Privacy Policy

At Catalyst (part of the Northern Ireland Science Park Foundation group of companies), we take the privacy of the people who engage with us seriously. This policy explains how we collect, manage, use and protect your personal data and what controls you have.

Catalyst is Northern Ireland’s next-generation science park. We are a not-for-profit organisation that invests the surplus generated from our agile workspace and facilities, providing the underwriting necessary for the community-led development of our entrepreneurial innovation ecosystem.

Key to our model is the co-location of major technology corporations, world-class research and start-ups. Over 3,000 engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs and executives work in our campuses in Belfast, Derry/ Londonderry and Ballymena.

Our vision for Northern Ireland:
A community of innovators so powerful that its people can change the world.

This is based on our passionate belief that innovation has the power to transform NI into one of Europe’s most entrepreneurial and inclusive knowledge economies by 2030.

Our mission is to:
Provide the home, networks and empathy to nurture anyone with the talent and ambition to produce world-leading products and services.

This document may be updated from time to time to reflect the latest view of what we do with your information. Please check back frequently; you can always find an up-to-date version of this notice on our website at www.WeAreCatalyst.org or you can ask us for a copy here.

Refer to the sections below for more details on how and why we use your personal information:

1. Who are we?

In this policy references to the Catalyst, or to ‘we’ or ‘us’ are to The Northern Ireland Science Park Foundation Limited group of companies, a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, which includes: The Northern Ireland Science Park Foundation Limited (NI035856), The Northern Ireland Science Park (Holdings) Limited (NI039294), The Northern Ireland Science Park Property Limited (NI038987), The Northern Ireland Science Park Trading Limited (NI038988) and the North West Regional Science Park Limited (NI614527).

2. What personal data we collect and how we use it

Catalyst is what’s known as the ‘controller’ of the personal data you provide to us. We will usually collect basic personal data about you like your name, your company name, job title, postal address, telephone number, email address etc.

We collect your personal data in connection with specific activities, such as to share programme invites, programme updates, newsletters or membership requests, feedback and information you provide in applications.

On occasions, we may process personal data when we need to do this to fulfil a contract (for example, for our tenants, suppliers and customers) or where we are required to do this by law or other regulations.

We also process your data when it is in our legitimate interests to do this and when these interests do not override your rights. Those legitimate interests include providing you with information on Catalyst activities, membership, sponsorship, events, newsletter requests, feedback, competitions and other activities. Please see the section on ‘Legitimate Interest’ for more information.

How we obtain your details
We will also hold information about your details so that we can respect your preferences for being contacted by us.

We collect your personal information in a number of ways and combine the information from these sources with the information you provide to us directly, e.g.

• When you provide it to us directly.
• When you provide permission to other organisations to share it with us (including Linkedin, Eventbrite or Twitter).
• When we collect it as you use our websites
• When you have given it to a third party and you have provided permission to pass your information on to us.
• From publicly available sources (where possible) to keep your information up to date (e.g. Google Searches or Company websites).

Pro-bono work or volunteering
When you engage with Catalyst to provide pro-bono or volunteer support to our programmes or partner companies, we will keep you up to date with the work that we are doing and events we are involved with. We will also let you know of any changes which you need to be aware of and we will only use this information in relation to your engagement with us for as long as you wish to remain engaged with us.

Data Transfers
All the personal data we process is processed by our staff within the UK however for the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance your information may be situated outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). This will be done in accordance with guidance issued by the ICO. If you would like to change the way you hear from us or no longer wish to receive direct marketing communications from then please use the unsubscribe links below:

Catalyst/News – Unsubscribe here

Catalyst Members News – Unsubscribe here

NW CAM News – Unsubscribe here

If you wish to request any action in relation to your rights under GDPR, please contact our Data Protection Lead via email: Data.Protection@WeAreCatalyst.org

3. Legitimate interests

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we have a number of lawful reasons that we can use (or ‘process’) your personal information. One of the lawful reasons is called ‘legitimate interests’.

