You may, by now, have heard of the new regulations regarding the gathering, processing, and storage of personal data issued by the EU known as GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation. This comes into effect on the 25 May 2018 and, if you have not done so already, you can read more about the regulations here. 

Organisations have known about these changes since April 2016 and the staff and Board of Trustees at the EES have been working since then to ensure that our handling of your data is compliant with the law that will be enforced from 25 May 2018. In June last year we asked you to confirm whether you were happy to receive communications from us via email - thank you to those that responded by returning the slips. We must acquire your consent to contact you by email directly due to separate Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). Over the last year we have updated our entire CRM system to incorporate the new GDPR by recording whether you would like to hear from us by email, phone, post, or SMS and the date at which you supplied that consent.

Many of you will already have renewed using the new website and you may have noticed that there were a number of communication preferences for you to check in order to opt-in. Do not worry, this does not affect your membership materials being sent to you which will continue to be mailed as normal for as long as your membership is active. Clause 10.3 of the Articles of Association clearly states that membership is considered active up to 6 months after it has lapsed (from 1 April). We may therefore contact you within that period in order to send reminders and an invitation to the Annual General Meeting. Therefore, our communications with lapsed members will cease on 1 October each year, after which those memberships will be considered as terminated and we will only communicate with you if you have provided consent to do so.

The EES will not share your data with any third parties other than those listed in our Privacy Policy which is available to read on the website here. These partners enable us to continue producing and mailing our annual publications or providing access to the JEA-online. The Privacy Policy was updated in October 2017 in compliance with the new regulations and you should familiarise yourself with the content of it (as well as the usual Articles of Association and Memorandum of Association).

If you no longer wish to receive communications from the Society at all (including your membership materials) then please inform us immediately. If you are happy to continue receiving them then there is no need to do anything. Should you renew, donate, or book events tickets using the website then you will be asked to update your communication preferences and your latest selection will inform how any further materials are delivered to you – so please keep them up to date.

Thank you, as always, for your support and your patience while we have embedded these regulations.