Signing up to a service often involves disclosing some personal data and our services as a charity are no different. While registering you, we need to collect essential information such as your address and contact details which we will use to get in touch with you while we are working on your case. We will also ask additional questions as part of this sign-up process and we wanted to explain the purpose of asking for this information.
We are currently funded by Kent County Council to deliver physical wellbeing services to adults across the county. As part of our contract with KCC, we are required to ask a number of questions to gather demographic information, such as your gender, ethnicity, and disability. You may be wondering why we need so much information but we want to reassure you that this is just part of our contractual obligation.
KCC want to make sure that our service is effective and that we are helping those that need our assistance, from a wide range of backgrounds. We regularly report back to KCC on our work but please be assured that any information is anonymised so it cannot be used to identify you as an individual in any way. This allows both them and us to ensure we are working with a varied range of people and helps us to identify if we are missing any particular demographic. This information will not be used to judge or discriminate in any way, as we will always aim to deliver the same high-quality assistance to anyone who falls within our eligibility criteria (i.e. adults living in Kent who have a physical disability). We comply with GDPR guidelines at all times and it is important to note that you can always tell us if you would prefer not to answer any question that you are uncomfortable with.
Collecting data is also vital to helping us to evaluate and improve, fundraise, and deliver services to our clients. We want to make sure we are reaching as many disabled people as possible so this information is also useful to help us tailor our communications. As part of the signing up process, you will be asked whether you would like to receive our e-newsletter and we recommend that you provide an email address so that we can send this to you once a month. It is packed full of the latest news and updates, upcoming events that may be of interest and information that can help to improve your finances.
We hope this clarifies why we ask you certain things and thank you for your patience with our Information Officers while they take you through the questions.