Privacy Policy

Who we are

At ECI we are committed to maintaining trust between ourselves and you our customers (both parents and students). We never share your details with any other organisations or companies. Your personal information remains with us. Please read this Privacy Policy for details about how your personal information is handled and stored.

Personal information and mailing lists

As part of the registration process when you sign up for an ECI program we collect personal information. We collect this information via the following applications:

Checkfront

This is a cloud based booking application that allows organisations such as ECI to manage their inventories online, centralize reservations, and process payments online. For more information please see the Checkfront Privacy Policy.

Wufoo

This is an online form builder application that we use to collect information from you in the following ways:

  • When you apply for a scholarship
  • When you fill out a Teacher Recommendation Form
  • When you fill out a post trip Evaluation Form

For more information please see the Wufoo Privacy Policy.

LiveChat

This is an online customer service application with live support and web analytics capabilities. We use this online chat facility to communicate directly with you via our website. We capture the following information from you during a LiveChat session:

  • Your email address
  • Your location
  • A record of our text based chat with you

For more information please see the LiveChat Privacy Policy.

Google Analytics

When someone visits educulture.com we use a third party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.

MailChimp

We use a third-party provider, MailChimp, to deliver our newsletter. We gather statistics around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. You can unsubscribe to general mailings by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of any of our newsletters or by emailing our data protection officer Marie Harris at info [at] educulture [dot] com. For more information please see the MailChimp Privacy Policy.

Why we collect your personal information

We use the information you supply us for the following reasons:

  • To maintain communication with you both prior to and during the trip or course (both parents and students).
  • To help us place you with a suitable host family or HomeTeach teacher. We share your contact and personal details with Host Family Coordinators, Host Families, HomeTeach teachers, HomeTeach Coordinators and language schools (where applicable in each case).
  • To give you information about ECI news, trips and HomeTeach courses via newsletters that we send out on a regular basis.

We don’t rent or trade email lists with other organisations and businesses.

Children’s details and consent

GDPR sets the age at which a child can give consent at 13 for the UK and 16 for the rest of Europe. For students under the age of 16 filling out our online registration form we require consent from a parent or guardian. This will be asked for on the registration form.

About the information we hold

Once we receive information about you via our online registration application Checkfront, this information is held on our database until the end of your programme with us. After this time it is archived on our system and held securely in our Checkfront account. After 3 years this information is deleted. We keep it for this length of time in case you need to contact us for any follow up reason relating to the financial transactions you made to us, or anything concerning your host family stay. You can contact us at any time during this 3 year period to ask us to delete the information we hold for you.

Access to your personal information

You are entitled to view, amend, or delete the personal information that we hold. Email your request to our data protection officer Marie Harris at info [at] educulture [dot] com.

About us

ECI is based in the UK. It is here that decisions about how your data is processed are taken.

Cookies

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)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass data to advertising networks
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions
  • Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) 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.

More about our Cookies

Website Function Cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Allowing you to add comments to our site
  • 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.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Disabling cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Social Website Cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by:

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

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 (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us if how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

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 our’s and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.

Changes to this Privacy Notice

This Privacy Policy will be reviewed annually in order to make certain that ECI remains GDPR compliant, and in an effort to improve our relationship with our customers, in terms of protecting your privacy and handling of your personal information you have entrusted to us.

This policy was last reviewed on May 22nd 2018.