Liverpool Philharmonic Privacy Statement
At Liverpool Philharmonic, we take your privacy and security seriously and are committed to treating your personal information with respect.
This statement outlines how we collect, store, manage, process and protect your personal information.
We will use your information in accordance with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), together with the new The Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018), and any replacement laws. If you want to contact us, or have any questions about this statement, please email data@liverpoolphil.com.
You can manage your preferences at any time, by logging into your account or by contacting Box Office on 0151 709 3789.
Expand any of the following sections for more detail
Who We Are
Liverpool Philharmonic is one of the UK’s premier music organisations and a registered charity. Our principal funders are Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council. We generate more than two thirds of our income through other sources, including box office sales, orchestral engagements, broadcasts and recordings, hires of our venues and associated secondary spend (on services such as bars and programmes), commercial partnerships, trusts and foundations, sponsorship and individual donations.
We are the UK’s oldest continuing professional symphony orchestra, the award-winning Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1840, and run an extensive learning programme that is a national leader in its field. We present over 400 events each year at our home, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, our Music Room – our specialist space for more intimate performances - and other city venues including St. George’s Hall Concert Room and the Tung Auditorium. Our wide-ranging programme includes classical, rock, pop, folk and roots music, comedy, films and spoken word events.
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society is a charity registered in England (registered charity number 230538), a company limited by guarantee (registered in England number 88235).
Patron His Majesty the King
President The Rt Hon the Earl of Derby DL
How We Collect Your Personal Information
You give us your information when you:
- Book tickets
- Participate in one of our learning programmes
- Request to join our mailing list
- Update your contact preferences on our website
- Join one of our membership schemes (including Priority Booking/Premium Priority Booking)
- Make a donation
- Apply for a job
- Communicate with us – either directly with members of the team, through our customer service channels or direct messages on social media platforms
- Participate in a customer survey, feedback or other consultative process
- Join our Access Scheme
- Apply to join one of our ensembles, such as Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Company
We will always make it clear what data we are collecting from you during these transactions.
Other ways we may collect information include:
- Images and recordings in photography/video at events, which may be held in our archives and/or posted on our website and social media.
- Information available publicly – this may include information found in places such as Companies House, websites or information in published articles/newspapers.
- We may track our communications to you to see whether you receive and/or opened them, to ensure we are sending you the most relevant information.
- We may respond to comments or messages you send to us on social media platforms, or use advertising to provide you with promotions tailored to your interests.
- If your data is provided to us by another source (eg recommendation from a friend, or from a school participating in one of our learning programmes), or collected from a publicly accessible source (eg a website), we will always tell you where we obtained the information from.
- All areas of Liverpool Philharmonic Hall are monitored by CCTV camera surveillance for security and safety of staff and visitors. Images are stored securely and available only to authorised members of staff and the Police if required for investigation of crime, in line with our CCTV policy.
- Cookies – these are small files that are automatically placed onto your device by some websites to help analyse web traffic and to allow web operators to tailor your experience by gathering information on your activity and preferences. Our ticketing system Spektrix uses four cookies that are essential to making our website function properly. These four cookies track your booking process, allow you to log in properly as a customer, set test cookies for blocked Third Party Cookies before you start the booking process, keep track of your basket and improve your experience (e.g. programming the ‘recently visited’ and ‘recommended’ boxes at the bottom of our home page based on what events you are browsing through). You can change the options on your device or browser to stop accepting these cookies - however this may mean you are not able to use all functionality of our site.
The Liverpool Philharmonic website also uses the following non-essential cookies:
- Google analytics cookies to compile aggregated, anonymous statistics about how visitors use our website and which pages they visit. You can go to http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html to find out more about Google Analytics cookies and how to opt-out of them.
Third-party cookies may be set through our website by other companies. Data may be collected by these companies that enable them to serve up adverts on other sites that are relevant to your interests. In use on the Liverpool Philharmonic website are:
- Google Ads Remarketing, which allows us to tailor our marketing to better suit your needs and only display ads that are relevant to you. If you do not wish to participate in our Google Ads Remarketing, you can opt out here https://adssettings.google.com/. We may also use other Google Analytics Advertising Features to create remarketing audiences to share with Google Ads, including: Google Display Network Impression Reporting, Google Analytics Demographics, and Interest Reporting. These features use data collected by Google Analytics through cookies and anonymous identifiers. They help us target and measure our online advertising. If you wish to opt out of this, you can do so by installing Google Analytics’ opt-outs tool for your internet browser.
