Privacy Policy

At Converge, we are committed to being transparent and giving you control over your privacy. But that’s easy to say. Here’s what that actually means to us.

We only collect information that we actually need to improve our services and deliver high-quality content. We do not and will never sell your personal information to third parties. And if you want to know more, keep reading—and don’t hesitate to ask us a question at (privacy@convergehere.com) if you aren’t finding the answers you’re looking for.

This privacy policy explains how we use the information we collect from you when you use our website.

Topics:

  • Why do we collect any information at all?
  • What information do we collect?
  • How will we use your information?
  • How do we store your information?
  • Who can access your information?
  • Consent and opt-out
  • Your privacy rights
  • Contact us
  • A word of thanks

Why do we collect any information at all?

There are two answers to that question, and they’re connected to each other.
One answer is that we want to be able to market our services effectively. We interpret “effectively” to mean:

  1. Marketing our services to the people and organizations who actually stand to benefit from them

Converge’s service isn’t for everyone; we’re not trying to be all things to all people. Collecting information helps us to understand who might be a good fit for our services. If you’re a good fit for our services, we want to start a conversation with you—and (again, if you’re a good fit for our services) we suspect that you’ll want to have a conversation with us as well.

  1. Improving the quality of our content

For those folks who would benefit from our services, great content is a way to launch and sustain conversations at scale. And even for those who are already doing well on their own and aren’t really in need of support through Converge, we hope that high-quality content will help you to get even better results and find even more satisfaction in your work.

From an impact perspective, if we can help someone improve their work just by giving them great content, that’s a win for us, because our content can reach far more people than our facilitation work ever could.

What information do we collect?

When you subscribe to our newsletter or contact us, we ask you for the following information directly:

  • Personal identification/contact information (first name, last name, email address).

When you use or view our website, we also collect certain information in the background. This is done using cookies, web beacons, and similar technologies, which collect information such as:

  • Details about your browser or device, e.g. IP address, browser type, language preference, time zone, country, date and time of access, and operating system;
  • Your consent selections and cookie banner display settings; and
  • Your behaviour on the site, e.g. referring URL and domain; pages visited; mouse movements, location, and clicks.

To opt out of information collection, go to Consent and opt-out.

How will we use your information?

How does that information actually help us to know our readership better and improve our content?

We use your contact information to communicate with you and distribute our newsletter, where we share strategy insights, client stories, and other information we think you might find valuable. (We can make educated guesses, but ultimately we only know what’s valuable to you if you give us a signal. That’s what the data is for.)

These newsletters also include calls to action, including offers to buy our services. We’re not trying to be in your face about it, and we hope that the newsletter serves you well even if you never purchase our services. But we also want you to know that that option is there should it be of use to you.

We use web tracking information to:

  • Improve email campaigns (measuring engagement with different content and formats, so that we can build on what works);
  • Make our site content more relevant and our site design more intuitive (again, measuring engagement so that we can build on what works).
  • Personalize your experience by serving up content that we think will be a better fit for you, based on your past engagements. If you end up booking a call with us (which we hope that you will!), we might also look back at your engagement history to get a better sense of who we’re going to be speaking with. This can help us more quickly get to the heart of the issues you want to speak about, saving you time.

Wherever possible, web usage data is analyzed in an aggregated or anonymized form. In some cases (primarily if you book a call with us), an actual human may look back over your individual activity on our website to help us get to know you faster.

How do we store your information?

Converge uses trustworthy service providers who have implemented appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards. The information we collect is stored in data centres in North America and Europe.

Converge will only keep your personal information for as long as is required for the purposes stated in this policy. When we no longer have a legitimate need to process your information (for instance, after we have fulfilled our ultimate purpose of helping every last organization on the planet get way better at strategy, and the time has come for us to ascend to the great data warehouse in the sky) we will delete or anonymize your information, as appropriate. Seriously, though, we’re still reflecting internally on how best to figure out a reasonable time limit for data retention. Recall that you can also request that your data be deleted; see Your privacy rights for more.

Who can access your information?

For the most part, Converge does its own analytics internally, so your data is accessible to us (in the aggregate) alongside the data of others. For example, a Converge staff member might look at what percentage of recipients opened a given email and compare that against the average open rate across several campaigns, to see how engaging the subject line was. Access to information is provided on a need-to-know basis, and at the level of granularity required in order to accomplish the task at hand.

Additionally, Converge sometimes hires external help to support its marketing/sales strategies and conduct some analysis to support strategy implementation. In those cases, once again, information is provided on a need-to-know basis, and at the level of granularity required in order to accomplish the task at hand. Additionally, no disaggregated data is ever exported from the Converge data ecosystem, so when contractors have finished their work, they can’t go back and regain access to the data later on.

Your information may also be shared with organizations that provide services to Converge, such as data hosting or email deployment services. We require that service providers limit their access and use of personal information to what is required to deliver their services, and the service providers we’ve chosen do have policies in place to that effect.

Consent and opt-out

We don’t send you any email campaigns without your consent. We also don’t collect any cookie-based data about website usage without your consent. But few decisions in life are final, and sharing your data with us certainly isn’t final.

  • If you have agreed to receive communications from us, you may opt out at any time using the unsubscribe button in the emails (or by clicking here).
  • If you previously accepted cookies, you can opt in or out of automatic information collection by clicking here. You can also block cookies by adjusting your browser settings. To make your life even easier, we’ve provided links below to instructions on blocking cookies in Chrome and Safari, which account for 80% of the global market share. (Note that if you disable all cookies, certain website features may not work properly.)

Your privacy rights

People from the European Economic Area (EEA) are provided certain privacy rights by law, and we think those are reasonable for everyone. So Converge aims to provide all users these rights no matter where you live:

  • Right to access – You have the right to request access to, or copies of, the personal information we hold about you.
  • Right to rectification – You have the right to update or correct information we hold about you that you believe to be inaccurate or incomplete.
  • Right to erasure – You have the right to request that we delete your information.
  • Right to restriction of processing – You have the right to request that your information is not processed in a certain way or prevent future processing.
  • Right to data portability – You have the right to request that Converge transfer the information that we have collected to you or to another organization, in an accessible format.
  • Right to object – You have the right to object to Converge’s processing of your information. (e.g., If you unsubscribe from our newsletter, we won’t send them to you anymore. Sometimes it’s amazing that things like this even need to be written down, but here we are, folks: living life in the 21st century.)
  • Right to complain – If you are dissatisfied with how Converge is processing your information, you have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. This right may not be available to you if there is no public authority dealing with data protection in your country. Here are links to the relevant authorities for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the EU

Contact us

If you have any questions about our privacy practices, the information we hold on you, or you would like to exercise one of your privacy rights, please contact us using one of the email addresses below:

We will respond to privacy requests within one month of receipt.

A word of thanks

If you’ve actually read all this way, we want to say: thank you. Data privacy and security are important topics—and ones that far too often get overlooked. We’re trying our best to do right by the folks we serve, and we hope that after reading this privacy policy you feel that our efforts have been (at least moderately) successful.