At Stickyworld, like many cloud software providers, we have been busy over the last 6 months getting reading for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

We started the review 6 months ago and have always seen the GDPR as an opportunity, not just to comply, but to fundamentally improve our service and the number of use cases we can serve. Our review and subsequent efforts has resulted in a significant amount of new features and improvements to the technology, which have been wrapped into a major software update which is released this week.

This blog post explains the various changes and provides links to other posts or webpages where you can read about each specific change in more detail.

Why does the GDPR affect Stickyworld?

The GDPR has affected us in two key ways.

Firstly, like any other business, we collect and store data in our marketing and sales operations. So we've been busy reviewing how we do this, ensuring that we have the processes in place to meet the GDPR, and the consent or legitimate business interest to contact anyone going forward. We've updated our website terms and privacy policy, cleaned our CRM systems and been in touch with all contacts to ask them to opt in to future marketing communications.

Secondly, and perhaps having a far greater impact on the service we provide our customers, Stickyworld engagement automation software explicitly facilities the collection and processing of personal information from our customer's stakeholders as part of the engagement activities and processes managed by our customers. As a result, we’ve felt compelled to look thoroughly at every service and interface of our system to ensure that it complies with the requirements of the GDPR. We want to make it easy for our customers to comply with the GDPR and have improved how the software works for organisers, visitors and participants, to protect all interests.

As a result of these changes, we hope everyone is clear about who is collecting, processing and controlling their data, what an individual’s rights are and how they can execute these within the Stickyworld software ecosystem.

Customers will notice we have made some significant changes in the organiser interface, but the greatest changes are behind the scenes in how the system works and is now built on a more common subscriber/unsubscriber model, moving away from a more traditional user collaboration model.

As a result of this move towards more traditional marketing technologies, we are excited about the roadmap going forward and the opportunities to improve our software service for customers and the visitor and participant experience generally.

There are several posts and documents which outline in more detail the changes we have introduced, and we list these below.

1. Our legals terms

We have decoupled several policies and 'terms of use' so that terms and policies addressing visitors and participants are not confused with terms and policies for customers. Previously, for convenience, all the terms were groups together, and hosted on our marketing website.

Whilst it may have been okay, we didn't think that was good enough, or clear enough, and it didn't explicitly name our customers as Data Controllers of portals.

Our customer terms will also be updated before 23rd May to include a good behaviour clause for our customers to agree to.

You can read the legals page here, and this explains the relationships of all our terms and links to the right pages for you to read.

2. Software release 1.30

We have released version 1.30 which has new improvements and features to cover our customers and their visitors and participants for the GDPR.

This post explains all the new features to our customers.

You can read the 1.30 release blog here.

3. How Stickyworld software addresses GDPR compliance

We have also compiled a page to explain how Stickyworld explicitly meets all the requirements of the GDPR, and where we will continue to improve the software to make it really easy for customers to meet their obligations using Stickyworld. You can read that here.

Get in touch

If you have any questions on the above, we would pleased to hear from you and address your questions.