Guiders Staff Room Part 3

[Groovee]

Reconvening over here ladies.

No. But that doesn't mean you can use another system.
Guiding will take a very dim view and you will be contravening your duty of care to your girls. Possibly GDPR too as you cannot guarantee their personal data would be safe.

Sorry. You CAN email from go.

What do you want to track?

Sorry, didn't mean to get off on the wrong foot here. Was just hoping to use whatever I am allowed to use to be as efficient as possible from day one! Of course I will be taking GDPR and safeguarding very seriously (I did mention that in my previous post).

Herat the app I was looking for sends texts and emails out to parents with voting buttons for "yes I can attend" and "no I can't". It then provides automatic summaries with the lists or yes and no to the administrator.

Was hoping that GO might do that too. I know the scouts/cubs/beavers in my area use a similar system. Maybe it's something that might be available in the future for GO.

@Heratnumber7 well, it's impossible to text or email parents without storing their number.
But no, don't use another database.

You can use Survey Monkey for voting buttons. Or EventBrite.

The app used by Scouts has been banned by Guiding. I suspect because they spent a lot of money developing GO.

As for this it's impossible to text or email parents without storing their number.

You need specific, opt in, permission from parents to store their number on your phone. We've got a record of all our parents' approval for this and we check at the start of every new year.

You can email parents directly from GO. You shouldn't store them on your pc.

It's all a PITA, and I suspect many Leaders ignore the rules. You'd be silly to trust a third party app though.

@Heratnumber7 your phone will store the number unless you delete all incoming and outgoing messages which is a bit pointless.

I've not tried using email directly from Go but you can't send attachments can you? So again you'll have to use your computer - which saves recent addresses - and you'll get replies to your email address so you'll have their address anyway.

I agree. But Guiding, and The Law will tell you that that is no excuse. You must have explicit (not implicit, inferred by you because they have contacted you) a parent's permission to store their contact details outside of GO on a personal device.

I have been on Region GDPR training today

Good timing Herat. So can we gain explicit permission from the parents or is that disallowed?

That is allowed.
Our unit asks all parents to sign a permission slip once a year, giving us permission to store their contact numbers and emails.

The big thing about GDPR is the permission.
As long as you have explicit permission to use personal data for something, that's ok.

I use personal data for work and no, you don't have to ask every individual for explicit permission, as long as you publish your policy, tell people how to remove their info, there are a few other things you have to do.

So on some work databases that I'm on - some of them have carried on as is but sent out a statement, but one deleted the whole thing and started from scratch - because the owner didn't understand the regulations.

And it is pretty much literally impossible to remove an email address from an email program that's used it.

That's not what I was told today spouse.

New leaders in training should be getting this info from their training sessions and their mentors. That's what the mentors are for.

There are a lot of myths out there about GDPR. Use the GG website to find GG's requirements and ask your mentor.

We have a unit email. Parents send us their email and then I BCC everyone.

Exactly Groovee. But you can't actually delete the parents' email addresses even if you delete the content of all emails.

I have I estimate at least 100,000 emails in my work email program. Despite none of them signing up to any kind of agreement, I've not emailed any one of them to ask if they agree to me having their email in a program. My employer is very large and on the ball. GG have been known to get many things wrong in the past, and they haven't indicated any way to get rid of phone numbers or email addresses from sent or received messages or from your email program. They have a long record of not thinking things through and this is one of those things.

Have a look at the starting forms. They have been updated to include communication too.

I have an email account just for my unit. I keep the parents email in there only while the child is in Brownies, then it gets deleted. Everything else is kept in GO.

@InflagranteDelicto I do similar but the fact remains that if you tried to email a parent now, even if they'd left, our current parents that haven't given permission for storage, your email program will probably have it still.

Yes, it would. But given that emailing from GO is very clunky, especially with attachments, it's the safest way, so long as every safeguard that I can is applied. I'd rather this way then everything coming through my personal email.

It is also more handy if you are a team and you can share an email.

That too! I've set it up as a group, so if Brownies is typed into the BCC bar everyone can be added at once, leaders & girls (OK, their parents). It's quite odd to receive an email that you've not sent!

Have just found out that Girlguiding Staffordshire and Girlguiding Leicester have their own smart phone apps , available on iTunes!

So does it seem that most people here use a group email address (separate from the GO system), to email parents?

We did when we had "a team", but with just me I have been a bit lax.