Privacy Policy

Who we are

The Write By The Sea Festival is held annually in the fishing Village of Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford. We are a not-for-profit group and the Festival is organised and co-ordinated by a voluntary committee in association with the Stella Maris Centre, Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford.

Our commitment to the privacy of your Information

Throughout this document the terms “we”, “us”, “the Festival” or “WBTS”) mean Write By The Sea, Kilmore Quay Literary Festival. We are committed to complying with applicable data protection and privacy law. We understand that your information is important to you and to address any concern that you may have about how we will use your information, we have developed our Write By The Sea Privacy Policy which is effective from 25 May and which we will regularly review and update in line with data protection requirements and business needs.

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. To prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and administrative procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online and in hard copy format.

Who we engage with

To attract and retain a following for the Festival and to ensure its success, we engage with Festival attendees, sponsors, suppliers and service providers, volunteers, presenters, writers and contributors.

The personal information we collect

When you engage with WBTS in any of the above capacities we collect information such as your name, address, telephone number, email address and your workshop preferences and suggestions. We only collect personal information that is necessary to help us to meet the needs of efficiently running our festival and providing you with the services and the information that you have requested.

Where you pay in person or by post for an event, we collect information such as your name, address, telephone number, email address, workshop preferences and cash or cheque payment details.

Our designated ticket service provider for the festival is Eventbrite. If you purchase a ticket for our festival through our designated ticket service provider, you will be asked to provide your personal details and your card payment details. Your card payment details will be processed directly by the ticket service provider and its secure third-party processors to ensure the payments you make are authenticated, submitted and authorised and that you receive your tickets for the events that you have booked. Your card payment details will be secured in line with our ticket provider’s privacy protection and we recommend that you read and understand their privacy policy.

If you pay for tickets online through our designated ticket service provider, while WBTS will have access to your name, email address and order number, we will not have access to your card payment details.

If you pay for a competition entry online through our website, payments are handled by our designated service provider, Stripe. While WBTS will have access to your name, telephone, email address and entry number, we will not have access to your card payment details.

How we collect your personal information

When you interact with Write By The Sea we collect your personal information in a number of ways, such as:

When you buy a WBTS ticket via our designated ticket service provider and create an online account on their website. In this situation WBTS has access to your name email address and order number but not your card payment details which will only be used by the ticket service provider to process your ticket purchase transaction online.
When you contact us by phone, in person, online or by post to make an enquiry, to reserve Festival workshops or to access information.
When you complete a contact form.
When you submit an entry to our writers’ competitions.
When you join our mailing list and agree to receive communications and updates from Write By The Sea, and information about our “Room to Write” facility in the Stella Maris Centre, Kilmore Quay.
When you make a donation or sponsor an event or workshop.
When you submit a suggestion or complaint or when you complete an evaluation form after a workshop and include your contact details.
When you engage with us through our social media channels, including Twitter and Facebook (please note that we only receive the personal information that you share voluntarily with us and that is compatible with your own privacy settings on social media).
When you visit our website, certain non-personal data is available to us through our internet service provider. This non-personal data is collected on a statistical, aggregate, non-individual basis. This information may include the IP address from which you access our website, the type of internet browser used to access our website, the type of operating system used to access our website, the “top-level” domain name used (i.e., .com, .org, etc.), the date and time of your visit to our website and the number of pages you visited on our website

How we use your personal information

We use your information to meet our business needs, to provide you with our services and to fulfil contracts with you. In relation to Festival bookings that you make, we use your information in the following ways:

To fulfil ticket and workshop requests and to ensure payments are received and processed correctly; to provide joining instructions and confirmations; to notify you of any programme changes or cancellations; to issue additional workshop instructions or information and to thank you for your support.
To administer and manage your attendance at the Festival and in your chosen workshops.
To respond to you when you initiate contact with us in person, by email, through our website or social media, or by phone.
To process competition entries that you may submit.
To notify you by email of Festival updates and to provide information about our “Room to Write” facility in the Stella Maris Centre, Kilmore Quay.
To acknowledge a gift or donation that you have made.
To enhance customer service by responding to a suggestion, query or complaint that you have made or Festival or workshop evaluation form that you have completed.
To “like” or share information that you have provided to us through social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
To comply with our legal and financial obligations in relation to record keeping
For general administration and record-keeping purposes.
Please note: in certain venues where we stage events, CCTV may be used on the premises for the security and protection of staff and patrons of those venues.
Official photographs are sometimes taken at WBTS events by the WBTS team or by designated photographers and these photographs may be used by WBTS for publicity purposes. We endeavour to alert participants when such photographs are being taken.

