Tagged / charities

Charity Impact Networking Day

BU research, Events, Fusion, Impact, Research communication

Last Monday the 13th of May, the Charity Impact Networking Day was attended in fantastic numbers at Talbot campus, Kimmeridge House.

The day consisted of two well attended events. The morning session, ‘Charity Research Showcase’ was a display of academic work, presented on stalls for various visiting charities to engage with.

Academic attendees included Professor Jane Murphy of the Faculty for Health and Social Science. She says that she had a very successful session in showcasing her centre’s research and in speaking to multiple charity representatives who may be involved in future project collaborations.

The afternoon ‘SteamLab’ session was a chance to work within groups of academics and charities to identify research themes and possible project collaborations for the future.

It was fantastic to hear plans for funding applications due to networking introductions.

   

Thank you to all academics and charities that attended both morning and afternoon sessions.

There were some great discussions of possible future project collaborations. It was also brilliant to see many people leave with key contacts.

A final special thank you to Professor Lee-Ann Fenge, Dr Fiona Cownie, Ian Jones, Rachel Clarke and Connor Tracy for organising and running the events.

Small charities face bankruptcy for not complying with GDPR, but put clients at risk if they do

BU research, Featured, the conversation

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The way charities use and hold data on behalf of their clients and donors creates problems under GDPR. Tashatuvango/Shutterstock

By Dr Shamal Faily, Bournemouth University

You will no doubt have received the emails yourself: don’t forget to opt in, click here to stay in touch, we don’t want to lose you. The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, comes into force on May 25, and organisations and businesses large and small are racing to ensure the way they collect, store and use the personal data of their customers and clients meets the new, higher standards of this new European Union privacy law.

Compliance with GDPR can be costly, requiring organisations to analyse the way they work, the data they use, how it is handled and secured. Documenting how personal data is held and processed is tedious and time consuming, as is developing procedures for dealing with individuals’ requests to see the data held on them, security breaches that involve loss of data, or assessing the privacy impact of some new product or service.

To data protection authorities across the European Union, such as the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), this is just good practice – the cost of doing business in a free and open market. But what if yours is a non-profit organisation? Several UK charities have been fined for breaking existing data protection laws. Many others are acutely aware that a single penalty for non-compliance could put them out of business.

The ICO has produced guidance for charities, and reading it you might think that the challenges charities face are the same as those facing any small business. Both have limited resources, time and money to spend on ensuring compliance. Losing or misusing personal data leads to the erosion of trust, irrespective of whether those affected are paying customers or charity donors. But scratch beneath the surface and you can see how GDPR causes unique problems for small charities, particularly those that work to help society’s most vulnerable.

Duty of care

The new privacy regulations require that personal data is “processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data”. Any security expert will tell you that perfect security is impossible, so businesses can meet this requirement by investing in security considered “good enough” to meet the duty of care to their clients and customers.

But for charities, the duty of care they have for both their vulnerable client base and their donors is so strong that a culture of cost-cutting has formed. Because charities lack the expertise to understand the risks they face, they may wrongly believe they are avoiding risks, or accept risks without understanding the implications. Ultimately, this works against charities investing in the security they actually need. A report commissioned by the UK Department for Culture Media and Sport in 2017 found this culture even led to some charities intentionally relying on out-of-date or low technology solutions. In one case, a charity was even prepared to accept the risk of damaging data losses, in the hope that their donors would be sympathetic and appreciate that, to them, cybersecurity is a luxury they cannot afford.



Read more:
GDPR comes with teeth – here are the winners and losers

Charities care for others, but are not always able to care for their data. perfectlab/Shutterstock

Ethical tensions

The new privacy regulations are built around fair treatment, but this also fails to appreciate the ethical tensions faced by charities. Under GDPR, organisations can only collect data from individuals when they have a legal basis for doing so, for example that the individual has given their consent (such as signing up for an email newsletter), or that the organisation must do so in order to comply with a legal obligation (such as banking information required to meet money laundering regulations). However, complications arise because while an individual may give consent, they may also withdraw it.

Imagine, for example, that Bob suffers from a drug addiction. In a moment of clarity, he checks into private rehab uk for help, and gives consent for the centre to collect what personal data they require. But Bob later relapses, and – to keep this information from his family – withdraws his consent and exercises his right to be forgotten, demanding that the rehab centre deletes the data on him that it holds.

The GDPR provides some discretion for processing personal data in matters of life and death, but not if Bob is capable of giving consent. And so the rehab centre faces a dilemma: it can assert Bob isn’t capable, exposing themselves to the risk of a fine should he report them to the ICO. Alternatively, they can comply and expose Bob to future risks that may threaten his health or life, and reduce or remove the information they know that might one day help save his life.

ICO guidance for not-for-profits should answer the sorts of questions regularly raised by charities. But instead it treats small charities like any other small business. The ICO claims the is information that charities want, but it is not the information they need. If guidance fails to acknowledge the risks to small charities, what incentive do charities have to invest time and money following it?

