Hofesh Shechter Company − Privacy Policy 

Hofesh Shechter Company − Privacy Policy
Updated 27 Mar 2025

Hofesh Shechter Company Ltd is committed to keeping any information we hold about you securely and on a lawful basis in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and all other relevant legislation.

The policy applies to our audiences, participants, employees, freelancers, contractors, supporters or anyone who uses our services, visits our website, emails, calls, writes to us or interacts with us on social media. It sets out how and why we use your personal data so that we can ensure you are fully informed and in control of your personal information.

If at any time you wish to update your preferences, review or update your information, submit a request, raise any issues regarding the processing of your personal data or raise any questions, comments, concerns about the policy please contact us at:

Email: info@hofesh.co.uk
Mail: Data Protection, Hofesh Shechter Company, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA

1. What personal Data do we collect

  • Contact data: name, postal address, email address, telephone number – provided by you to us online or paper form or, with your consent, via a venue where we perform.
  • If you are a participant, we may need information about your next of kin and special category data as outlined below.
  • If you are a staff member, freelancer or contractor we may need your ID documentation; NI/UTR number; personal information for obtaining visas and UK work permits; details to conduct right to work checks; your next of kin and special category data as outline below.
  • Profile data: biographical information (e.g. date of birth), background information (e.g. education/training, employment and employer) and other details you have sent to us or to enable us to maintain a relevant and tailored relationship with you.
  • Social media data: your publicly available social media activity or analytics about you provided by social media platforms e.g. Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, handle, posts and location.
  • Transactional data: information about your purchases, donations, event attendance– including the information available through the services we use to process and manage these transactions.
  • Financial data: If you are making a payment, your financial transaction history with us. We do not store credit/debit card details. For employees and regular contractors, we may store bank details for the purposes of making payments.
  • Photographic and Video recordings: for archival and promotional reasons as agreed with your consent.
  • Technical data: includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access our website.
  • Usage data: information on how your use our website, our services and engage with us.

We may also collect special category data including

  • Racial or ethnic origin
  • Trade union membership
  • Health data including disabilities
  • Sexual orientation

And we treat with care information shared with us on gender identity and neurotype.

Some identifiable special category data may be collected to protect you or an individual you refer to our services (e.g. information relating to next of kin, access needs or dietary requirements).

Marketing and communications: Your preferences in receiving communications from us or our third parties. A note on conversations that may have taken place during an interaction, all of which help us to manage our relationship with you and helps us ensure you only receive relevant and timely communications from us.

Anonymous data:  Statistical or demographic data for any purpose that we may request via surveys or equality monitoring forms following your contact with the company. This data is shared anonymously with key funders of our activities such as Arts Council England. 

2. How do we collect your data

Hofesh Shechter Company holds data provided by you via one or more of the following ways:

  • Opt-in subscription to receive news and information on our activities and events, and other ways to connect with the company, including supporting us.
  • Customer booking data made available to us by venues where the company has performed, and customers have agreed for their data to be shared in this way.
  • Via third party plug- ins as you interact with our website www.hofesh.co.uk. These plug-ins collect technical data about your device and via cookies – which is listed in detail at the bottom of this policy.
  • Via donations to the company or if you have attended an invitation only event.
  • People who have contacted us with an enquiry in person, online or by phone.
  • People who have attended our in person or online performances, films, events, workshops and auditions.
  • People who work at venues we perform at such as programmers, producers, commissioners, marketers, box office staff.
  • People, such as teachers, who have, downloaded our educational resources or may be interested in hosting a workshop.
  • People contracted or engaged to deliver services on our behalf or provide products to us.
  • People who have interacted with us on social media.
  • People who have completed a paper or online survey.
  • People who have purchased our merchandise or our downloaded music.
  • Personal data for Board members past and present.
  • Personal data for visas, work permits, PAYE and freelance artists, staff and contractors.
  • Personal data for people who have applied for jobs or contracts with us.

3. Why do we collect your data and how do we process it

When you share your data with us, we may use it for one or more of the following purposes:

  • Personalise your experience of our website and/or communications you receive from us.
  • Record who has given money or services to us so that we can tell them how their money has helped us and others, and to claim GiftAid where possible.
  • Manage our organisation effectively and continually improve what we do.
  • Develop our relationship with you as someone who may want to collaborate with us.
  • Inform future programming of events including better understanding of specific locations and tailoring work to specific audiences.
  • Encourage bookings for our events and donations in order for us to be less dependent on funding – according to what marketing communications you have agreed to:
  • to communicate with you about ourselves, our work, future shows, other fun stuff that we think you might find interesting, and opportunities to support us.
  • to communicate with you about upcoming auditions.
  • to communicate with you about training and workshops
  • For employee and human resources management practices.
  • For auditing processes.
  • To comply with our legal or regulatory obligations.
  • To establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

We’ll also collect your personal information to help prepare for our residencies, workshops and auditions, and to ensure that they run smoothly.  If you’re signed up to an audition, residency, workshop or project, we will need to keep in regular touch with you by phone, email, text message and/or post to ensure that you have all the information you need to take part on our projects. This is information that we need to send you, and so you can’t opt-out of receiving this information if you wish to take part. This only applies to information we absolutely must send you in order to participate in a course – you can of course opt-out from marketing communications at any time without affecting your relationship with Hofesh Shechter Company Ltd.

Although we sometimes will tell you about work from others, we won’t pass information we hold about you to them – unless you explicitly give us your permission.

