Terms of Service

Last Updated: January 2025

Our latest Terms of Service are produced in accordance with the requirements of the Data Protection Law (as defined below).

In order to use Church Planner to help with the management of your organisation and membership, you must first agree to these Terms of Service on behalf of your organisation. By signing up your organisation to use Church Planner, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service and acknowledge that any violation of the terms outlined below may result in the termination of your Organisation’s account.

Hello Technology Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with registered number 15512176. Church Planner is a web-based member management system and database tool, developed by Hello Technology Ltd, and is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis so far as the law allows – see more detail below.

Although the language in these Terms of Service is simple, the intentions are serious, forming a contract considered to be a legal document under English Law and under the jurisdiction of English courts.

Definitions we use in this document

“Data Protection Law” means all data protection laws and regulations applicable to the UK including (i) the UK Data Protection Act 2018; (ii) UK General Data Protection Regulation (“UK GDPR“); (iii) the Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (“the PECR“) relating to electronic communications; (iv) In the event that the EU GDPR (as defined in the Data Protection Act 2018) applies to activities, we will comply with the EU GDPR; and applicable national implementations of (iii) and (iv)
“The Service” means our Church Planner software, which is accessed online through a web browser. Access is provided through a unique username and password.
“your Organisation” means your church, charity or other type of organisation that has opened a Church Planner account. In the relationship between us, your Organisation should be considered the Data Controller as defined within the context of Data Protection Law as to the users nominated by you in accordance with these Terms of Service.
“us“, “we” and “our” refer to Hello Technology Ltd. In the relationship between us, Hello Technology Ltd should be considered the Data Processor as defined within the context of General Data Protection Regulation Data Protection Law as to the Personal Data concerning your users, account contact and data that they upload. We are a Data Controller as to Personal Data that we collect about you for our relationship and our privacy policy on our website from time to time applies.
“user” means your account contact, all end-users of the Service or website that you have enabled to have access whether staff, workers, agents, volunteers, members, or contractors to the extent permitted by these Terms of Service to access and use The Service and/or our website.
“working day” means a day that is not a Saturday or Sunday, Christmas Day, Good Friday or any day that is a statutory bank holiday in England.
“you” means the Organisation that is the contracted subscriber of The Service.

Access to an account

In order to apply to use The Service, you must first submit your account contact details through our Registration page.

We may create an account for you to access The Service, however we reserve the right, at our discretion, not to accept your application.

Should we accept your application to access The Service, we will confirm this by email to the account contact email address you provide in your application, at which point a legally binding contract will be created between us and you; you must therefore ensure that any signatory/enquirer is authorised to enter into this contract for and on behalf of you. These Terms of Service shall govern our agreement with you.

If at any time you need to update the Organisation account contact details you provided to us when applying to access The Service, you can do so through your Church Planner account, within the Account settings. You are required to maintain an up to date designated, named account contact. A change of account contact details does not change the contractual relationship between us and you.

By accepting your application to access The Service, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, automatically renewing monthly license to use The Service for you and permitted users. This license is in accordance with these Terms of Service and our Acceptable Use Policy.

Your obligations to us (our rights)

You must only access The Service using a username/password or secure link that your Organisation authorises.
You must not do anything which could reasonably be expected to damage, disable, overburden, or materially impair The Service or our website, or which is likely to interfere with any third party’s use or enjoyment of The Service.
You must accept that all software available through The Service or used to create and operate The Service is property of us or our licensors. You will not question or dispute our ownership of the intellectual property of The Service.
Each account held with The Service must only be used for the purpose of a single Organisation. You may, however, hold multiple accounts (one for each charity/project/subsidiary or division you need to administer).
You recognise that The Service stores and processes special category data on your behalf.
You accept that nothing in these Terms of Service, nor by using The Service, relieves you (the Data Controller) of your own direct responsibilities and liabilities under GDPR Data Protection Law. At all times you are responsible for the acts and omissions of your users and anyone using login details generated for your users that have been shared without our permission and you must ensure that they all comply with these Terms of Service and our Acceptable Use Policy.

