Privacy Policy

Presbyterian Development Society Customer Privacy Policy

Presbyterian Development Society has this privacy policy because we understand that it is important for you to know how we collect, store, and use your personal information.

In this policy, we refer to Presbyterian Development Society as "we", "us", or "our"; and “you” or “your” means you as the user of our services or our website.

By using our website, providing us with your personal information, applying for our services, and by interacting with us, you agree to accept our processes and methods in relation to your personal information as described in this policy.

This policy explains the following:

Personal information
Types of personal information we collect
Collection of personal information
If we are not able to collect personal information
Use of personal information
Cookies
Use of personal information for marketing
Disclosure of personal information
Retention and Protection of personal information
Right to access or correct your personal information
Your representation
Our staff Accountability
Links to other websites
Complaints about a breach of privacy
Changes to the privacy policy

1. PERSONAL INFORMATION

In this policy, "personal information" means the same as it does in the Privacy Act 2020 ("Privacy Act"). In general terms, this includes any information that can be used to personally identify you. This may include (but is not limited to) your name, age, gender, address, contact details (including phone numbers and email addresses) images of you, your biometric data, and financial information, including your payment information. If the information we collect personally identifies you, or you are reasonably identifiable from it, then the information is considered personal information. It does not include information where the identity of the person to which the information relates has been removed (i.e. anonymous information).

2. TYPES OF PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

The information we collect about you may differ depending on the nature of your dealings and interactions with us. We may collect the following types of personal information and/or information from you only as necessary for the purposes of performing our functions and services, which may include your:

Name;
Mailing or street address;
Location;
Email address;
Telephone number;
Profession, occupation, organisation or job title;
Organisation details;
Computer or network;
Transaction information such as payment information, bank details, and amounts granted;
A report with information, including photos about the grant project, that you provide that can be used on our website;
Personal information that is available through social media;
Details of the services you have enquired of us together with any additional information necessary to deliver those services and to respond to your enquiries;
Any additional personal information that you provide to us directly or indirectly through our website or social media, our application forms, through the use of our services or otherwise, including any questions or comments you submit via our website or social media and all of your interactions with us;
Information that you have authorised third parties to provide to us;
Information as needed on our grant application forms; and/or
Information that is publicly available.

We do not collect any of your personal information if you are simply browsing our website, however, cookies are enabled so please have a read of how we use cookies below.

You are responsible for ensuring that all information you provide us is current, complete, and accurate. Unless required to, we will not verify that the information you have provided is current, complete, and accurate. However, if we believe that the information you provide is not current, complete, or accurate, we reserve the right to decline access to information or services, deny access to certain parts of our website, decline the provision of grants, or not process any grant applications, until current, complete or accurate information is provided.

We will also collect non-personal information about you such as your internet protocol (IP) address, login data, time-zone setting and location, operating systems and platform, and other technology on the devices you use to access our website.

3. COLLECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

This privacy policy applies to personal information collected, including when you:

Enquire about services from us;
Access and use our website and communications, including registration details and information relating to your use of the website and the services, such as the content you access (for example, the services you have viewed, or the search queries you input);
Call, email or interact with our directors or staff;
Complete an application for a grant; and
Interact with us including through social media.

If we need to collect your personal information from a third party, we will discuss with you.

You should not provide us with another person’s personal information. If you do so, you must only do so with the affected individual’s express consent. You warrant that the information you provide is only in relation to your personal information and if you are providing another individual’s personal information, you warrant that you have the necessary consents and authorisation.

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children and young persons under the age of 18 years. We strongly discourage you from providing any personal information about children.

4. IF WE ARE NOT ABLE TO COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION

You do not have to provide us with your personal information. However, if you choose not to provide us with the personal information described within this policy, then:

We may not be able to provide you with the services you have requested, either to the same standard or at all;
We may not be able to provide you with information about services that you may want; or
We may not be able to tailor our content, website, and communications for your preferences.

5. USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

The primary purpose for which we collect information about you is to enable us to perform our business activities and to provide the best possible service.

We collect, hold, use, and disclose your personal information for the following purposes:

