the effective operation of our website and are used by services we make use of to provide a better experience to you when using our site.

The services that we use that place their own cookies on our site are provided by:

• Google LLC - The cookies that are in place from Google are used for the analytics data and the anti-spam measures we have in place on our contact and newsletter subscription forms.
  

google analytics

Like most websites, this site uses Google Analytics (GA) to track user interaction. We use this data to determine the number of people using our site, to better understand how they find and use our web pages and to see their journey through the website.

Although GA records data such as your geographical location, device, internet browser and operating system, none of this information personally identifies you to us. We send a partial record of your IP address to GA with the last few characters or “octet” removed, this reduces the ability for anyone to use this to identify an individual.

GA makes use of cookies, details of which can be found on Google’s developer guides.

Disabling cookies on your internet browser will stop GA from tracking any part of your visit to pages within this website.

donors

We keep very limited information about our individual donors (enough to enable us to thank them and to comply with money laundering obligations). We currently use Charities Aid Foundation to process donations.

newsletter

As part of the registration process for our regular Involve e-newsletter, we only collect your name and email address. We use Mailchimp to send out the newsletter, and your details will be held on Mailchimp’s servers in the USA. Our agreement with Mailchimp is based on one of the approved means of protecting the data of UK citizens (it uses what are called the Standard Contractual Clauses, and you can see them here). We only send you our newsletter with your consent.

The email address that you submit will not be stored within this website’s own database or in any of our internal computer systems. We don't rent or trade email lists with other organisations and businesses.

We gather statistics around newsletter opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our newsletter.

We also produce a regular newsletter for the Democracy Network, and if you sign up for this you will be given details about how we look after your personal information and about your privacy rights

You can unsubscribe from our newsletters at any time of the day or night by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our newsletters.

members of the public we work with on projects

If we are working with you on a project we will give you full details about how we will use and look after your personal information. We normally do this by giving you a consent form. That form will also clearly set out the lawful basis for processing your data, and it will explain your legal rights.

professional networks and subcontractors

Like many organisations, we keep contact details of people in our professional networks, for example people from organisations that we collaborate with, people we subcontract to, people we meet at conferences, etc. Our professional networks are very important to us, as they enable us to build alliances.

We have decided that we have a legitimate interest in holding this information, and that is the lawful basis we are using to process this data. We store this data either in Notion (which is a US-based company providing database management software), in Dropbox Business, or in Google Workspace. Just as with Mailchimp, our agreements with all of these databases and apps use the Standard Contractual Clauses to protect the data of UK citizens.

You can ask us to delete any data we hold about you by emailing data@involve.org.uk, and we will action this request within 10 days. We also clean up our contacts database at least once a year by deleting out of date contact information or by updating records, for example where people have moved into different roles.

open government network

Involve coordinates the UK’s Open Government Network, and we use the Discourse online forum to support the network. If you are part of this network and sign up to the forum, we will let you know separately what steps we are taking to ensure that your data is properly protected.

job applicants

If you apply for a job at Involve, we look after the information that you send us and we store it securely. For unsuccessful candidates, we delete this information after 6 months, unless you’ve asked us to keep your CV on file.

IWe have a comprehensive data protection policy to ensure that we comply with the UK's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. We’ve undertaken a data audit, so that we know what personal information we hold and process, and we’ve documented our lawful bases for processing personal data. We have also checked that our online systems and databases are GDPR-compliant, and we’ve reviewed the security of our different storage systems. We review these arrangements regularly.

changes to this privacy notice

This privacy policy may change from time to time in line with legislation or industry developments. We will not explicitly inform our clients or website users of these changes. Instead, we recommend that you check this page occasionally for any policy changes.

if you need further information or if you have a complaint

If you have any questions about how we look after people’s personal information, or if you have a complaint about how we are handling your data, please get in touch with us at data@involve.org.uk or call our office on 020 3745 4334. We will try our best to answer your questions or resolve your complaint.

You can also make a complaint to the Information Commissioner, who is the official data protection regulator in the UK. Their contact information can be found on their website at www.ico.org.uk.

Better Democracy is a project of Involve and has been made possible by a grant from St Stephens’ Green Trust.

contact us