Our obligations to you (your rights)

As Data Processor, we commit to only use the data you entrust to us for its intended purpose. We will never:
- Pass your data on to third parties, except where instructed to do so by you or where such is required to comply with the law
- Sell your or your users’ data to third parties
- Use your or your users’ data for our own purposes, except to monitor the health and security of your Organisation’s account
We will only access your data upon receipt of written or verbal instructions to do so from you, the Data Controller (unless required by law to act without such instructions). Within the Account settings of your Organisation’s account, you may, at your discretion, enable or disable our access to your data at any time. Access is helpful when resolving technical issues or answering support-related enquiries from you or your members (data subjects). If access is not enabled by you, we will only be able to provide generic support responses, and support enquiries from your members (data subjects) may be directed back to you.
We will ensure all our employees who are responsible for processing your data are subject to a duty of confidence.
At all times, we will protect your data by:
- Restricting our access to your data and ensuring that only trusted staff can access your data
- Taking suitable technical and organisational steps to ensure the technical security of your data
We will ensure the technical measures detailed on our website from time to time shall be at all times adhered to as a minimum security standard save as otherwise authorised by applicable law.
We will comply with all obligations imposed directly on us by the Data Protection Laws.
We will support you with answering Subject Access Requests and in enabling data subjects to exercise their rights under applicable Data Protection Law where you do not already have access to the relevant data. Where you wish us to provide input for proceedings or regulatory investigations then you agree to pay our reasonable costs and expenses where we are not at fault.
We will only engage a Sub-Processor where instructed to do so by you, with your prior consent and written contract with that Sub-Processor, except where that Sub-Processor is a pre-existing requirement for The Service, (for example, your data is hosted on our Sub-Processor’s servers).
Through the functionality we provide within The Service and other information we may make available to you we are assisting you in meeting your GDPR obligations under applicable Data Protection Laws in relation to the security of processing and data protection impact assessments.
In the event that we discover or become aware of a data breach or have reasonable grounds to suspect any illegal or unauthorised activity, we will inform you without undue delay, so far as allowed by law; and provide reasonable assistance to facilitate your meeting your obligations to inform the data subjects.
We will co-operate with the ICO or any other Data Protection Authority as required by law.
We will delete all of the data we hold on your data subjects on termination of contract. Since we maintain backups of all data for 6 months, your data will be fully deleted 6 months after termination.
We will cooperate with reasonable audits and, to the extent that you cannot carry these out remotely through your existing access, reasonable inspections on a confidential basis where relevant and/or deemed necessary, but respecting our and third party’s data, the security of our operation and commercially sensitive information.
We shall ensure that all of our employees, agents, officers and contractors involved in the handling of Personal Data: (i) are aware of the confidential nature of the Personal Data and are contractually bound to keep the Personal Data confidential; (ii) have received appropriate training on their responsibilities as a data processor; and (iii) accept that they are bound by equivalent terms to these.

Paying for The Service

Full details of the subscription fees for the use of The Service are provided through the Church Planner website. We reserve the right to vary these fees from time to time, at which time we will provide not less than one month notice through the Church Planner website. Prices quoted on our website are quoted in GBP, USD, EUR, AUD, CAD and CHF. Hello Technology Ltd is not registered for VAT.

We offer all customers a “30-day free trial” of The Service, and there will be no charge for the use of The Service during the free trial period. We may, at our discretion, extend any free trial period, or grant a further trial period for a valid reason. Your Organisation (and any related or associated organisation) is not entitled to benefit from more than one “free trial period”, and if we discover that your Organisation and its related or associated organisation has requested an additional “free trial period”, they will become liable for payment of all fees and charges for use of The Service from the start of the first additional “free trial period”.

Your subscription to The Service will renew automatically each month on your “billing day” – which is set as the day of the month when you first subscribe – and your Organisation will be billed in advance on a monthly basis. There will be no refunds for unused services or account downgrades.

Your Organisation’s subscription fee for using The Service is directly linked to (i) the total number of contacts within the active section of your account’s Contacts module. As such, the fee for using The Service may vary month to month, depending on the number of contacts listed within the active section of the Contacts module. You will be billed automatically and will be fully liable for any charges calculated on your billing day.

Payment for The Service will be taken by credit or debit card. Payments will be taken for The Service on your designated monthly billing date using the card payment handler that we have authorised for your Organisation’s account. We are unable to accept payment for The Service by any other method.

We shall be under no obligation to provide The Service to you and your Organisation if payment of the subscription fee is not made within a timely manner. If subscription fees become overdue, we reserve the right to suspend access to The Service until the outstanding balance is paid.

Changing your subscription

If at any time you wish to amend your subscription you can do so through the Subscription settings of your account. This action can be performed by an administrator at any time and takes immediate effect.

Cancelling your subscription

If you wish to cancel your subscription to The Service, you can do so through the Subscription settings of your account. Cancellations can only be initiated by an Administrator of the Organisation.

In the event of a serious breach of the Terms of Service by Hello Church you shall be entitled to forthwith terminate the Service.

If you or your users fail to abide by these Terms of Service, we reserve the right to suspend access to The Service or permanently cancel the Church Planner account. If we withdraw access to The Service due to a breach of these Terms of Service, no refund will be payable by us.