Attracting fund raising and contributions:

From time to time we initiate direct contract with local businesses and agencies who may be interested in supporting the Festival by providing much needed funding or by assisting in the provision of a service at a free or reduced cost in accordance with our legitimate interests. To access the contact details of such businesses and agencies we may use:

Google and other search engines
Public registers of companies
Company websites and newspapers
Social Media platforms including Twitter and Facebook where such information is publicly available

We endeavour to ensure that any such approaches are only made on foot of publicly available contact details and where any such company or agency would, in our view, have a reasonable expectation that their information may be freely read by the public and that a festival such as ours might reasonably contact them for the purposes of seeking funds, donations or sponsorship.

How we share your personal information

WBTS will not sell, rent or trade your personal information to third parties for marketing or research purposes.
We will not share your personal information without your permission unless we are legally obliged/directed to do so, or in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights.
We are committed to giving you control over the personal information you share with us.
When you receive emails from WBTS you will have an option to opt-out or unsubscribe from similar communications in the future. If your contact details change we would be grateful if you would keep us updated. You can contact us directly about amendments to your personal information by emailing us at writebytheseakq@gmail.com

Information Security

To ensure any data you provide to us via our website is securely transferred to us, we use a Secure Socket Layer certificate (SSL) on our website. This verifies our identity to your browser and encrypts any data that you provide us with, for example, via our contact form. SSL is identifiable by the padlock symbol or trust mark in the browser’s URL bar and by the URL itself which will begin https:// (as opposed to http://)

While no digital system or online service is 100% secure, we will endeavour to ensure the information you provide to us is securely held, both online and offline as applicable, and protected against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction and will take reasonable measures to do so.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Although we make every effort to ensure that our links to external websites are accurate, up to date and relevant, Write by the Sea cannot take responsibility for pages maintained by external providers. Write By the Sea takes no responsibility for information contained on external links from this website. Views expressed on external sites are not necessarily those of Write By the Sea itself.

Third Party Services

Our websites, domains and apps may contain third-party plugins to provide certain functionality – backups, analysis, social media feeds etc. Please note that this policy does not apply in those cases and we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such third parties. We do however endeavour to only select third party services that are GDPR compliant.

Retention of Information

Write By The Sea will not collect or retain information that is unnecessary to the purpose of the running of our festival. Generally, we will retain ticket purchase information (excluding card payment details) for a minimum of seven years to comply with our financial auditing requirements.

If you wish to be removed from our mailing lists, we may need to retain a minimum amount of information to fully comply with your request.

Your rights regarding the personal information we hold

You can make choices and exercise your rights in relation to the personal information we hold about you.

You have a right to be informed of how we collect and use the information we hold about you.
You have the right to access your information and receive copies of your information.
You have a right to request us to correct and update inaccurate or incomplete information. The easiest way to ensure your information is accurate and up to date is to email us at writebytheseakq@gmail.com
You have a right to object to our processing your personal information for reasons of our legitimate interests or marketing purposes.
You have a right to object to us processing your personal information in certain circumstances – for example if you believe that we are not using your information lawfully or are using it for purposes other that for which it was provided
You have a right to receive the personal information we hold about you in a portable format.
You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time to receiving our emails, updates and information from WBTS, and to unsubscribe from our mailing lists.

The Write By The Sea Festival is made possible through the commitment and co-operation of all our volunteers, attendees, sponsors and donors. We hope that we will always be able to address any concerns that you may have in a prompt and efficient manner.

We will regularly review and update this privacy policy in line with data protection requirements and our business needs.

If you have any query regarding how we handle your personal information or if you wish to make a complaint, please email us at writebytheseakq@gmail.com or write to us c/o The Secretary, Write By The Sea, Stella Maris Centre, Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford.

You also have the right to contact the Data Protection Commissioner at www.dataprotection.ie, Lo call: 1890 252 231, email: info@dataprotection.ie