Privacy policy

Who this is about

This policy explains how NZ Businesswomen looks after the personal information you give us through this website, including our find-your-group, contact, and guest-visit forms. We follow the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

When you become a member, some extra terms apply to your member profile and the information you share inside the network. This page is mostly about the public website and getting in touch with us, with a few notes on what the member area holds and who can see it.

What we collect

We only ask for what we need to help you find your group and follow up. Depending on the form you use, that can include:

• Your name and email address.
• Your town, city, or region.
• A phone number, if you give us one.
• Business details you choose to share, like your business name, website, when you started, and a short description.
• Which group you would like to visit, and how you heard about us.
• Which member brought you to us, if you came through her invite link or invite email or gave her name on the form, so the NZ Businesswomen team knows who invited whom. She is credited for the introduction, and nothing is sent to you about it.
• Anything you write in a message or comments box.

If you use the feedback tab inside the member area, we record, alongside your note, some technical details about the page and device you were on: your browser and version, device type, screen size, connection, timezone, the page address, and the last few script errors the page saw, so the person who builds the app can fix what you saw. That is technical data only, never anything else you have written or shared in the app.

What we do not collect here

We do not take or store any bank or card details on this website. Membership billing is handled separately by our billing provider, and the app only ever reflects your status. We never buy in, scrape, or enrich your information from third parties like LinkedIn. Anything on your profile is what you have given us and confirmed yourself.

How we use it

We use your information to point you to your nearest group, to have the right regional manager follow up with you, and to answer any question you have asked. That is it.

We will not spam you, and you can ask us to stop contacting you at any time.

Who can see it

Your enquiry is shared only with the small NZ Businesswomen team and the regional manager for your area, so they can follow up with you. We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to anyone.

Inside the member area, if you attach a screenshot to a referral (say a social media post, where you have the post but not the person's details), only the two members on that referral can see it, not even the NZ Businesswomen team, and it is deleted when the referral closes. A screenshot of a post can show someone else's name and words, so we ask you to consider that before you attach it.

If you record for yourself whether you did what you committed to at a meeting, your answer is visible to you and to whoever runs your group, never to the rest of the group, and it is never counted or scored.

Photos members add to a meeting are seen there by that group and its managers. We ask everyone who adds a photo not to upload anyone who has not given permission to be shared online, guests included, and NZ Businesswomen only uses meeting photos in its own channels, including online, on that basis. If you would rather not appear, just say no when you are asked, or tell whoever runs your group, and you will be left out. Whoever runs the group, or the member who added a photo, can share chosen photos to the members-only Community board for the region or the whole network, with a reminder to check that the people in them are happy with that.

If whoever runs your group asks for a change of venue, time or day, the request, the decision and a log of what changed are kept on the group and seen by the group's managers.

The services that hold it

We use a small number of service providers to run the website and the member area. Most of them are based outside New Zealand, so your information is stored or passes through servers overseas. Each one works under a written agreement that limits what it can do with your information, and we have chosen them because they protect it to a standard comparable to New Zealand's.

• Supabase holds our database, member sign-in and member photos, on servers in Sydney, Australia.
• Vercel hosts the website and member area, counts visits to the public pages, and checks that our forms are being filled in by a person rather than a bot, in the United States. That check looks at your browser, not at what you write in the form, and nothing it uses follows you around the web.
• Resend sends our emails, in the United States.
• Mailchimp holds our newsletter list, in the United States.
• Xero is our billing system, in the United States. The website never sends it your card or bank details.
• Vimeo plays the videos on our pages, in the United States.
• Humanitix runs bookings for some of our events. If you book through it, what you enter there is held under Humanitix's own privacy policy.
• If you switch on notifications in the member area, your browser's own push service (for example Apple or Google) delivers them. They carry a short message and a link, nothing more.

Where we use AI

We do not use AI on your information. Nothing you give us through this website or the member area is sent to an AI service.

If that ever changes, we will update this page before it does, it will only ever run when you ask it to, and nothing it writes will go live until you have read and confirmed it. We will never scrape LinkedIn or buy in information about you.

How long we keep it

If you enquire and do not join, we keep your enquiry for 12 months and then delete it. If you asked to hear from us, your name and email stay on our newsletter list until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove you, and we will.

If you have been a member and you leave, your record moves to our general records and we keep it for seven years. That is the ordinary business record keeping period in New Zealand.

Your choices and your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you can ask to see the personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct it if it is wrong. Just get in touch and we will sort it out.

You can also ask us to remove your details or to stop contacting you at any time.

If something ever goes wrong with your information, such as someone getting access who should not have, and it could cause you serious harm, we will tell you and the Privacy Commissioner as soon as we can.

If you are not happy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

Cookies

The public website uses only the cookies it needs to work. If you sign in as a member, we use a secure cookie to keep you signed in. We do not use cookies to track you around the web.

To learn which pages are useful, the public website counts visits with Vercel Web Analytics. It sets no cookies and does not identify you. It records the page you visited, the site that sent you, your country and your type of device. Nothing is counted inside the member area.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, the new version takes effect from the date we publish it here.