Privacy Policy

Doc Academy is an initiative of Doc Society. In the United Kingdom the programme is implemented by Doc Society. In the United States it is implemented by our partners at Blueshift Education.

We, Doc Society, take the security and privacy of the community that we serve extremely seriously, and we are committed to managing your personal data in accordance with current legislation and best practice. In this privacy policy we explain:

  • Who we are;
  • What personal data we collect;
  • How we collect personal data;
  • The ways in which we use personal data to provide services to you;
  • Our legal basis for processing your personal data;
  • How we use personal data to support our mission and the work we undertake in our five strategic areas;
  • Your rights with respect to the personal data that we hold; and
  • How to contact us if you have questions about the personal data that we hold or the ways in which we process it.

Who we are

If you are resident in the UK, or any other country other than the US or the Netherlands, we are Doc Society, a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee and registered in the United Kingdom with company registration number 05278207. Our trading address is 50 Frith Street London W1D 4SQ.

If you are resident in the US, we are Doc Society Inc, a not-for-profit company registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3). Our trading address is 20 Jay Street, Suite 1008, Brooklyn, NY 11201.

Blueshift Education is based in Denver, Colorado and develops Impact Education - innovative educational strategy, experiences, tools and resources to bring stories off the screen and into viewers' lives in order to deepen the audience experience and drive social change.

If you are resident in the Netherlands, we are Stichting Doc Society, a not-for-profit company registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce with registration number 858556364.

What personal data we collect

Personal data

The personal data we collect includes:

  • Your name
  • Your email address
  • If you are a teacher, the name of the school at which you teach
  • Your password

How we collect personal data

We collect the personal data you provide us with when you create a user account.

When you visit the Doc Society site (docsociety.org) or any related site (goodpitch.org, docacademy.org, safeandsecure.film, impactguide.org) we also collect data that enables us to track your site usage by means of cookies. Cookies are small files that, with your consent, we place on your device. They enable us to analyse web traffic, make the experience of using a website smoother, and they may also perform certain essential functions without which it would not be possible to use our website; for example, a cookie may record whether you have logged in with a password, and can therefore access secure parts of our website. Cookies may remain on your computer after you leave our website or after your Internet session finishes. You can block cookies using your browser preferences, and you can delete cookies either via your browser settings or using system utilities. For more information, please visit About Cookies.

We use Google Analytics and other third-party cookies to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use this information to report to our funders and to analyse website usage so that we can improve user experience. Google Analytics collects information such as the number of site visitors, which pages they visited, how they came to the site and their location. This information is anonymous and cannot be used to identify you personally.

There are links to other sites on our site (for example, among others, to Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube), and while you are on our site these third-party sites may also deliver cookies to your device. We have no control over these third-party cookies.

You can read more about the cookies we use, how to recognise them, and how to manage them, here.

The ways in which we use personal data to provide services to you

We use the personal data you give us:

  • To fulfil our mission;
  • To provide and administer services that you have signed up to receive;
  • To keep you updated about our work, to share news about developments in the documentary film sector which we believe you will find interesting or helpful, and to inform you about the work of other organisations whose goals and aspirations we share; and
  • To comply with relevant regulations and legislation.

Data processing

Within Doc Society we limit access to your personal data to those people at Doc Society whose responsibilities require them to be able to access it. We regularly audit the information we store, to check how we manage consent for it, that the right people can access it, that it is secure, and that it is removed when no longer needed.

The personal data that we hold may be transferred to and subsequently processed by external companies. For example, personal data may be stored securely in the cloud on servers belonging to third-party suppliers. Third-party suppliers that maintain our IT systems have remote access to those systems and the personal data they contain. Where third-party suppliers have such access, we ensure that proper controls and contracts are in place to regulate how those suppliers manage the personal data to which they have access. Where these companies run their operations outside the European Economic Area, we take steps to make sure they provide an adequate level of protection in accordance with UK data protection law by requesting and checking their data policies and associated documents.

If you are a user of Doc Academy in the United States, we share your personal data with Blueshift Education, our Doc Academy delivery partner, so that they can manage the program and communicate with teachers who have opted in to receive information from the Doc Academy programme.

If required we may need to pass your details to the police, regulatory bodies or legal advisors.