- Conversion Tracking Pixel service by Facebook, which allows us to follow the actions of users after they are redirected to the Liverpool Philharmonic website from a Facebook advertisement - this collected data remains anonymous to us. The Facebook Conversion Tracking does allow Facebook and its partners to show you advertisements on and outside Facebook. In addition, a cookie will be saved onto your computer for these purposes. To revoke your permission - https://www.facebook.com/ads/website_custom_audiences/
- YouTube cookies. If we host a video on YouTube.com and embed that on our site, when you click play YouTube drops a cookie on your machine so it knows you have watched it. These cookies are held for 30 days. As these cookies are set by YouTube, we have no direct control over their usage. For further information from YouTube please read YouTube’s privacy policy.
- Cookies used by Vimeo. This cookie compiles aggregated, anonymous statistics on how many people have watched the videos on our site which are hosted on vimeo.com
You can accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser and by contacting the third-party cookie owner individually. You can also remove any cookies already stored on your computer. Find out more about cookies on https://www.allaboutcookies.org and https://www.networkadvertising.org/understanding-online-advertising/what-are-my-options. Please note that we are not responsible for information available on these websites.
Types of Personal Information We Collect
Most of the information is collected directly from you, and may include information you give us, such as, when you book a ticket:
- Name
- Telephone
- Postal address
- Payment card info (encrypted)
- Transaction / booking history
- Donations made to Liverpool Philharmonic and Gift Aid status
- Records of previous communications you have had with Liverpool Philharmonic
Other information we have access to may include:
- Image and likeness - photos, videos and recordings from events and concerts
- Other personal information you provide to us (eg when you apply for a job, share your story, correspond with our customer service team, share your relationship with the organisation or give background information to your donation)
If you are a participant in one of our Learning projects or ensembles, we may collect additional data including:
- Emergency contact details
- Medical information
- Access support needs
- School attended
- Dietary requirements
- Gender
- Date of Birth
- Ethnicity
Sensitive personal information
Data Protection law recognises that certain categories of personal information are more sensitive. On occasion, we may collect sensitive classes of information but these will only be collected with your explicit consent and when we have a clear reason for doing so.
We have a free Access Scheme and by storing your booking details as part of this scheme, we are able to offer consistency and support for your attendance here.
We may use sensitive data to monitor and better understand our audiences. Where this is the case, any data will be anonymised before processing.
How We Manage and Protect Your Data
Personal data is held and processed on Liverpool Philharmonic systems, or systems managed on our behalf. Access to personal information is strictly controlled and accessible only to people who require this to complete their job.
We only collect the data that is required to deliver the service requested and some additional information that we use to carry out legitimate business interests. Our computer network is protected and our systems regularly reviewed to ensure security processes are in place, including restricted access folders and password protection.
Where another company is processing data on our behalf, they will have entered into an agreement with us to ensure they comply with our data security policy and the legislation set out in GDPR.
When you book a ticket to an event or make a donation, your data is stored on our central CRM system. Where possible, this is held within a single record for each customer.
Legal Basis
There are three legal bases under which we may process your data:
Contract purposes
When you book or purchase you are entering into a contract with us. In order to fulfil this contract we need to process and store your data. For example we may need to contact you by email or telephone in the case of the cancellation of a concert or event, in the case of problems with your payment, or to deliver benefits associated with your payment or membership. When you donate we would like to be able to thank you and may need to contact you with regard to acknowledging your gift.
Legitimate business interests
In certain situations we collect and process your personal information for purposes that are in our legitimate organisational interests. However we only do this if there is no overriding prejudice to you by using your personal information in this way. See below some of the situations in which we would use this basis; they include marketing communications, analysing our audience base and improving our processes.
With your explicit consent
For any situation where the two bases above are not appropriate, we will instead ask for your explicit consent before using your personal information in that specific situation. For example, we would never share your data with another organisation to contact you, unless you had given us explicit consent to do so.
How We Use Your Data
We aim to be as clear as possible when we collect your data and only use it in ways you might reasonably expect.
We may process it because it is necessary for the performance of a contract, for example to manage ticket purchases, administration and fulfilment of membership schemes, when you sign up for an event, or give a donation.