Your user data is available for you to access and back-up at any time through our website. If this contract/The service are terminated by either you or us then, subject to any legal obligations to the contrary or our need to handle the defence of any claim and other legal enquiries or the requirements of our insurers, our policy is to delete the data thirty days after termination takes effect.

Privacy, data ownership and security

By using The Service, you are accepting these Terms of Service (our written contract), our Acceptable Use Policy and our description of the way we collect and use data within The Service as described in the Hello Church Privacy Policy.

General terms

It is your responsibility to keep your Organisation’s account contact information up to date at all times.
You are responsible for ensuring your Organisation’s and users’ login information is kept secure at all times. We will not be responsible for any loss or damage incurred as a consequence of login details being compromised, save where such loss or damage occurs by reason of a breach by Church Planner, in which case you must notify us without delay.
We do not guarantee that The Service will meet all your requirements, be available 100% of the time or be “bug free”. While we will exercise our reasonably-commercial endeavours to keep disruptions to a minimum, from time to time it may be necessary to suspend The Service to carry out maintenance or support work, or there may be outage that is caused by a reason out of our control.
The Service has been created and tested in accordance with industry best practices and on that basis, to the best of our knowledge, The Service is free from material defect against the agreed specification. If you discover a defect or fault with The Service (and such defect or fault does not result from you, your users or anyone through you having amended or misused The Service, our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy), you shall provide us with all the information that may be necessary to assist us in resolving the defect without delay, including sufficient information to enable us to reproduce the defect and shall then endeavour to do so within 48 hours of discovering the defect or fault.
We reserve the right to remove any information from The Service that we consider to be unlawful, offensive or that violates the intellectual property of a third party.
You and your Organisation may not use The Service to send unsolicited communication of any kind, including but not limited to emails and SMS.
We reserve the right to make changes to these Terms of Service at any time.

Limitation of liability

You use The Service entirely at your own risk.

Where we are not legally entitled to exclude our liability, our total liability for any loss or damage relating to The Service shall not exceed an amount equal to the subscription fees which your Organisation has paid to us.

Except in respect of death or personal injury caused by our negligence and subject to clauses 2 to 3 below, our entire liability to you, your users and others that have shared logins, whether arising in contract, tort (including without limitation negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, arising under or in connection with this contract and these Terms of Service (whether in respect of the provision of the Service, damages, breach, indemnity or otherwise) shall not in any circumstance exceed 100% of the amount of the total annual subscriptions paid by you to us for the provision of The Service for the previous year under this contract or annualised if less than a year has passed.
We shall have no liability to you or any third party for any loss, damage, costs, expenses, or other claims for compensation arising from any material or instructions supplied by you or your users (or those that have shared logins) which are unauthorised, illegal, incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate, illegible, out of sequence or in the wrong form or due to any other fault of yours or those persons.
Except in respect of death or personal injury caused by our negligence, we shall not be liable to you or your users by reason of any representation (unless fraudulent), or any term or any duty for any loss of anticipated savings, donation or business revenues, or profits (whether categorised as direct or indirect) or any indirect, special or consequential loss, loss of goodwill or reputation, and all other such loss (whether or not arising in the normal course of activities), or other economic loss or other claims however caused under the contract or the provision of The Service.
You agree and acknowledge that the allocation of risk in this clause is fair and reasonable in the circumstances having been taken into account by us in setting the level of charges and agreeing the extent of Service. You accept that if you have risk not covered by us then you have had ample opportunity to secure your own insurance for such risks before and during any arrangement with us.
For the avoidance of doubt, we:
1. make no express warranties and specifically disclaim any implied warranties, including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, with respect to the performance of Service under our contract and these Terms of Service to the extent permissible by law.
2. do not guarantee, and nothing contained in our contract, these Terms of Service, shall be construed as a guarantee, that the use of the Service by you or your users will achieve any projected level of results.
We shall not be liable for any default (or deemed to be in breach of contract) by reason of any delay due to any circumstance beyond our reasonable control.
You declare and acknowledge that we have no control, involvement, role, or responsibility as to the type or use of data input by you, your users or others with their logins and we merely provide software as a service and an IT repository for data with a specified conduit for its movement to and from you and your users or third-party infrastructure. Our processing does not include the manipulation, selection, ordering, searching, or monitoring of such Personal Data other than in a generic sense of storage in the scope of the Service or in the running of the software module selected by you. You are solely responsible for the cleansing, updating, timely deletion and maintenance of Personal Data by your access direct to our website portal, other than our deletion as stated otherwise in these Terms of Service.
You will ensure that you comply with all Data Protection Laws and have all necessary appropriate consents and notices in place to enable lawful transmission of the Personal Data for the Service and its processing in accordance with this contract for the duration and purposes of this contract.
This clause shall survive termination of the contract.