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Data Protection – what you need to know  

Whether you sell tickets or not, it is likely that you gather and hold information about your audiences and participants, board members and employees – but how well do you know your responsibilities and obligations?

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ran a surgery session at our Future of CRM and Ticketing event that helped attendees understand their legal commitments. There are 8 data protection principles that can be used to guide any data protection questions or queries, and these are mainly common sense!

  1. Personal information must be fairly and lawfully processed
  2. Personal information must be processed for limited purposes
  3. Personal information must be adequate, relevant and not excessive
  4. Personal information must be accurate and up to date
  5. Personal information must not be kept for longer than is necessary
  6. Personal information must be processed in line with the data subjects’ rights
  7. Personal information must be secure
  8. Personal information must not be transferred to other countries without adequate protection

The ICO session was designed to be very flexible and respond to current issues that surgery participants raised as real-life examples.  This included best practice around customer databases; analysing audience data for research purposes; sharing information with other organisations; and improving direct marketing strategies. Some of the questions raised on the day were:

Data protection is an ongoing responsibility that arts organisations need to keep on top of and the ICO surgery session helped participants to make sure they have the right policies and procedures in place to stay on the right side of the law.

The Future of CRM and Ticketing event was a full day of workshops, top tips and blue sky thinking that will provide big ideas to revolutionise your CRM activity and a range of practical fixes that you can take back to the office. In addition to the ICO’s surgery session on data protection there were sessions from CCR, Circle Interactive, PatronBase, Spektrix and Tessitura.

Main image credit: Computer security by Chris Amelung (CC.20)