Policy & Privacy
The British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) is, like any charity, affected by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that came into force on 25 May 2018, governing the way we keep personal information.
This notice explains what information we hold about you, why we hold it, how we hold it, and how you can ask us to delete any information that relates to you if you so wish.
What information we hold about you
This includes all the information you have provided to us. You may have supplied this when you became a member of BIPS, donated to BIPS, applied for a grant from us, subscribed to our mailing list, registered to attend one of our events, gave a lecture/spoke at an event, or applied to work here, including as a trustee.
For members, grant applicants and speakers, this typically includes (where provided) your name, address, email address, affiliation to any higher educational institution, telephone number and any honours or academic title you may have. We also hold data relating to how you paid for your membership, including the date and method of payment so that we can ascertain whether your membership is current. For mailing list subscribers or event attendees (who are not also members) we typically hold less information, such as just name and email address. For trustees and job applicants we may hold more specific data, such as date of birth or details of your professional employment.
Why we hold this information about you
This information is important to us as it enables BIPS to process your membership or donation and provide you with member services, or to contact you and send you news of our activities (such as alerting you to an upcoming grant round deadline, an event or lecture and telling you how you can register to attend). We may also from time to time contact you regarding donating to BIPS.
We generally contact you by email, but may also contact you by post (for example to send you our Annual Report or notice of the AGM). We hope you will want to stay in touch but if you would prefer not to be contacted, or only to be contacted in a particular way or for a particular purpose, you can ask the Executive Officer to update your preferences or remove your contact data from our database by emailing: bips@britac.ac.uk. You can also unsubscribe yourself from our mailing list by using the unsubscribe option at the bottom of any mailing list email from us.
Unless you have opted not to do so, BIPS members receive a copy of our journal IRAN when it is published (currently twice a year). In order to send the journal to you we share your name and address information with third party publishers/distributers. In time we will also share some additional data (such as email address) to allow you to access IRAN online. This data is shared for the sole purpose of sending you/providing you with access to IRAN. No financial data or sensitive data (such as date of birth) is shared with third parties.
How we hold your information
We hold your information safely on an electronic database. This database is only accessed by BIPS staff, principally the Executive Officer, and only for BIPS-related work purposes. It is not shared informally. If you would like to see copies of any information we hold about you, please write to the Executive Officer at bips@britac.ac.uk and it will be supplied within the legal timeframe. You can also write to the data protection officer, the Honorary Secretary, Dr Narguess Farzard, if you are unhappy about the way we hold or manage your personal data. BIPS is voluntarily registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, the regulator which exists to protect people’s information rights.