To provide services to you;
To provide you with information or advice about existing and new services;
To communicate with you and process your requests;
To manage and enhance our services;
To personalise and customise your experience with us;
To provide you with access to secure areas of our websites;
To verify your identity and that the funds granted are used for the purposes you have stated in your application;
To provide to third parties if you have authorised us to do so;
To investigate if we have reason to suspect a breach of any of our terms and conditions or any suspected unlawful activity;
To help prevent unlawful activity;
To make a determination on your application and to process your application(s);
To distribute publications, newsletters, and promotion of our products and services;
To research market preferences and user requirements;
To comply with financial obligations and conduct credit checks where necessary;
To register a security interest over assets used to secure the grant where necessary;
To provide to third parties such as donors, benefactors, and administrative parties;
To share your information with our staff members and/or agents to administer your account, and to enable our agents to assist us in arranging promotions and programs;
To detect, prevent, mitigate, investigate, and report any fraud or any prohibited activity which in turn protects you and others;
To improve our website and our services – for example through the collection and analysis of statistical and research data and the use of cookies;
To handle your requests, enquiries, complaints, and other customer care-related activities, as well as all other general administrative and business purposes;
To enforce any of our rights under any agreement we have with you;
To comply with any law (including the Privacy Act), law enforcement agencies, and any court orders; and/or
any other transaction or activity as a result of the performance of our role as an organisation providing, services, products and benefits to our members and to others.

Your personal information will not be shared, sold, rented or disclosed other than as described within this policy or as permitted by the Privacy Act.

We, or third parties authorised by us, may use non-personally identifiable information to compile statistical and analytical reports on the use of the website by all of our customers, provided that such reports do not identify you or any other individual users.

6. COOKIES

A "cookie" is a small text file that is placed on a device when it is browsing a website to enable the host of the website to store information about use of the website by that device. We use cookies and similar technologies for the following key purposes:

To measure traffic patterns, to determine which areas of our websites have been visited, and to measure transaction patterns in the aggregate;
To research our users' habits so that we can improve our services;
To operate our websites efficiently with a high level of functionality;
To measure the effectiveness of our marketing initiatives;
To learn about your preferences so that we can present you with web content and advertising that is relevant to you;
To produce data on web traffic and customer web activity through our website or apps; and/or
While we use cookies to improve our customers' online experience, if you do not wish to allow cookies then you can choose to disable cookies (for all sites) from within your browser settings.

You have the ability to disable cookies (for all sites) from within your browser settings and you can control the extent to which your device allows cookies. You can do this by changing the settings on the browser software that your device uses to access the internet. If you do choose to set your browser to disable all cookies, this may affect your ability to use some of the features on our Website. To learn more about cookies and how you can manage them in your browser, visit: www.allaboutcookies.org.

We do not currently use social media platforms to communicate with you or post content. However, we may do so in the future and if we do use social media on some sections of our website to help communicate our messages and give you the best experience e.g. the X feed on our home page, the X and Facebook plugins on our blog pages, and the YouTube videos we embed. These social media services have their own privacy policies and may track your use of our website on those pages where their links are displayed. They do this by the use, for example, of persistent session cookies and their tracking may be associated with your profile with them.

7. USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION FOR MARKETING

From time to time, we use personal information to provide you with information or advice about our existing and new services. We also use it to conduct promotions on our own behalf and on behalf of selected third parties.

If, at any stage, you no longer wish to receive these marketing communications you may unsubscribe by using the link in any promotional email, logging into your account and changing your preferences or contacting us at:

[email protected]

We will not collect usage data or target advertisements based on the following categories:

Political opinions;
Membership of a political association;
Religious beliefs or affiliations;
Philosophical beliefs;
Membership of a trade union;
Sexual preferences or practice;
Criminal record; and/or
Health information.

We will not provide personal information to an advertisers or third parties without your express consent or as outlined in this policy.

If you receive communications from us that you believe have been sent to you in violation of this policy, or in breach of any law, please contact us at [email protected].

8. DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

We may disclose your personal information:

To our directors, board members, contractors, subcontractors, and/or agents agents (including intermediary functions, such as customer support services or marketing agents);
To data warehouses and to strategic learning organisations on an de-identified basis;
To entities whom we have reporting obligations;
To government, statutory or regulatory bodies and enforcement bodies;
To any external dispute resolution body;
To third parties involved in preventing or detecting fraud or crime, or apprehending or prosecuting offenders, including the operators and participants of crime prevention schemes in which we participate who may compare your personal information with information collected from other sources and who may keep a record of the searches we make against your name;
Where we are permitted to under the Privacy Act;
As otherwise detailed in this policy; and
With your consent.

When we engage third parties to provide services, we may provide those third parties with some of your information if it is required to fulfil those services and only to the extent required to fulfil those services. Examples of such third party providers may include, but not limited to:

sponsors, strategic partners, exhibitors, suppliers, and guest speakers where applicable;
information technology services, financial services, product services, marketing services, and consultancy;
debt collection agencies; and
trusted parties such as accountants, legal, or other professional advisers or consultants.

All information we hold about you will be processed and stored in accordance with data protection laws, which should at a minimum be similar to the Privacy Act. We take reasonable steps to ensure that any third party we engage protect your information against unauthorised use or disclosure and can meet our privacy and security requirements but we cannot be held liable for the actions and omissions of such third parties.

