Who we are

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (‘CIPR’) advances professionalism in public relations by making its members accountable to their employers and the public through a code of conduct and searchable public register, setting standards through training, qualifications, awards and the production of best practice and skills guidance, facilitating Continuing Professional Development (CPD), and awarding Chartered Public Relations Practitioner status (Chart.PR).

Overview

By sharing your Personal Data with us, you can access information that will support you and your career development as a public relations practitioner.

This Privacy Policy describes the ways in which your Personal Data is collected and used by the CIPR (the data controller).

It is your responsibility to review and understand this Privacy Policy prior to providing your Personal Data to us. You also should review our Terms and Conditions. If you do not accept and agree to the Privacy Policy and/or Terms and Conditions, please do not provide your Personal Data to us, access our websites, or choose our products and services.

Our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions will change from time to time. Modified policies will be posted on our websites. Each time they change, the version number displayed at the top of the page will also change. When you access or use our websites, CIPR Connect App or otherwise engage with us, you accept and agree to the most current Privacy Policy and set of Terms and Conditions. It is your responsibility to be aware of any such changes.

Our websites contain links to other websites which are managed by third parties (including their use of cookies). As a user of links, it is your responsibility to understand those third parties’ privacy policies. Once you leave our websites using links, we have no control over information that is submitted to or collected by any third parties and are not responsible for other websites.

Collection of personal data

In order to provide our products, services, CIPR Connect App and websites and for the other purposes set out in the ‘Use of Information’ section below, we collect and process Personal Data from our members, customers, potential customers and users of CIPR managed websites. We may collect information from you such as, but not limited to, your name, email address, mailing address, phone numbers, date of birth, gender, payment information, education history, employment information, information related to your professional qualifications, designations and memberships and information about your use of our and third-party websites, products and services ("Personal Data"). You are not required to provide us with all of the Personal Data listed above, but if you do not do so, we may not be able to effectively provide you with our products, services and information. In certain circumstances, you will need to provide us with specific categories of Personal Data (including name, email address and payment information) in order to enter into a contract with us and for us to perform that contract.

Why we collect and how we use your personal data

We may use your Personal Data in, but not limited to, the following ways:

  • To discharge our role as a regulator of professional conduct, as stipulated in the CIPR’s Royal Charter, in the management of complaints made under our Code of Conduct.
  • To publish a publicly accessible list of CIPR members.
  • To provide our products and services to you, including membership, and to manage those products and services as you use them. For example, we will send you reminders if the product has an expiry, or information about any developments.
  • To process payments from you (including, but not limited to, membership subscription, payments for any products or services and other fees such as Chartered PR Practitioner assessment fees).
  • To process payments to you (including, but not limited to, refunds or the reimbursement of expenses).
  • To provide access to member-only benefits (including, but not limited to, Influence magazine, CIPR Connect App) and restricted parts of our websites.
  • To determine eligibility for membership, volunteer and other opportunities (including but not limited to assessment for Chartered PR Practitioner).
  • To enhance and improve our products and services and to request your participation in surveys, focus groups, or other initiatives which help us to gather information used to develop and enhance our products and services, and research into the profession more generally (such as our State of the Profession survey).
  • Internal purposes, such as website and system administration or internal audits and reviews.
  • To communicate with you regarding your membership and products/services that may be of interest to you.
  • To respond to your requests and enquiries.
  • To serve relevant advertisements to you when you visit our sites or other third-party sites (including social media platforms).
  • To manage and enhance your participation in the CIPR’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) scheme.
  • To comply with applicable law(s) (for example, to comply with a search warrant or court order) or to carry out professional ethics/conduct investigations.
  • From time to time we may provide statistics about the usage levels of our websites and other related information to reputable third parties, but these statistics will not include information which will allow you to be identified.
  • We may use the information you provide to us and which we obtain from other sources to better understand your interests so we can try to predict what other products, services and information you might be most interested in. This practice is called “profiling”, which we do in order to better enable us to tailor our interactions with you to make them more relevant and interesting.

    We process your Personal Data for the above purposes on the following legal bases:

  • When it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation.
  • Where such processing is necessary to carry out our contract with you or in order to enter into a contract with you.
  • Our legitimate interests, in which it would be reasonable for you to expect us to process your Personal Data for the purposes of providing and enhancing the provision of our products, services and information. Included in this is the sharing of your Personal Data with CIPR Volunteers, acting on our behalf, who use it to support the activity of the CIPR groups or committees in which they operate. Their access to your data is subject to strict control and limited in most cases to single use.
  • The consent of the data subject.

We will retain your information for as long as you have a contract with us, and for as long as it is necessary thereafter to meet other obligations (for example, in our role as a regulator of professional conduct, to maintain a financial record or to maintain a list of holders of CIPR qualifications). This period of retention is subject to our review and alteration.

How we use your data across the CIPR business

To find out more about how we use your data in the various areas of our business, please refer to the departmental Privacy Notices available on the links below:

Awarding Body
Events and Awards
Membership
Training

Your Communication Preferences

We strive to provide you with relevant and useful information related to our products and services and industry news. You can update your communication preferences at any time by visiting MyCIPR or if you are not a CIPR member, by emailing [email protected]. Any promotional emails that we send will include a link at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe.

