GDPR-compliant consent

This article is for training companies and trainers.

The GDPR takes seriously how you collect consents to process personal data of EU citizens. Participation in a workshop gives you a legal right to work with the personal data of an attendee. However, there are more:

• you must collect separate consents for processing personal data and subscribing to a newsletter
• an attendee can review anytime what consents were given, and how they were collected.

In Workshop Butler, there is a special field  Consent to deal with the above scenarios. A Consent field is added as any other custom field to a registration form. It differs in how it’s recorded and kept.

Storing the consent

For all custom fields, Workshop Butler records only the provided values. For example, you added a new field  Years of Experience. During the registration, attendee Anna Smith set it to 5. Later you changed it to Experience Level. Now on your WSB account, you see Experience Level: 5 at the profile of Anna Smith.

The behaviour is different for consents. The platform records both the value (yes or no) and the content of a consent at the time of the registration. If you change it later, it will be valid only for new attendees.

Consents and API

The content of a consent is provided via API and can be rendered on the registration page of your website. Obviously, we cannot control how you render it. It is up to you to make sure that a consent you show on your website is equal to the one you added to Workshop Butler. Our website plugins support the consents natively for all parties: trainers, training companies, and certification brands.

In addition to the content of a consent, the platform also records the name of the person who provided the consent and the exact date/time. When attendees register themselves, their names are recorded. When you add attendees manually or import them, then it’s your name recorded.

Using the consent

You collected the consent, but can you use it further? Yes. In Workshop Butler, you can subscribe attendees to MailChimp lists or invite to Slack groups based on the consents they give to you.

For more information, read MailChimp Integration and Slack Integration.