What charities need are less platitudes on what they should be doing – they already know this – and more advice on how to do it, given the very particular challenges they face. In a speech given to the charities attending the Funding and Regulatory Compliance conference last year, the information commissioner said that getting privacy right can be done, that it should be done, and she would say how it can be done. Yet as the deadline looms, charities are still waiting to hear about the “how”.

Shamal Faily, Senior Lecturer in Systems Security Engineering, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Introducing the Student Project Bank

BU research, Knowledge Exchange and Impact Team, R & KE Operations

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Based in the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office, the Student Project Bank is a mutually beneficial collaboration between community organisations and BU students. Students get to work on a live project with real world impact as part of their studies and community organisations get the opportunity to access their creativity, skills and gain valuable insights. The Student Project Bank is based on a science shop and our projects must have the potential to benefit an individual, a community or society through research, service improvement or a creative project.

We are looking for community organisations, charities, not-for-profits and corporate partners to submit their project ideas. We will work with them to turn their ideas into project briefs which will be made available to students across BU from our undergraduate and Master’s courses.

How it works

  1. A community organisation tells us about their idea.
  2. We’ll work with them to develop their idea into an exciting project brief and upload it to the Student Project Bank. It can then be picked up by a student with the right skills and enthusiasm.
  3. We’ll meet with the community organisation and student to discuss everyone’s needs before starting the project.
  4. Once completed, our student shares the results of the project with the community organisation and it is published open access on our website.

The Student Project Bank is currently in the development stage and we will be putting out a call for interested parties to take part in a pilot project over the coming months. If you would like to find out more about this fantastic project, or would like to take part, please contact spb@bournemouth.ac.uk. We will be launching to students in September 2016.

Meet the brave, Team PhD!

BU Challenges, PG research

In the team of three psychology PGRs are Becca (2nd year), Anna and Simon (both 3rd years working hard on their theses). They have teamed up to race in the Bournemouth International Triathlon on 5th July doing the sprint distance: 750m Channel swim, 22k bike ride, and a 5k run between Bournemouth and Boscombe piers. Tri1 (2)

Becca, Anna and Simon are raising funds for Marie Curie UK, a charity that helps people affected by terminal illnesses.

Why are they doing it? Because they want to help; one night of nursing care costs an £160, which is a lot of money for those affected and needing support. Anna, one of the team members says: “My undergraduate lecturer died of cancer last year at the age of thirty six. Nurses and staff at a Marie Curie hospice had helped him tremendously during his struggle with the illness and he was always praising them for their dedication and all the work they did. If we can provide some comfort to others by our fundraising initiative, then this is all we want to do. We’ll do all the running anyway!”

Tri 2 (2)

 

The team has a very successful record of supporting Marie Curie UK and has taken part in Pandemonium Obstacle Race in 2014, raising an amazing £385 for the charity.

This year so far, team PhD has collected £335 via their Just Giving page and with two weeks until the race, there is still time to raise more! If you would like to sponsor Anna, Becca and Simon, please visit their Just Giving Page on: https://www.justgiving.com/Team-PhD/

TeamPhD (2)

Tourism Week – Helping charities use social media

BU research

The eTourism Lab, ICTHR , in the School of Tourism at Bournemouth University is supporting Just a Drop– a water charity to spread its word through Social Media and the Internet.

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis and Georgina Sekadakis a Masters student at Bournemouth University work closely with Fiona Jeffery Chairman of World Travel Market & Just a Drop and Ana Sustelo of Just a Drop to demonstrate how charities can use Social Media to benefit their great causes. Just a Drop is a registered water charity raising money to build wells, install boreholes and hand pumps as well as carry out sanitation and health education programmes in some of the poorest parts of the developing world. The mission they are trying to accomplish is to reduce child mortality. Currently a child dies every 20 seconds as a result of water-borne diseases and this must stop. Their main donors are from the Travel and Tourism industry however they are now trying to attract donors from all industries and individuals.

While there is agreement that charities nowadays have a greater need for marketing, there is little agreement on how they should be approaching marketing and especially when it comes to the adoption of Social Media; research has shown that they are lagging behind as they are waiting to see how others use this new technology.  Today, charities of any size can take advantage of Social Media tools to showcase their organisation to the world without relying on huge budgets.  Money is no longer the decision factor, creativity is. Getting a head start and expanding your Instagram presence buy choosing to buy Threads shares might be a game-changer in this fast-paced digital environment.

Little research has actually been carried out on marketing from a non-profitable organisation’s point of view.  Bournemouth University is experimenting with Internet and Social Media to try and classify a best practice for charities to help them engage and create awareness about the problem and how people can help make a change.  Facebook and Twitter are primarily used to raise awareness and create story telling.  As relationships are the foundation for Social Media sites they are key for charities in order to engage further with their stakeholders.  So far our attempts have been successful and we have found that followers are engaging with us through Social Media and we are now looking into ways of raising money through the various platforms to help fund new projects around the world. Using social media strategically will be critical for organisations of the future and the expertise of the eTourism Lab will be widely used for all organisations engaging.