We may process it because it is within our legitimate interests to do so, for example:
- To enable us to tailor our communications to provide you with the most relevant information by post or by email. In the case of postal mailings, you may object to receiving these at any time by updating your contact preferences in your account or by calling the box office on 0151 709 3789. In the case of email, we will provide you with an option to unsubscribe in every email that we send you. You can also update your preferences at any time by logging into your account or calling the box office.
- To enable us to present you with personalised adverts from us on social media, that have been tailored to your interests. Depending on your settings on social media and messaging services (such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), and their privacy policies, you might give third parties (including Liverpool Philharmonic) permission to access information from those accounts and services in order to provide you with the most relevant information and to maximise the effectiveness of our communications.
- To enhance your experience at an event
- To analyse our audience base and improve our processes
- To invite you to take part in research, surveys, focus groups etc to understand your opinions about our activities and improve our service
- To understand your reasons for supporting us with a donation
- To enable us to meet your support needs
- To meet our statutory responsibilities and best practice around safeguarding etc
We may also process your personal data (including sensitive personal data) where:
- it is necessary for medical purposes (for example, in a medical emergency)
- it is necessary to protect your or another person’s vital interests (for example, if it is necessary to process a parent's data to protect the vital interests of a child)
- we have your consent to do so (for example to monitor the diversity of visitors to Liverpool Philharmonic Hall). We will also ask for your consent to provide you with information about products and services and fundraising activities which may be of interest to you (apart from where it is appropriate for us to rely on our legitimate interests to do so).
We also use images and video from Liverpool Philharmonic events for promotional activities. We will seek consent for prominent or impactful use (or for any images of children). Group shots, background inclusion or internal use may be processed on a legitimate interest basis where it would not be necessary, appropriate or practicable to obtain your specific consent.
Retention of your information
We may retain your information for a period of up to seven years after your association with us has come to an end.
Some information may be retained beyond this time for historical, statistical or research purposes.
Third Parties
We value and protect all the information you supply to us, and we do not sell, rent or trade personal information to third parties for any purpose.
We may need to disclose your details to third parties in the following circumstances:
- If we are running an event in partnership with another organisation – we will only share this information with your explicit consent, and they will be named at the point of consent
- In order to comply with any legal obligations, eg the police, regulatory bodies and crime protection agencies
- To our legal advisors
- For the purposes of regulatory or inspection compliance, for example to the Charity Commission
- To funding bodies, particularly Arts Council England, who may use anonymised personal information to analyse our audience and understand the impact of the public investment made in Liverpool Philharmonic
- Data processing services acting in an accordance with our instructions, and subject to confidentiality obligations
- Service providers acting on our behalf, eg processing card payments, mailing houses, website hosting, email delivery services – these providers will have confirmed our confidentiality agreements and be working in compliance with GDPR
- In the event of a safeguarding disclosure or concern
- To enable us to meet the support needs of programme participants
Any suppliers outside of the EEA will be required to agree to the privacy policies as outlined within GDPR.
You Manage Your Data
We make it easy for you to tell us how you want to hear from us – you can log in to your account on our website, or you can tell our Box Office over the phone (0151 709 3789) or in person.
We will give you the option to opt out of our marketing communications at any time – every email sent will tell you how to do this.
If you have opted out of marketing communications, we may still contact you, but this will only be with information specific to your booking – e.g. pre and post-concert information, notification of any changes, or with an invitation to take one of our post-event surveys to help us improve our services, or as required as a condition of our funding.
Your Rights
If you no longer want us to use or process your data, you can opt out using the unsubscribe link in any of our emails, by updating your preferences at any time by logging into your account on liverpoolphil.com, or by contacting a member of our Box Office team on 0151 709 3789.
You also have the following rights:
- You have the right to be forgotten – we will remove all the personal information we hold on you
- You have the right to have the information we hold on you corrected – please let us know if you have any concerns or queries around the accuracy of the data we hold
- You have the right to request copies of any of your data currently held by Liverpool Philharmonic
If you would like to make a request regarding any of the above, please email data@liverpoolphil.com
If you are unhappy with our response, you are also entitled to make a complaint to the Information Commissioners' Office.
Further information and updates to this statement
Last updated: 26 May 2022
Updates may be necessary from time to time to reflect changes in legislation and/or our business operations. These changes will be updated on this page, and occasionally we may inform you directly of any major changes.
You may also find these websites helpful:
Information Commissioners Office (ICO)
Fundraising Regulator