Privacy policy

First Connections is a business network for the North East, run by the founders of four regional businesses. For anything about this policy or the data we hold, email hello@first-connections.co.uk. [Registered entity name, registered address and ICO registration number to be confirmed by the founders.]

We only collect what you type into one of our forms, plus the booking details Eventbrite passes to us as the event organiser:

• Newsletter signup: your email address.
• Funding support enquiry: your name, email address, business name, and optionally your phone number, business stage and a description of what you are hoping to fund.
• Event waitlists and launch lists (the platform and podcast lists): your name, email address and business name.
• Event bookings: when you book a free ticket on Eventbrite, we receive your name, email address, and whether you booked, cancelled or checked in.

For the newsletter and the waitlists, our basis is your consent: you asked us to contact you, and you can withdraw at any time. For funding enquiries, it is taking steps at your request before entering into a contract with our partner. For running and understanding our events, it is our legitimate interest in running a business network well, balanced against your privacy: it is why the reporting we share is aggregated.

We keep the list of sub-processors short. Each one processes your data only on our instructions, under a data processing agreement, and this is all of them:

• AWS - eu-west-1 region, which hosts this site and serves it to you.
• Neon, which hosts the database that stores form submissions and event records.
• Brevo, which stores newsletter contacts and sends the newsletter. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing there stops the emails at source.
• Eventbrite, which handles event bookings under its own privacy policy, as the platform you book on.
• Metrick, who receive funding enquiries as described above, and act as their own data controller from that point.

Form submissions are kept while they are still useful to the enquiry they belong to, and reviewed yearly. Event records are kept as a running history of the network, because the pattern of who attends over time is the thing they are for. Ask us to delete yours and we will.

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to how we use it. Email hello@first-connections.co.uk and we will respond within one month. If you are not happy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

The public site sets no analytics or advertising cookies. The admin section, which only our team can reach, uses a single cookie to keep whoever is signed in signed in.