GDPR Compliance Didn’t End on May 25
Posted on 14/06/2018
May 25th 2018 was the date that the GDPR legislation came into effect. There was a bit of a panic about this ‘deadline’. The onslaught of emails (mostly announcing hasty changes to Privacy Policies and requesting that subscribers resubscribe in a GDPR compliant fashion) became a news story in itself and spawned several internet memes and editorial cartoons.
About Those Emails
A significant number of those emails begging us to allow a company to hang on to our personal details may well have been in contravention of data protection laws that predate the GDPR. But let’s assume that everything has been done correctly and legally. A small organisation (or a marketing company on their behalf) may be panicking because attempting to become compliant with the new legislation has decimated their email marketing lists.
A different way of looking at this is to compare the two lists in terms of quality rather than quantity. Those who have resubscribed are genuinely interested in the product or service being offered. Those who ignored your pleas to sign up again or who took the opportunity to unsubscribe would probably never have opened a marketing email from you anyway.
Forget the thousands of email addresses that have been deleted (and that, in all probability, you shouldn’t have been marketing to in the first place). You now have a small list of genuinely interested customers. This is a list to whom you can offer tailored marketing and expect a positive response. This is a base that can be built on, in a manner fully compliant with the requirements of GDPR.
Our Services
Understandably, we were incredibly busy in the build-up to the implementation deadline and we don’t expect demand for our services to tail off any time soon. Compliance with the GDPR is not something that you have to do once and then forget about. Done properly, it is a process that involves instilling respect for people’s personal data into the core of your organisation’s values. That means continuing to train staff in proper procedures for handling data.
With this in mind, we’ll still be hosting regular training days and offering organisations the opportunity to use our consultancy services to ensure that staff become and remain compliant with the GDPR.
If you would like more information on GDPR compliance training for your staff, please get in touch. You can call us on 0203 2878 243 or email info@priviness.eu.
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