Legitimate Interests generally means that we can process your personal information if we have a genuine and legitimate reason to do so and we are not harming any of your rights and interests.
When you provide your personal details to us we use your information for our legitimate business interests to carry out our work and deliver our vision for Northern Ireland. Before doing this, though, we will also carefully consider necessity and balance any potential impact on you and your rights.

Some typical examples of when we might use the approach are for direct marketing, maintaining the security of our system, data analytics, enhancing, modifying or improving our services, identifying usage trends and determining the effectiveness of our programmes.

OUR VISION FOR NORTHERN IRELAND
A community of innovators so powerful that its people can change the world.

This is based on our passionate belief that innovation has the power to transform NI into one of Europe’s most entrepreneurial and inclusive knowledge economies by 2030.
We will process the personal information you have supplied to us to conduct and manage our business to enable us to provide you with the most appropriate information, marketing, event invites and provide the best and most secure experience. These are what we consider to be our ‘Legitimate Interests’.

Our interests
Direct Marketing: We will email information such as Techwatch or Knowledge Economy newsletters, invites to Catalyst events such as Frameworks workshops, Springboard panels, Generation Innovation or Invent, or updates on our Programmes which we believe may be of interest to you.

Your best interest: Processing your information to make sure you only receive updates to programmes you are interested in and to ensure our websites and systems are secure.

Analytics: To process your personal information for the purposes of customer engagement analysis, assessment, profiling and direct marketing, on a personalised or aggregated basis, to help us with our activities and to provide you with the most relevant information as long as this does not harm any of your rights and interests.

Research: To determine the effectiveness of programme campaigns, advertising and to develop our products, services, systems and relationships with you.

Due Diligence: We may need to conduct investigations on supporters, potential customers and business partners to determine if those companies and individuals have been involved or convicted of offences such as fraud, bribery and corruption.

We will also hold information about you to allow us to respect your preferences for being contacted by us.

Your interests
When we process your personal information for our legitimate interests, we will consider necessity and balance any potential impact on you and your rights under data protection and any other relevant law. Our legitimate business interests do not automatically override your interests – we will not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your explicit consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law).

For more information about your rights, please see the “What are your rights?” section of this Privacy Policy.

You retain the right to change how we contact you, personalise the programmes and events that we update you on or request that we no longer process your personal details at any time. If you would like to change the way you hear from us or no longer wish to receive direct marketing communications from then please use the unsubscribe link shown below:

Catalyst/News – Unsubscribe here

Catalyst Members News – Unsubscribe here

NW CAM News – Unsubscribe here

If you wish to request any action in relation to your rights under GDPR, please contact our Data Protection Lead here: Data.Protection@WeAreCatalyst.org

4. Sharing your information

We only disclose information to third parties or individuals when obliged to by law, for purposes of national security, taxation and criminal investigations and the following:

• If you have agreed that we may do so.
• When we use other companies to provide services on our behalf, sending mail and emails, customer analysis, assessment and profiling, when using auditors/advisors
• To our subsidiaries (i.e. within The Northern Ireland Science Park Foundation Limited group of companies).
• To protect and defend the rights, property or personal safety of Catalyst, our tenants, our visitors, our websites and for other lawful purposes.
• We may disclose aggregate statistics about our site visitors, supporters, tenants and operations to prospective partners and other reputable third parties and for other lawful purposes, but these statistics won’t include any personally identifying information.
• If we run an event in partnership with other named organisations your details may need to be shared. We will be very clear what will happen to your data when you register.

And, we will never sell or rent your personal information to other organisations.

5. Retaining your information

We hold your information only as long as necessary for each purpose we use it, this is subject to our data retention policy. The data retention periods will vary depending on the type of personal data being retained and any legal or contractual obligations we have for retaining such information.

If you request that we have no further contact with you, we will only retain enough basic information to avoid sending you unwanted materials in the future and to ensure that we don’t accidentally duplicate information.

6. The Catalyst Cookie policy

This policy explains what cookies are, how Catalyst uses them on our websites and what you can do to manage how they are used.

Cookies and how they benefit you
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you’d expect.
• Remember your settings during and between visits.
• Improve the speed/security of the site.
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook.
• Continuously improve our website for you.
• Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do).

If the settings on your browser that you are using to view this website are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

How long do cookies last?
When a web server sends a cookie, it asks your browser to keep that particular cookie until a certain date and time. These dates can be:

• Some date in the future – which might be a few minutes or a few hours from now (to track something like your shopping cart in an online store). The cookie might expire many years in the future, to keep track of your browser for a long time.
• When you close your browser – this is called a session cookie, the next time you start your browser these will have vanished.
• Some date in the past – this is how the server asks a browser to remove a previously-stored cookie.
• Our own cookies
• We use cookies to make our website work including:
  Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions.
• Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions (e.g. you declined to use our app or take our survey).

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Site improvement cookies
We regularly test new designs or site features on our sites. We may do this by showing slightly different versions of our websites to different people and anonymously monitoring how our site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps us to offer you a better website experience.

Anonymous visitor statistics cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using, how long they spend on the site, what page they look at, etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These analytics programs also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, helping us to develop our services for you.

Google Analytics
Advertising or targeting cookies

These types of cookies are used to deliver adverts which will be more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement and to help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. They are normally placed by advertising networks with the Trust’s permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Targeting or advertising cookies will often be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.

Link to social networks, like Facebook, who may use information to provide targeted advertising to you on other websites.

Third party functions
Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following third part functions which use cookies.

Turning cookies off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of ours and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

7. What are your rights?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force on May 25th 2018, gives everyone a number of very important rights. These are:

• Transparency over how we use your personal information (right to be informed).
• Request a copy of the information we hold about you, which will be provided to you within one month (right of access).
• Update or amend the information we hold about you if it is wrong (right of rectification).
• Ask us to stop using your information (right to restrict processing).
• Ask us to remove your personal information from our records (right to be ‘forgotten’).
• Object to the processing of your information for marketing purposes (right to object).
• Obtain and reuse your personal data for your own purposes (right to data portability).
• Not be subject to a decision when it is based on automated processing (automated decision making and profiling).

If you would like to change the way you hear from us or no longer wish to receive direct marketing communications from then please use the unsubscribe links shown below:

Catalyst/News – Unsubscribe here

Catalyst Members News – Unsubscribe here

NW CAM News – Unsubscribe here

If you wish to request any action in relation to your rights under GDPR, please contact our Data Protection Lead here: Data.Protection@WeAreCatalyst.org

8. How to contact us

If you wish to discuss anything in our privacy policy, find out more about your rights or obtain a copy of the information we hold about you, please contact our Data Protection Lead on the details shown below.

If you have a complaint about the use of your personal information or how it has been processed you can in the first instance contact us to give us the opportunity to put things right as quickly as possible. If you wish to make a complaint you may do so in person, in writing or by e-mail by contacting our Data Protection Lead on the details shown below:

Data Protection Lead
Catalyst
The Innovation Centre
Queens Road
Belfast
BT3 9DT

Or by emailing: Data.Protection@WeAreCatalyst.org

Please be assured that all complaints received will be fully investigated and we ask that you supply as much information as possible to help us resolve your complaint quickly.
If you remain dissatisfied then you have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at: –

The Information Commissioner’s Office – Northern Ireland
3rd Floor
14 Cromac Place,
Belfast
BT7 2JB

ni@ico.org.uk

Updates to this notice
We will make changes to this Privacy Notice from time to time, particularly when we change how we use your personal information or change our technology.

You can always find an up-to-date version of this notice on our website or you can ask us for a copy here.