Terms of service

1. Using ReachThem

ReachThem helps organisations such as churches, clubs, charities and festivals run events, teams, rotas, tasks and team chats, and helps the people involved sign up, get reminders and keep in touch. By using ReachThem you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use it.

2. Who can use ReachThem

• You must be 13 or over to use ReachThem. We ask everyone for their date of birth; please give your real one. If you are under 13 we will close your account.
• If you are 13 to 17, some things work differently to keep you safe (see Young people below and our privacy policy).
• Create an account only for yourself. (The people who run an organisation can add a person who doesn't use the app, as our privacy policy explains.)
• If your date of birth is wrong, ask your church's Safeguarding Officer, or contact us (see Contact). We can make someone younger straight away; making an account older needs our support team to check.

3. Your account

• Give your real date of birth when we ask, and don't help anyone under 13 to use ReachThem.
• Give accurate details and keep them up to date. You can change them in your profile.
• Keep access to your email account, phone and any Google or Apple account you sign in with secure: whoever controls them can sign in as you.
• You can delete your account at any time (how to delete your account).

4. Organisations and the people who run them

If you create or run an organisation, event, team or rota on ReachThem, you also agree that:

• you are responsible for the information your organisation collects and adds about other people (for example when you add someone to a team, ask questions on a registration form or record a DBS check), and you have a proper reason to collect it and to contact them;
• you give roles such as owner, administrator, coordinator, team organiser or Safeguarding Officer only to people you trust with what those roles can see and do;
• you handle registrations, payments you collect yourselves, refunds and changes to your events directly with the people concerned. ReachThem helps you organise them but is not a party to your arrangements and does not take payments;
• you are responsible, as its controller, for the information your organisation keeps about its members, visitors, parents and carers, and we process it for you under these terms, our privacy policy and our data processing terms for organisations, which are part of these terms;
• you approve as members only people you have a proper reason to add, and you publish on your church page and contacts only your organisation's own email addresses and phone numbers, never someone's personal ones;
• anything you publish for “Anyone” can be seen by anyone, including on the web; you post photos of children only with their parents' or carers' permission; and you have the rights to everything you publish, including podcast episodes and any music in them;
• you use youth groups only after we have approved your organisation for them, which needs a named person responsible for safeguarding, your charity or church registration, a written safeguarding policy that covers online contact with young people, and at least two Safeguarding Officers; you record only DBS checks you have seen, never your own; and you act on concerns and reports under your safeguarding policy.

5. Young people

ReachThem protects people aged 13 to 17 in the ways our privacy policy describes. In particular:

• no adult may have a private, one-to-one conversation with a young person anywhere in ReachThem;
• young people join a church's youth groups only with consent from a parent or carer and approval by a youth leader or Safeguarding Officer, and a youth group always has two leaders with a DBS check for work with children;
• young people can't lead or organise anything on ReachThem.

Don't try to get round these protections: for example by giving a false date of birth, asking a young person for their own phone number, email or social media, or moving a conversation with a young person to another app. We may close the account of anyone who does.

6. Acceptable use

Do not use ReachThem to:

• give false information or pretend to be someone else;
• harass, threaten or abuse anyone, or post content that is unlawful, hateful or sexually explicit;
• send people messages they have not agreed to receive, or collect their details for unrelated purposes;
• try to get into accounts, organisations or information you have no permission to see, or disrupt the service;
• post or share anything that sexualises children, encourages or assists suicide or self-harm, promotes eating disorders, supports terrorism, or is otherwise illegal;
• groom, pressure or exploit anyone, or ask anyone for intimate images;
• scam people, for example with fake events, fake collections or misleading links;
• post links to messaging apps in notices, or use ReachThem to move conversations with young people elsewhere.

We may remove content, and suspend or close accounts, that break these terms. We report child sexual exploitation and abuse content to the National Crime Agency, as the law requires, and we tell the police when someone may be in danger.

7. Reporting and complaints

• Reporting. You can report a message, a person or a conversation from inside the app with Report. Young people, and anyone in a youth group or a chat with someone under 18, can also use Tell a Safeguarding Officer, which goes straight to the church's Safeguarding Officers. If you can't use the app, or you want to report something to us rather than to the organisation, use www.reachthem.co.uk/complain. You don't need an account to report content you think is illegal.
• What happens next. Reports go to the people who look after that chat or organisation, and to our own team. Reports that involve someone under 18 go only to the organisation's Safeguarding Officers (to us if it has none), never to the person reported. We aim to review reports of illegal content quickly and to remove illegal content as soon as we know about it.
• Complaints. You can complain to us through Help and complaints in the app, or at www.reachthem.co.uk/complain if you don't have an account, if you think we got a report wrong, if we removed your content or restricted your account and you think we shouldn't have, or if you think ReachThem is not doing what the law requires to keep people safe. We will give you a reference straight away, look at it again with someone who was not involved where we can, and tell you the outcome within 14 days.
• How we protect people from illegal content and content harmful to children. We design ReachThem to keep people safe: there is no public feed and no searching for people, chats carry text only, nobody over 18 can have a private conversation with someone under 18, and young people's chats always have two checked leaders. We act on reports, and we keep written assessments of the risks, which we review at least once a year and before any big change.

8. Your content

Messages, event pages, photos and other content you add remain yours. You allow us to store and show them to the people they are meant for, only so that ReachThem can work. Make sure you have the right to share anything you upload.

9. Links, church pages and podcasts

Church pages, notices and podcasts are written by the organisations that publish them, and may link to other websites and apps. We don't control those sites, and their own terms apply. Podcast audio plays in your phone's browser, straight from the church's podcast host.

10. Giving and tickets

When your church, or another organisation, takes card payments through ReachThem:

• you pay the organisation, through its own Stripe account; ReachThem is not a party to the payment and takes no fee. Stripe's own terms apply to the card payment;
• the organisation decides refunds, following the refund rule it shows before you pay; Stripe keeps its fee on a refund;
• you can stop or change a regular gift at any time from the link in your receipt; stopping is never refused;
• you must be 18 or over to give or to buy places;
• the organisation is responsible for its receipts, its Gift Aid claims and what it tells HMRC. An organisation that takes payments agrees to Stripe's terms and to our data processing terms for giving and paid places.

11. Availability and changes

We work to keep ReachThem running and your information safe, but we cannot promise it will always be available or free of faults. We may change or stop features; where a change affects you significantly we will tell you first.

12. Our responsibility to you

We are not responsible for events, rotas or arrangements run by the organisations that use ReachThem, or for losses that were not a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms. Nothing in these terms limits any responsibility that cannot be limited by law, or your rights as a consumer.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will change the “last updated” date above and, for significant changes, let you know in the app or by email. If you keep using ReachThem after a change, the updated terms apply.

14. Contact

Questions about these terms? Ask the people who run your organisation on ReachThem to pass them to us.