Our Privacy Policy

We know that privacy policies aren’t particularly exciting, and sorry, this is no exception. But it is really important. It explains how we use the data you give to us – some of which you might not even know you provide – when you use this website.

We’ve tried to make it as simple and as easy to understand as possible, but if, after reading this, you have a question or two, please just get in touch.

Who we are

This is the simplest bit. We are London Speech Workshop. We provide fantastic (if we do say ourselves), tailored communication courses for both individual and corporate clients.

This policy relates to our website:  www.londonspeechworkshop.com. We are only responsible for this website, so if you click on a link that takes you to another website, you should read their privacy policy.

Have you heard of GDPR? It stands for General Data Protection Regulation, and it came into force in May 2018, acting as a modern law to protect the personal information of individuals, i.e. you.  We won’t go into the nitty gritty of this law – you can look that up yourself if you want. In terms of this regulation though, what you need to know is that we are responsible for deciding how and why we store your information and what it is used for.

If you want to contact us about this policy, it’s best to call us on 020 3137 6323 or email office@londonspeechworkshop.com.

Definitions

For the purposes of this policy, we refer to ‘personal data’ as meaning information that can identify you. This might be your name, telephone number or email address. If you could be identified from this information, you are called the ‘data subject’.

We collect personal data from everyone using this website – our clients, email subscribers and anyone applying to work with London Speech Workshop.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Information you provide us
As you could reasonably expect, a lot of the data we collect is information you actively give us. For example, when you fill in a form or a comment on our website or register with us, you supply us with information about you. This might include your name, email address and phone number.

Information we collect from you
We collect other technical information to help us improve the website and give you the best experience possible while on it. This might include the pages you’ve visited and how long you stay on each page. We also collect information to help with spam detection. This includes your IP address and browser agent string (we did say it was technical, didn’t we?).

If you fill in a comment form, an anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

We may store personal data on our databases, but we don’t collect anything that’s unnecessary or irrelevant, such as your favourite colour or your pet’s name (so don’t worry if it’s an unusual one).

We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimise our service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices. This includes a device’s IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website. Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf. For further details, please see the ‘about Hotjar’ section of Hotjar’s support site.

When we might contact you

We may contact you and let you know about updates, offers or send you our newsletter. We only do this if you have agreed to receive emails from us.

Our email marketing messages are created and sent through an email marketing service (EMS) provider. This is a third-party service provider of software that securely stores data and allows us to send campaigns to different lists of contacts. These emails may contain tracking beacons or similar technologies to track subscriber activity, such as whether a contact has opened the email and clicked on any links. This information helps us to review and improve our emails so that they’re as relevant and useful as possible to you/

Any email marketing messages we send are in accordance with the GDPR. You can withdraw your consent (unsubscribe)  at any time. These instructions are at the bottom of our emails, which is standard practice.

If you become a client of ours, we will obviously contact you by telephone or email to arrange appointments and where necessary, follow-up on payment transactions. We need to do this to be able to deliver the service you have paid for.

Cookies (sadly not the edible kind)

Like most companies, we use cookies on this website to improve your experience of using it. We do this by placing a small text file (cookie) on your device or computer hard drive to track how you use the website, whether you have completed any forms and to keep you logged in if this is applicable.

Some cookies will be saved for specific time periods, while others may last indefinitely. The cookies are either performance-based, which collect information about how you use our website for example, or functionality-based, which allow our website to remember your login details or save your screen display choices, for instance. Your web browser (e.g. Chrome, Safari or Firefox) should provide you with the controls to manage and delete cookies from your device.

Embedded content from other websites

We sometimes include embedded content, e.g. videos from YouTube. This content behaves in the same way as if the visitor has visited the hosting website and so may collect data, use cookies or embed third-party tracking to monitor your interactions with the embedded content. We don’t have control over this.

Who we share your data with

We may need to share your data with third party service clients, for example to allow you to pay us or to send emails to you, but we keep this to a minimum. If you have registered on the website, your personal data may be available to our development company. We take reasonable steps to make sure these parties will keep your personal data secure at all times.

How long we retain your data

We only keep your personal data as long as we need to, which may depend on the type of data we hold. For example, if you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely.

What rights you have over your data

You have the right to:

  • ask for details or the actual personal data we hold about you
  • update or edit personal data about you that you think is not accurate
  • ask us to stop processing your personal data.
  • have your personal data permanently removed from our records. Please note though that this doesn’t include data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security purposes.

Any questions?

If you have any questions or requests about your personal data, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and we will try to complete your request as soon as possible.

Phew, that’s the end of our privacy policy! May we suggest you head over to our blog for content that’s still informative, but hopefully a little more interesting?