Our Privacy Policy

Purpose and Rationale

Wesley Mission Queensland (WMQ) [ABN 28 746 881 862] is a congregation of The Uniting Church in Australia, Queensland Synod. Through our ministry and mission, we interact with many people in many different ways. We recognise the importance of protecting your privacy. This is our privacy policy. In it, we tell you how we collect, hold, and use and disclose your personal information to enable us to further our mission, provide you with services, respond to your request and maintain contact with you.

We are committed to protecting your personal information. We do this by handling your personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act). Please refer to our Credit Reporting Policy for how we use your credit information, and to our Nationally Coordinated Criminal History Checks Privacy Policy for how we deal with information collected for criminal history checks.

Before we collect your personal information, or at the time of collection, we provide you with a statement to tell you of that collection.

Requirements

What is your personal information?

When used in this privacy policy, the term “personal information” has the meaning given to it in the Privacy Act. In general terms, "personal information" is any information that can be used to personally identify you. This may include your name, address, telephone number, email address and profession or occupation. If the information we collect personally identifies you, or you are reasonably identifiable from it, the information will be considered personal information.

What personal information do we collect and hold?

We may collect the following types of personal information:

• Name
• Mailing or street address
• Email address
• Telephone number
• Facsimile number
• Age and/or birth date
• Profession, occupation or job title
• Details of the services that we have provided to you or which you have enquired about, together with any additional information necessary to deliver those services and respond to your enquiries
• Any additional information relating to you that you provide to us directly through our website or indirectly through use of our website or online presence, through our representatives or otherwise
• Information you provide to us through our activities and services, surveys or visits by our representatives from time to time.

We may also collect some information that is not personal information because it does not identify you or anyone else. For example, we may collect anonymous answers to surveys or aggregated information about how users use our website.

We may also collect health information with your consent and where it is reasonably necessary for one or more of our functions or activities.

How do we collect your personal information?

We collect your personal information directly from you unless it is unreasonable or impracticable to do so. When collecting personal information from you, we may collect it in a variety of ways including:

• Through your access and use of our website
• During conversations and via correspondence between you and our representatives
• When you complete an application or purchase order
• When you register for our conferences or events and/or when you participate in WMQ or Church activities
• When you complete our forms for the provision of services, or to volunteer your services and assistance to us
• When you complete a survey or make a donation

We may also collect personal information from third parties including from third party companies such as law enforcement agencies and other government entities and specialist agencies that assist us in achieving our objectives. This collection of information from third parties would occur in circumstances such as during recruitment when conducting a criminal record check or when verifying a Working with Children Check.

Anonymity

We will generally give you the option of not identifying yourself when you contact us or participate in activities or obtain services or assistance from us - unless we are authorised by law not to do so, or it is not practical or possible for us to deal with people who have not identified themselves, or who have used a pseudonym (in such circumstances we will only obtain as much personal information as is necessary to provide you with the service or assistance you require).

What happens if we can’t collect your personal information?

• If you do not provide us with the personal information described above, some or all of the following may happen:
• We may not be able to provide the requested activities or services to you, either to the same standard or at all
• We may not be able to provide you with information about activities and services that you may want
• We may be unable to tailor the content of our websites to your preferences and your experience of our websites may not be as enjoyable or useful
• We may not be able to contact you in relation to the various activities we undertake and services we provide.

For what purposes do we collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information?

We collect personal information about you so that we can perform our activities and functions and to provide the best possible quality of service.

• We collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information so we can:
• Establish and maintain your involvement with WMQ and the Church
• Conduct service processing functions, which may include providing personal information to other parts of the Church, WMQ, contractors, service providers or other third parties
• Provide services to you, send communications requested by you, and monitor your use of any services we offer
• Arrange our various activities, and register you for these
• Answer enquiries and provide information or advice about existing and new services
• Process and respond to any positive or negative feedback from you
• Provide you with access to protected areas of our website
• Update our records and keep your contact details up to date
• Update your personal information held by other parts of the Church, WMQ, contractors or service providers
• Assess the performance of our website and to improve the operation of our website
• Comply with any law, rule, regulation, lawful and binding determination, decision or direction of a regulator, or in co-operation with any governmental authority of any country (or political sub-division of a country).

As well as for:

• Administrative, marketing (including direct marketing), planning, product or service development, quality control and research purposes of WMQ, other parts of the Church, contractors or service providers
• Direct promotion of services and to keep you informed of new developments we believe may be of interest to you. If we contact you in this way without obtaining your prior consent, we will provide you with the opportunity to decline any further promotional communications
• Third parties, where we have retained those third parties to assist us to operate WMQ and provide the services you have requested, such as religious education instructors, catering and event coordinators, promotions companies, transport providers, health care providers, website hosts and IT consultants, and our professional advisers such as consultants, lawyers and accountants. In some circumstances we may need to disclose sensitive information about you to third parties as part of the services you have requested
• Different parts of the Church to enable the development and promotion of other activities and services and to improve our general ability to assist Church attendees and the wider community;

Your personal information will not be shared, sold, rented or disclosed other than as described in this Privacy Policy.