Other circumstances in which we share your personal data

In addition to the above transfers to third parties, we may share your personal data with other Doc Society entities. The Doc Society entities are:

  • Our three UK entities: Doc Society, a not for profit company limited by guarantee; Doc Society Charitable trust, a registered charity; and BRITDOC Films, a not for profit company limited by guarantee which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Doc Society
  • Doc Society, Inc, our US entity, a not-for-profit registered with the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3)
  • Stichting Doc Society, our Netherlands entity

All Doc Society entities, including Doc Society Inc, provide a level of protection when processing personal data that is in accordance with UK data protection law.

In certain circumstances we may also share your personal data with the partners we select to deliver our Good Pitch programme outside the European Economic Area. We work with these partners because they are committed to the same goals and values as we are. When we share your personal data with a Good Pitch partner it is only ever on a case by case basis; that is, where we have identified that there is a public benefit in sharing an individual's personal data with our partner, where we are confident that that individual would recognise this public benefit, and where we are confident that that individual would not be surprised at or object to our sharing their personal data in this way. We will never indiscriminately share personal data from our databases in bulk with any delivery partner. We do not share sensitive personal data. Where we work with such partners we require that they put in place contractual controls such that they process personal data in accordance with UK data protection law.

We will never sell or rent your details to any other organisation.

Our legal basis for processing your personal data

Doc Society processes the information referred to in this Privacy Notice in pursuit of our legitimate interests in:

  • Fulfilling our mission by serving the documentary film community globally;
  • Providing you with the services that you have signed up to receive; and
  • Communicating with the documentary film community and its allies globally.

We may pursue these legitimate interests by contacting you by telephone, email, post or on social media.

Information about how you can manage the ways that we contact you, including how to opt out from some or all contact from us, is outlined in the "Your Rights" section below.

We rely on legitimate interests as the legal basis to process personal data to the extent that these legitimate interests are not overridden by your individual rights. Where appropriate we will sometimes process your data on an alternative legal basis; for example, because you have given us consent to do so.

How we use personal data to support our mission and the work we undertake in our five strategic areas

Doc Society's mission:

"We bring people together to unleash the transformational power of documentary film. We stand in solidarity with filmmakers and work to unite them with new friends and allies, building new models globally. We aim to innovate, share and innovate again."

Our five strategic areas are:

  • Helping good films be great
  • Engaging new partners
  • Building new audiences
  • Doing and measuring
  • Sharing our learning

We process data and share it as described in this privacy policy only to the extent that doing so enables us to fulfil our mission and act in one or more of our strategic areas.

Your rights with respect to the personal data that we hold

With respect to the personal data that we hold, you, the individual whose data that we hold, have the following rights:

Right to be informed Your right to be informed means we have an obligation to inform you clearly about how and why we are processing your data, which is what we do in this Privacy Policy.
Right of access You have the right to request a copy of the data we hold on you.
Right to rectification You are entitled to have personal data rectified if it is inaccurate or incomplete.
Right to erasure In certain circumstances you have the right to require us to remove the personal data we hold about you from our systems. This right may be overridden by our interests. For example, if we had made an award to you as a filmmaker, you could not subsequently insist that we delete all personal data about you from our systems if that made it impossible for us to continue to track the progress of our award to you.
Right to restrict processing This is the right to ask us to stop processing data in certain circumstances. It would apply if you had requested that we rectify or erase your personal data and we were considering whether to comply with that request.
Right to data portability The right to data portability allows individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes across different services.
Right to object You have the right to object to our relying on Legitimate Interests as the legal basis for processing your personal data.
Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling Automated decision-making includes such things as credit-scoring by means of an algorithm. You have a right not to be subject to automated decision-making where that is the only basis for a data processor taking a decision which would have a significant effect on you. Doc Society does not use automated decision making and profiling.


Contact preferences

We will contact you by email to inform you about our activities in general, about calls for applications to our film funds, about future Good Pitches, about developments in the documentary film sector globally, and about the work of allied organisations and individuals.

If you do not want to hear from us in this way, you can opt out at any time by clicking on the opt-out link at the bottom of our emails.

How to contact us if you have questions about the personal data that we hold or the ways in which we process it

Email us at datacontroller@docsociety.org, with "Doc Society personal data" in the subject line, or write to The Data Controller, Doc Society, 50 Frith Street, London W1D 4SQ. In normal circumstances we undertake to respond within fourteen days in the first instance.

If you contact us to request any form of access to or alteration of your personal data, or if you request erasure of your personal data, or if you wish to object to the basis on which we are processing your personal data, then we will ask you to provide proof of identity. The proofs of identity that we may ask for will vary on a case by case basis.

Creative Commons License