Sharing your Personal Data with third parties

We do not sell data to third parties. However, names and organisations of event delegates, but not their contact details, are shared with event sponsors.

We may disclose your Personal Data to third parties from time to time under the following circumstances:

  • You request or authorise the disclosure of your Personal Data to a third party.

  • Your Personal Data is disclosed as permitted by applicable law and/or in order to comply with, for example, a court order.

  • Your Personal Data is provided to our agents, vendors or service providers who perform functions on our behalf. We require that our third-party service providers only use your Personal Data as necessary to provide the requested services to us and each service provider is subject to a set of terms consistent with this Privacy Policy.

Below is a list of the general categories of third parties. More information on the third parties with whom we may share your Personal Data is included in the privacy notice at the point where we ask for your details. It is likely that the identity and categories of such third parties will change and the privacy notices will be updated. It is your responsibility to review and understand the privacy notice prior to providing your Personal Data to us.

  • Hosting providers and website/App developers
  • Providers of communication enabling software
  • Database software providers
  • Teaching and assessment centres, assessors and examiners
  • CIPR Trainers
  • Statutory authorities, including HMRC
  • Payment services providers and the CIPR’s Banking facilities
  • Event management software
  • Awards management software
  • Printers
  • Legal Counsel
  • Loyalty scheme providers
  • Election service providers
  • Event, training and assessment venues
  • Mailing houses and call centres
  • Publishers
  • Researchers and research companies working on our behalf
  • Payroll services and providers of employee benefits

 

Cookie Use

We may obtain information about your interactions with CIPR owned websites and general internet usage by using a “cookie” file.

A cookie is an element of data that a website can send to your browser, which may then be stored on your hard drive. You can choose to not receive a cookie file by enabling your web browser to refuse cookies or to prompt you before you accept a cookie. All major browsers allow you to block or delete cookies from your system. To learn more about your ability to manage your preferences related to cookies, please consult the privacy features within your browser.

We use a range of cookies – some cookies are necessary for our websites to work properly, others enhance the functionality of our websites by storing your preferences (such as your preferred language or the region that you are in). Cookies also allow us to count page visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our sites. They help us to understand which pages are visited most frequently and how visitors interact with our sites.

Third-Party cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners, such as Google or Adobe. They may be used by these companies to enable them to build a profile of your interests and show relevant advertisements on other sites. These cookies are based on identifying your browser and internet device.

If you opt in to use the “Remember me” feature on our websites, we will place a persistent cookie on your hard drive and you will not be required to log in for every session. By disabling cookies on your machine or clearing your browsing history you may deactivate the persistent cookie.

In general, if you opt out of using cookies, it will affect your use of the CIPR’s websites.

Transfer of Personal Data internationally

By providing us with your Personal Data, you acknowledge and agree that we may from time to time transfer any of your Personal Data to any of the third parties with whom we work to deliver our contract to you or to the offices of any of our agents or appointed representatives located around the world.

More information on the third parties with whom we may share your Personal Data is included in the privacy notice at the point where we ask for your details. It is likely that the identity and categories of such third parties will change and the privacy notices will be updated. It is your responsibility to review and understand the privacy notice prior to providing your Personal Data to us.

We require that our third-party service providers only use your Personal Data as necessary to provide the requested services to us and each service provider is subject to a set of terms consistent with this Privacy Policy.

Security and Other

We use reasonable measures to strive to safeguard and secure the Personal Data shared with us. However, we do not accept responsibility for the security of any devices you may use to share it with us. Our security practices, processes or technology do not guarantee absolute security of your information and you should take all normal personal precautions such as, but not limited to, not sharing passwords, closing browsers, and not using public networks (e.g., internet cafes, etc.).

Any transmission of personal information to us is at your own risk.

Parents and Children

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. Parents have the right to terminate the registration of a child under the age of 13 by contacting us using the information listed at the bottom of this policy.

Subject Access/User Rights

As a data subject, you have the following rights:

  • The right to be informed about how we use your Personal Data.

  • The right of access to your Personal Data and the right to have your data corrected or erased (which must be balanced with other rights and obligations).

  • The right to restrict processing of your Personal Data. 

  • The right to not be subject to any decision based solely on automated processing of your Personal Data.

    You also have the right to lodge a complaint about the processing of your Personal Data carried out under this Privacy Policy, with the ICO or relevant other supervisory authority.

 

 

Surveys

If you are subscribed to receive CIPR emails, we will contact you from time to time to take part in membership and other surveys.

CIPR surveys are completed anonymously with cookies disabled.

 

When we run prize draw incentives for our surveys, the prize draw entry form is hosted separately to the survey itself. This enables us to capture and store your prize draw entry data separately from your survey responses.

The data captured for the prize draw will only be used for that purpose and will be discarded following the draw. 

When using Survey Monkey for our surveys, an integration with our email platform enables us to identify your response status. This does not affect the anonymity of your responses as we cannot associate your survey responses with your membership record or any personal data held about you.

 

Contact us

If you need to get in touch with us about this Privacy Policy or your Personal Data that we process, please contact:
For CIPR membership: [email protected]
For CIPR training: [email protected]
For CIPR events and awards: [email protected]
For the CIPR qualifications and awarding body: [email protected]
For CIPR personnel and recruitment: [email protected]
For other queries please contact Alastair McCapra, CIPR Chief Executive ([email protected]).