To whom may we disclose your information?

We may disclose your personal information to:

• Our employees, other parts of WMQ or the Church, contractors or service providers for the purposes of operation of our website or our operations, fulfilling requests by you, and to otherwise provide services to you including, without limitation, web hosting providers, IT systems administrators, mailing houses, couriers, payment processors, data entry service providers, electronic network administrators, debt collectors, and professional advisors such as accountants, solicitors, business advisors and consultants
• Suppliers and other third parties with whom we have commercial relationships, for operations, marketing, and related purposes
• Any organisation for any authorised purpose with your express consent
• Theological students studying the Church or Christian studies.

We may combine or share any information that we collect from you with information collected by any other parts of the Church (within Australia).

Direct marketing materials

We may send you direct marketing communications and information about our activities and services that we consider may be of interest to you. These communications may be sent in various forms, including mail, SMS, fax and email, in accordance with applicable marketing laws, such as the Spam Act 2003 (Cth). If you indicate a preference for a method of communication, we will endeavour to use that method whenever practical to do so. In addition, at any time you may opt-out of receiving marketing communications from us by contacting us (see the details below) or by using unsubscribe functions provided in the marketing communications and we will then endeavour to make sure that we remove your name from our mailing list.

We do not provide your personal information to other organisations for the purposes of direct marketing.

Use of Commonwealth Government identifiers

We will not use Commonwealth government identifiers, such as Medicare numbers, as its own identifier of individuals. We will only use or disclose such identifiers in the circumstances allowed by the Privacy Act.

Links

Our website may contain links to other websites operated by third parties. We make no representations or warranties in relation to the privacy practices of any third party website and we are not responsible for the privacy policies or the content of any third party website. Third party websites are responsible for informing you about their own privacy practices.

Cookies and IP addresses

In some cases we may also collect your personal information through the use of cookies. When you access our website, we may send a ‘cookie’ (which is a small summary text file containing a unique ID number) to your computer.

This enables us or our third party host or service provider to recognise your computer and greet you each time without bothering you with a request to register. It may also enable us to keep track of products, services or information that you view so that, if you consent, we can send you news about those products, services or information. We may also use cookies to measure traffic patterns, to determine which areas of our website or social media platforms have been visited and to measure transaction patterns in aggregate. We use this to research our users' habits so that we can improve our products, services and information. If you do not wish to receive cookies, you can set your browser so that your computer does not accept them.

We may gather your IP addresses (that is, the electronic addresses of computers connected to the internet) to analyse trends, administer the website, track users movement, and gather broad demographic information. This information does not identify you personally.

In some cases we may use Google Analytics to measure traffic patterns to determine which areas of our website have been visited and to measure transactions patterns in the aggregate. We use this to research our user’s habits so that we can improve our online presence, information and services. Our cookies do not collect personal information. If you do not wish to receive cookies, you can set your browser so that your computer does not accept them. Our use of Google Analytics will not involve the collection of personal information.

Social media platforms

You may wish to participate in the various blogs, forums, wikis and other social media platforms hosted by us. One of the aims of these social media platforms is to facilitate and allow you to share content. However, we cannot be held responsible if you share personal information on these platforms that is subsequently used, misused or otherwise appropriated by another user.

Disclosure of personal information to overseas recipients

We may use data hosting facilities and third party service providers to assist us with our functions and activities. As a result, your personal information may be transferred to, stored at, processed or backed up at a location outside Australia. These destinations outside Australia include, but are not limited to, New Zealand, United States of America, Singapore, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, India, Korea, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, Canada, Brazil and the United Kingdom. By continuing to deal with us, you consent to your personal information being disclosed to a destination outside Australia for this purpose and acknowledge that Australian Privacy Principle 8.1 will not apply to such disclosures of your personal information.

Security

We take reasonable steps to make sure your personal information is protected from misuse and loss from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. We may hold your information in either electronic or hard copy form.

As our website and social media platforms are linked to the internet, and the internet is inherently insecure, we cannot provide any assurance regarding the security of transmission of information you communicate to us online. We also cannot guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted over the internet. Accordingly, any personal information or other information which you transmit to us online is transmitted at your own risk.

Our Information Security Policy gives details on how we protect information we hold.

How you can access your personal information and update it

You may request access to any personal information we hold about you at any time by contacting us. If we hold information that you have the right to access, we will try to provide you with suitable means of accessing it. We may charge you a fee to cover our administrative and other reasonable costs in providing the information to you. We will not charge you for making the request and will not charge you for making any corrections to your personal information.

There may be situations where we cannot grant you access to the personal information we hold. For example, we may need to refuse you access if granting access would interfere with the privacy of others, would result in a breach of confidentiality, is contrary to natural justice, or is prohibited by law. If we cannot grant you access for any of these reasons, we will tell you.

If you believe that personal information we hold about you is incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate, then you may ask us to change it. We will decide if the information needs to be changed. If we do not agree there are grounds for changing the information, then we will add a note to the relevant information stating that you disagree with it.