Depending on the third party, some personal information may be disclosed to third parties in countries outside New Zealand and steps are taken to reasonably ensure it has similar levels of data protection. If the third party is not in a country with similar levels of data protection as that provided by the New Zealand Privacy Act, this will be made known to you and we will only share the required personal information necessary for the purposes of the performance of our services upon receipt of your consent.

If our assets or business are acquired by a third party, our customer information will be one of the transferred assets. In that case, we will continue to ensure the confidentiality of any personal information and will give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

In addition to the above, we release personal information only when permitted under the Privacy Act or required by law for legal compliance and law enforcement (including to government agencies with statutory law enforcement responsibilities, and/or to your Internet Service Provider or network administrator); to facilitate court proceedings; enforce or apply our terms and conditions; or protect our or your rights, property, or safety and the rights, property and safety of our users, or others, and where we reasonably believe that disclosure is necessary. Government agencies with statutory roles enabling them to request data from us include the Police, Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

9. RETENTION AND PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

We will take all reasonable steps to protect the personal information we hold from misuse, loss, or unauthorised access or modification but as with all things transmitted through the internet and with technology, we are unable to guarantee its absolute security – you acknowledge and accept the risks of using such mediums to transmit your personal information. If you suspect any misuse, loss, or unauthorised access to, your personal information, please let us know immediately.

We will retain your personal information only as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes for which we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements.

We may retain your personal information longer if there is a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation regarding our relationship with you.

10. RIGHT TO ACCESS OR CORRECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

You may request access to any personal information we hold about you at any time by contacting us at [email protected]. We request that you keep your information as current as possible so we can continue to improve our services.

Your request will be processed in accordance with the Privacy Act.

If you make an access request, we will ask you to verify your identity. There may be instances where we cannot grant you access to the personal information we hold. For example, we may need to refuse access if granting access would interfere with the privacy of others, or if it would result in a breach of confidentiality. If that happens, in most circumstances we will give you written reasons for any refusal.

We may charge a reasonable fee to cover the cost of providing reasonable assistance where you have made a request for making your personal information available to you or providing you with copies of it. With respect to any request to correct personal information, we may impose a charge for giving you reasonable assistance where you wish to make a correction or make a correction or where we are required to provide a statement of correction to personal information.

If you believe the personal information we hold about you is incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate, then you may ask us to amend it. We will consider if the information requires amendment and will not charge for making any amendments. Access to personal information may be refused in a number of circumstances, such as where the information relates to anticipated legal proceedings or the request for access is frivolous or vexatious, or where it falls under an exception in the Privacy Act 2020 preventing. If we do not agree that there are grounds for amendment, then we will add a note to the personal information stating that you disagree with it.

We also utilise the services of third party IT, cloud storage, system, legal tools, and management systems, and email providers, which may change from time to time. If you would like to know who we use and where your information is stored, please get in touch with our privacy officer and we will reasonably endeavour to provide that information to you.

11. YOUR REPRESENTATION

When you use our Website, apply for a grant, purchase our products or use our services, you represent that the personal information of any third parties you provide to us, and its manner of collection, are compliant with the Privacy Act 2020 and that you have obtained the relevant consent from the said third parties.

12. OUR STAFF ACCOUNTABILITY

Only staff members with a legitimate business purpose for accessing and handling information obtained by us are given authorisation to do so. Any unauthorised access or use of such information by our staff members is prohibited.

13. LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES

We are not responsible for the privacy practices and content of any other website linked to our Website. You are responsible for investigating the privacy policies on all other websites.

14. COMPLAINTS ABOUT A BREACH OF PRIVACY

If you believe we have breached this policy or the Privacy Act, or you have any questions or concerns about this policy, please contact us using the contact information below and provide details of the incident so that we can investigate it.

We have a formal procedure for investigating and addressing complaints. Once the Privacy Officer receives a complaint the Privacy Officer will commence an investigation with the relevant business unit. The investigator will endeavour to determine the nature of any breach and how it occurred.

We may contact you during the process to seek further clarification if necessary. If a breach is found, the Privacy Officer will escalate the matter to management so that the process can be rectified to prevent any further breaches from taking place. We will also contact you to inform you of the outcome of the investigation. We will endeavour to resolve all investigations within a reasonable time.

We will treat your requests and complaints confidentially.

You can contact the data privacy officer as set out below:

Privacy officer: Dr Kathryn Jones
Email: [email protected]

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your information unfairly, unlawfully, or without transparency, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. You can find more information about the Privacy Commissioner and their complaints procedure at http://privacy.org.nz.

15. CHANGES TO THE PRIVACY POLICY

We may change this privacy policy from time to time. Updated versions of this policy will be posted on our website. We encourage you to frequently check for changes. We will notify you if there are significant changes to our policy (such as a drastic change in who we disclose your information to). This policy was last updated in May 2025.