Privacy Policy

BCBHAS believes you have a fundamental right to privacy, which we work to protect. If you give us permission, BCBHAS may communicate with you about our programs and our work. Here are the details of how we collect, use and safeguard your personal information.

During the course of our various projects and activities, BCBHAS may gather and use personal information — information that can be used to distinguish, identify or contact a specific individual. BCBHAS is committed to protecting the privacy of personal information it receives.

Business contact information, certain publicly available information and information in the public domain are not considered personal information covered by the privacy legislation.

BCBHAS always considers donor, volunteer, and membership information to be personal information and not to be disclosed without consent.

We may ask you for personal information, including your name, address, email, phone numbers and specific interests, in a variety of ways, including website forms, surveys, email, mail-in forms, over the phone and in person.

BCBHAS uses the personal information provided by members, donors and others in connection with its programs to educate, disseminate, and support Black British Columbians’ achievements past, present, and future; bring together diverse groups of people who have an interest in promoting, educating, and learning about BC and Canadian Black history; promote diversity in BC social, economic, and political spectrums; and encourage youth and children to develop an interest in the achievements of Black people in BC and Canada.

We also use your information to manage our relationship with members and donors, conduct and facilitate fundraising, meet our legal or regulatory requirements, and fulfill other purposes consistent with the above.

For example, we may ask you for personal information to process a donation, membership or registration, to invite you to an event or to provide newsletters and information about BCBHAS of interest to you. We may also contact you by mail, email or phone about opportunities to support our work or to make a donation.

It is always your choice whether to provide your personal information to us. We keep the personal information that you provide to us in strict confidence. We grant access to personally identifiable information only to those in BCBHAS who need to perform a specific task, such as to record a membership or to provide a receipt.

We may sometimes use outside organizations to help us communicate with you. We will give them access to your personal information solely for that purpose. We only work with organizations that have comprehensive security and confidentiality policies, including written policies that do not allow them to use or share your information with anyone other than BCBHAS.

We never rent or sell the names of our members and supporters. We do not sell or exchange email addresses with other organizations. We do not trade names and mailing addresses of people who donate to us.

Donors who request that their name and/or the amount of the gift not be publicly released shall remain anonymous.

By providing personal information to us, you consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your information in accordance with this policy.

When you provide contact information to us for one purpose, we may contact you using that information for other parts of our own work. For example, if you join BCBHAS, we may send you information about BCBHAS events, opportunities to participate in our work or how to make a donation.

We may disclose your information to carefully selected service providers to conduct activities (such as mailings) on our behalf, or with your consent, to provide information on other activities about which you may be interested. We take all reasonable precautions to ensure that the service provider meets our policies to protect your personal information.

We use cookies on our website to collect information needed for the functionality of the site, to analyze visits to the site and to improve the site’s performance. Cookies are small text files placed on your device that allow a site to know if your device has visited that site before and help to understand how the site is being used, help you navigate between pages efficiently, help remember your preferences and help improve your browsing experience.

We also may use links in our emails to track open and click-through rates to help us learn what messages appeal to you most. By using our website and agreeing to this policy, you consent to the use of cookies as described in this policy.

BCBHAS uses Facebook and other social media services to keep supporters and others who are interested in the organization and its activities up to date. We show social networking sharing buttons and widgets from social media services such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter on our website to enable you to easily share news and information about BCBHAS. These social networking sharing buttons and widgets come from web servers which may track your behaviour on our website and may combine this with other information about you originating from other websites. There are browser add-ons that you can install to disable them.

We gather information automatically about visits to our website to help us maintain and improve its design, and to evaluate traffic statistics, such as the times of day and days of week of peak traffic, and to assess the popularity of different areas of the site. We use Google Analytics to gather this data and analyze it. Google Analytics collects information about the date and time in which our web site was accessed, and may also track a visitor’s movement within the site, but does not collect personal information about the visitor.

You can install the “Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on” to prevent information about your visits to our website being sent to Google Analytics.

Our website uses cookies and JavaScript-based tracking scripts to collect anonymous data. You can adjust your web browser’s “cookie”, “cache” and JavaScript settings to prevent this from happening. Note that changing these settings may alter the performance of our website and in some cases may completely prevent you from viewing some of our pages and forms.

The servers on which BCBHAS’s information is stored are located in Canada.

In some cases, BCBHAS does not actually collect and store personal information, but instead uses a third-party. For example, we may use Survey Monkey to send out a survey or a third-party service to provide registration for an event. Such services have resources dedicated to maintaining security and confidentiality, and we ensure that any third-party partner has written policies about never sharing your information with anyone other than BCBHAS.

We retain personal information as long as necessary to fulfill the specific purposes for its collection or to comply with applicable laws. BCBHAS uses reasonable business practices to ensure we have adequate controls, schedules and practices for retention and destruction of records containing your personal information.

Our donation pages are secured using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a security protocol that provides communications and transactional privacy over the internet. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) define industry best practices for handling and protecting credit card details. All storage and transferal of your financial details by BCBHAS and our payment processors is PCI compliant.

Our website contains links to websites owned and operated by other organizations. They may have their own privacy policies and terms and conditions and are not governed by this policy. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policy and terms of use of each website you visit.

We endeavour to maintain appropriate physical, procedural and technical safeguards for your personal information. This information may be subject to disclosure to the government, courts or law enforcement agencies, according to the laws of British Columbia and Canada. Where we are given notice of such disclosure, we will communicate the information to you, if permitted by law.

We may change this policy from time to time without notice. Changes will be reflected on this page.

For further information, please contact our privacy officer by email at development@bcblackhistory.ca or by writing to:

Privacy Officer
BC Black History Awareness Society
207-615 Cook St.
Victoria B.C. V8V 3Y6