Any feedback you give us we may use in public communications. But we won’t do so in such a way that people would know it was from you – unless we get your permission.

We may share information about you with other organisations who help us deliver services to you, but this will always be under the same conditions as we are bound by under this privacy policy.

Use and disclosure of Personal Information

If you contact us, we reserve the right to keep a record of that correspondence and incorporate the information it contains into our database.

If we are required by law or requested by the police or a regulatory or government authority investigating potentially illegal activities to provide information concerning your activities whilst using the network we shall do so. We may also disclose Personal Information to appropriate third parties to assist in anti-fraud checks and investigations.

4. How do we keep your Data secure and how long do we retain it

We take every precaution to protect your information and store your data using secure and password-protected databases. Some of your data is stored on cloud-based systems – in which case, we choose systems with strong security features and up-to-date encryption to help prevent unlawful access.  We use two CRM systems Monad and YesPlan both of which have robust security systems in place. Where your data is printed out or written down, it will be stored securely and then destroyed when the data is no longer needed.

Save as agreed by you for marketing purposes, only employees and approved contractors/developers we may appoint from time to time, and who need the information to perform a specific job, are granted access to personally identifiable information, subject to agreement to our Confidentiality Policy.

We only retain personal data or as long as is necessary in accordance with the above purposes and applicable laws. Typically, we retain personal data for two years after your last interaction with us (and financial data for seven years) after which point data will be securely destroyed. The exception to this is our anonymised data; alumni archive, which may contain your name, likeness, case studies, video/audio/photographic recordings of your performances, and other information in perpetuity as part of the official archives for Hofesh Shechter Ltd. Please contact us should require any further information regarding how we manage, process and store your data.

Regular security reviews are held by us to ensure that the site remains safe and secure for your protection. In the very unlikely event that your data is unlawfully accessed or leaked, we will inform you as soon as possible, with details the incident and of any remedial actions we are taking or any we’d advise you to take.

5. Communications

Email and e- newsletters

Messages received through any of our generic email addresses are reviewed and passed on when necessary to other staff members.  We use email service providers in the UK and our current service provider is Microsoft.

We administer support us and donor correspondence through a one-to-one relationship led by a designated team member.

We administer a mailing service through Mailchimp. Each e-mail we send you offers you the opportunity to amend your preferences or unsubscribe. You can also ask us to do this for you, by e-mailing info@hofesh.co.uk 

Postal correspondence

All post received to our general address is opened by an appropriate team member and passed onwards to the relevant staff member.

6. Website


Every time someone visits our website a log file is generated on our computer. The log file records the time and date of your visit, the files that were requested, your IP (Internet Protocol) address, the referrer URL (if provided) and the browser version. We collect this information to help us diagnose problems and administer our systems and to audit the geographical make-up of users and how they have arrived at our site; that is, from what other sites have visitors arrived – this information being obtained from the referrer URL.

We do not normally link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable, which means that you remain anonymous even though we include your IP address in our aggregate information. However, we can and will attempt to use IP addresses to identify a user when we feel it is necessary to enforce compliance with our terms and conditions, or to protect our services and other users.

Cookies Policy

Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored by your browser on your computer’s hard drive. They make it possible for us to track visitor statistics, such as returning visitors.

This website uses the following non-essential cookies:

Google Analytics cookies

We use a third-party provider, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns, for example, what you look at or access, traffic data, location data, weblogs and other communication data, information about your computer, including – where your browser provides this – your IP address, operating system and browser type. This information is anonymised, and we will make no attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.

You can go to http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html to find out more about Google Analytics cookies and how to opt-out of them.

7. Monitoring, Evaluation and Research

We collect and process data for monitoring, evaluation and research processes for example when we are evaluating the reach of our programmes and impact. This information is anonymised and may be captured through survey tools such as Survey Monkey and Culture Counts – Impact and Insight surveys, and is entirely voluntary and you therefore have a choice whether to disclose any information which might be required.

We may also ask you to complete equality monitoring surveys, which collect anonymous sensitive data such as your sexual orientation, ethnic origin or disability. This will always be kept separate from the rest of your personal data so that it’s kept anonymous. We collect this information to ensure that we are reaching people from all backgrounds, and to fulfil the funding requirements of Arts Council of England and other funders. If you do not wish to offer this information, you have the right to decline, and this again will not affect your relationship with Hofesh Shechter Company Ltd.

We use a third-party provider, MailChimp to deliver our e-newsletters. Through MailChimp we gather statistics around email opening and clicks which are not personally identifiable.

We also analyse data from our social media platforms in order to improve our performance and engagement on these platforms.

8. Users Under 18

If you are under 18, please ensure that you obtain your parent/guardian’s consent beforehand whenever you provide Personal Information to the website. Users without such consent are not allowed to provide us with Personal Information.

9. Your Data Subject Rights and how to contact us

Hofesh Shechter Company Ltd has a data policy which sets out its legal obligations for the management, processing and storing of your data. You have the legal right to access your data, or to change your data if it is inaccurate. You also have the right for the data to be removed, unless we have a legitimate reason for keeping it.  To submit a request, please put your request in writing by emailing info@hofesh.couk or post to Data Protection, Hofesh Shechter Company, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA. We will provide you with a response to your requests in accordance with the UK data protection law.

10. Changes to this policy

In the event that this policy is changed, the date and nature of the change will be recorded in this document. In the event that the change has a material impact on the handling of your data, we will contact you to inform you of the changes and where appropriate, seek your consent.