The Men and Boys Data Hub (and its Funding Evidence Engine) is operated by The Foundry Staffs CIC (“we”, “us”, “our”), a Community Interest Company registered in England and Wales. We are the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.
This policy explains what personal information we collect when you use the Hub, why we use it, who we share it with, and your rights. It applies to the public statistics hub, the news feed, and the members area (the evidence-pack generator and project tracking).
Browsing the public statistics and news requires no account and collects no personal information beyond standard technical logs (section 9).
When you create an account and use the members area, we collect:
Please do not enter personal information about identifiable individuals (for example named beneficiaries, or anyone's health information) into the free-text fields. The Hub is designed to hold information about your organisation and projects, not about individuals.
| What we do | Why | Lawful basis (UK GDPR) |
|---|---|---|
| Create and run your account; let you sign in by email link | To provide the service you asked for | Legitimate interests / steps at your request |
| Store your organisation and project details; generate evidence packs and draft narratives | To deliver the core service | Legitimate interests |
| Let you record and track funding applications and outcomes | To deliver the tracking feature you use | Legitimate interests |
| Send you occasional product updates | Only if you opted in | Consent |
| Produce aggregated, anonymised insights about what evidence is used and what helps secure funding | To improve the service and understand the sector | Legitimate interests (anonymised/aggregated — see section 10) |
| Keep the service secure and working | Security and fraud prevention | Legitimate interests / legal obligation |
You can withdraw consent to product updates at any time (see section 8). Withdrawing it does not affect the rest of your account.
We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with the service providers that run the Hub on our behalf, under contracts that require them to protect it:
We may also disclose information if required by law.
Your account and project data is stored in the United Kingdom (Supabase's London region).
Some of our providers are based in the United States (Netlify; Groq; and Supabase, which is US-headquartered though it stores your data in the UK). Where personal information is transferred outside the UK, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.
We keep your account and the information you enter for as long as your account is active. If you ask us to delete your account, we will delete your personal information within 30 days, except where we must keep some records to meet a legal obligation. Aggregated and anonymised information (which can no longer identify you or your organisation) may be kept indefinitely.
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
To exercise any of these, email lewis@hackney.co. We will respond within one month.
The Hub does not use advertising or tracking cookies. To keep you signed in, we store a secure sign-in token in your browser's local storage; this is essential to the members area and is cleared when you log out. The public hub works without it.
A core purpose of the Hub is to learn, across all users, which evidence is most useful and what helps small organisations secure funding. We do this using aggregated and anonymised data only — combined across many organisations so that no individual user or organisation can be identified. We may publish or share these aggregate insights. We will not identify you or your organisation in them without your separate consent.
The Hub is intended for adults acting on behalf of organisations. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18.
The Hub uses an automated system to select and rank relevant statistics, and an AI model to draft a funding narrative from the evidence you select. These produce draft content for you to review and edit. They do not make automated decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on individuals. The drafts are always presented for your review and are not relied on without your judgement.
We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including access controls so that you can only see your own organisation's projects, encrypted connections, and reputable infrastructure providers. No online service can be guaranteed completely secure.
We may update this policy from time to time. We will change the “last updated” date above and, for significant changes, let registered users know.
If you have a concern about how we handle your information, please contact us first at lewis@hackney.co so we can try to put it right.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO):