Privacy Policy

Last updated: 21 August 2026

Cuckfield Bookfest Community Interest Company (“Cuckfield Bookfest”, “we”, “us”, “our”) runs the annual Cuckfield Bookfest literary festival and this website, cuckfieldbookfest.co.uk.

We are a community-run, volunteer-led organisation (company number 12014883), registered office at 7 Halleighs, Whitemans Green, Cuckfield, Haywards Heath RH17 5DD, United Kingdom.

This policy explains what personal data we collect, why, and how we look after it, in line with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

1. Who we are (data controller)

Cuckfield Bookfest Community Interest Company is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy.

Data protection queries: info@cuckfieldbookfest.co.uk] Postal address: 7 Halleighs, Whitemans Green, Cuckfield, Haywards Heath RH17 5DD, United Kingdom

2. What personal data we collect

Depending on how you interact with us, we may collect:

Ticket bookings — name and email address.  Billing information and payment is taken and processed by TicketSource, our ticketing provider (we do not receive or store your card details). We may use anonymised transactional data for data analytics.

Mailing list sign-up — name and email address, submitted via our Mailchimp sign-up form, plus your engagement with our emails (opens/clicks) as reported by Mailchimp.

Contact form enquiries — name, email address, and the content of your message, submitted via our embedded Microsoft Forms contact form.

Volunteering, sponsorship and donation enquiries — name, contact details, and any information you choose to provide about your interest, skills, availability, or organisation, submitted via our Microsoft Forms application forms.

Friend and Benefactor memberships — your subscription payment is taken and processed directly by Stripe, our payment provider; we do not receive or store your card details or other payment information. We ourselves only hold your name, email address and membership level (Friend or Benefactor), for the purpose of managing our list of members.

Embedded Instagram feed — our homepage displays a feed of our recent Instagram posts. The images and videos in this feed are loaded directly from Instagram’s own servers by your browser, which means Instagram will see your IP address when the feed loads, in the same way it would if you visited instagram.com directly. This plugin does not itself set any cookies.

General website use — technical data such as IP address and browser type, collected via cookies and similar technologies. This is covered in detail in our separate Cookie Policy.

We do not knowingly collect personal data directly from children. Several of our festival events are aimed at children and families; where a child attends an event, the booking and any associated personal data is provided by a parent or guardian, not the child.

3. Why we use your data, and our legal basis

4. Who processes your data on our behalf, and who else is involved

We use a small number of trusted third-party services to run the festival and this website.

For some of these, we simply pass on data to a supplier who processes it on our instructions, for our purposes only (a “processor”):

• Mailchimp (The Rocket Science Group LLC) — for managing our mailing list and sending emails
• Microsoft — for our online contact, volunteering, sponsorship and donation forms (Microsoft Forms)
• Optimole — for optimising images shown on this website

For ticket purchases and memberships, you provide your payment details directly to our payment/ticketing providers — we never see or store your card details. These providers act as our processor for the purpose of fulfilling your order or subscription on our behalf, but — like most payment and ticketing providers — are also independent data controllers in their own right for certain purposes of their own, such as fraud prevention and meeting their own regulatory obligations as payment institutions. Their own privacy policies explain this in full, and are worth checking directly if you want the specifics of their role:

• TicketSource — processes your name, contact and payment details when you buy a ticket. We only receive the limited order information needed to run the event (such as your name and email). Privacy policy: https://www.ticketsource.com/privacypolicy
• Stripe — processes your payment details when you take out a Friend/Benefactor subscription. We only receive your name, email address and membership level. Privacy policy: https://stripe.com/gb/privacy

Where you interact with our public pages or click through to our profiles on social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), those platforms act as independent controllers under their own privacy policies. This also applies to the embedded Instagram feed on our homepage: Instagram is an independent controller of the data (including your IP address) generated when your browser loads content directly from its servers — see Instagram’s own privacy policy: https://privacycenter.instagram.com/policy

Some of these providers may store or process data outside the UK and European Economic Area (for example, in the United States). Where this happens, we rely on the provider’s adherence to the UK’s international data transfer safeguards, such as approved standard contractual clauses or a recognised adequacy arrangement.

We do not sell your personal data to anyone.

5. How long we keep your data

• Mailing list details: kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them
• Contact form enquiries: kept for 3 years after the enquiry is resolved
• Volunteer, membership and sponsorship data: kept for 7 years, or for as long as your involvement with Cuckfield Bookfest continues

6. Your rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you
• ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data
• ask us to delete your data, in certain circumstances
• ask us to restrict how we use your data, in certain circumstances
• object to us using your data, including for marketing
• ask for your data to be provided to you, or transferred elsewhere, in a portable format
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent (for example, you can unsubscribe from our mailing list using the link in any email)

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in Section 1. If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, you also have the right to complain to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

7. Cookies

Our website uses cookies and similar technologies. Full details of the cookies we use and how to manage your preferences are set out in our separate Cookie Policy.

8. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time, for example if we start using a new service or ticketing provider. The “last updated” date at the top of this page shows when it was last revised. We’d encourage you to check back occasionally.

9. Contact us

If you have any questions about this policy or how we handle your personal data, please contact us at info@cuckfieldbookfest.co.uk or write to us at: 7 Halleighs, Whitemans Green, Cuckfield, Haywards Heath RH17 5DD, United Kingdom.