Privacy Policy

The South African Dance Board (SADB NPC) is a non-profit company registered in South Africa, acting as the national umbrella body coordinating, developing, and advocating for dancers, choreographers, studios, and arts organisations across all nine provinces.

We are the "Responsible Party" under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) — meaning we are legally accountable for deciding how your personal information is processed and for ensuring it is handled lawfully and securely.

• Registered Name: South African Dance Board (SADB)
• Legal Status: South African Dance Board NPC
• National Office: Rand Club, 33 Loveday Street, Johannesburg, 2000
• Email: info@sadanceboard.co.za
• Information Officer: Appointed in line with Section 17 of POPIA. Contact via the email above.

We only collect the information necessary for sector registration, provincial representation, and the legitimate functioning of the Board. We do not collect marketing data, and we do not sell your information to anyone.

Information you provide directly (via the registration form and your dancer profile):

• Identity: Full name, surname, ID number (optional), date of birth
• Contact: Email address, phone number, province, city/town, residential address
• Dance background: Primary dance genre, years of experience, current role, biography, experience & training details
• Professional: Organization/dance company, website, Instagram handle
• Account: Email address (used as your username) and a secure, encrypted password
• Consent record: A timestamp of when you gave consent, recorded for compliance purposes

Information collected automatically:

• Technical data — Basic technical information (such as IP address and browser type) collected in server logs when you visit our site.
• Usage data — We record significant actions you take within the portal (such as logins and profile updates) for security and audit purposes.

We process your personal information for specific, explicitly defined purposes that align with our mandate as the national dance sector body. We never process your data for anything outside these purposes:

• Sector registration & verification — creating and verifying your dancer account so that you can be officially recognised as part of South Africa's dance sector.
• Provincial representation — mapping dancers by province so that SADB can advocate for equitable resource allocation, venue access, and training opportunities across all nine provinces.
• Policy advocacy — using aggregated, anonymised sector data to make submissions to the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture (DSAC), SALGA, and parliamentary committees on issues like fair remuneration, venue subsidies, and accreditation frameworks.
• Communication — emailing you about your application status (registration received, approved, rejected), sector-wide announcements, and opportunities directly relevant to your province and genre.
• Opportunity matching — connecting dancers with funding, festival, exchange, and employment opportunities based on their profile (genre, province, experience).
• Compliance & audit — maintaining a POPIA-compliant audit trail of every processing decision (who registered, who approved, who edited, who deleted, when, and from what IP).

This is the core of why the dancer registry exists. Your personal information — specifically your province, dance genre, and contact details — directly enables SADB to deliver on its national mandate at the provincial level:

• Provincial needs assessment — By knowing how many dancers are registered in each province and what genres they practice, SADB can identify underserved areas and direct resources (training workshops, venue subsidies, mentorship programmes) where they are needed most.
• Provincial councils & representation — Each province has a provincial council that advocates for local dancers. Your registration helps your provincial council understand who they are representing and ensures your voice is included in provincial-level decisions.
• Equitable resource allocation — Funding from DSAC, the National Lotteries Commission, and other bodies is distributed based on sector needs. Accurate provincial registration data ensures that smaller provinces (like the Northern Cape or North West) receive fair consideration alongside larger ones (like Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal).
• Local engagement — Provincial SADB representatives can contact registered dancers in their province about local consultations, town hall meetings, and feedback sessions — ensuring that national policy decisions are grounded in the lived reality of dancers in each region.
• Provincial reporting — Aggregated, anonymised data per province is included in SADB's annual reports to DSAC and in submissions to parliamentary committees, demonstrating the scale and geographic spread of the dance sector.

From the moment you register, your data flows through a clearly defined, audited path. Every step is logged:

Under POPIA, we may only process your personal information if we have a lawful basis. Our bases are:

• Your consent — You explicitly tick the POPIA consent checkbox when registering. This consent is recorded with a timestamp and IP address, and you may withdraw it at any time.
• Performance of a contract — Processing your data is necessary to provide you with the dancer portal service you have requested.
• Legitimate interests — SADB has a legitimate interest as the national dance sector body in maintaining an accurate registry of dancers for advocacy, resource allocation, and provincial representation.
• Legal obligation — We may be required to retain certain records to comply with South African law, including non-profit company regulations and POPIA's own record-keeping requirements.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We share it only in the following limited circumstances:

• Provincial SADB councils — Provincial representatives may view the names and contact details of registered dancers in their own province, for the purpose of local engagement. They cannot see dancers from other provinces.
• Service providers — We use a standard "I'm not a robot" verification (Google reCAPTCHA) on the registration form to prevent automated spam submissions. We do not use third-party email marketing or advertising services that receive your personal data.
• Government & funding bodies — We share aggregated, anonymised sector data with DSAC, SALGA, and the National Lotteries Commission to support funding applications and policy submissions. Individual dancers cannot be identified from this data.
• Legal compliance — If required by law, court order, or lawful request from a South African law enforcement or regulatory authority, we may disclose specific personal information. This is rare and would only happen under legal compulsion.

We take the security of your personal information seriously and have put in place reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect it against loss, misuse, unauthorised access, and alteration — in line with POPIA's security safeguards requirements.

• Secure passwords — Your password is encrypted when stored; we cannot see it and we never share it.
• Encrypted transmission — All data sent between your device and our servers is encrypted using industry-standard HTTPS.
• Restricted access — Only authorised SADB reviewers and administrators can view dancer information, and every action they take is recorded.
• Protection against abuse — Our systems include safeguards to detect and block automated attacks, fraudulent submissions, and unauthorised access attempts.
• Audit trail — We keep a record of significant actions (registration, review decisions, profile changes, data exports) for accountability and compliance.

While no system can be guaranteed 100% secure, we continuously review and improve our safeguards. In the unlikely event of a data breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as required by POPIA.

We retain your personal information only for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected, and in line with POPIA's data minimisation principle:

• Active dancer accounts — Retained for as long as your account is active. If you stop engaging with SADB for 3 years, we will contact you to confirm whether you wish to remain registered.
• Pending applications — If you register but your application is rejected, your data is retained for 12 months for audit purposes, then permanently deleted (unless you request earlier deletion).
• Audit log — Retained for 7 years from the date of each event, in line with standard South African record-keeping practice. The audit log does not contain your full profile — only event types, timestamps, and actor references.
• Deleted accounts — When you request deletion (or an admin deletes your account), your profile row and WordPress user are permanently removed. An audit-log entry recording the deletion (with your email and the actor) is retained for 7 years.

POPIA gives you specific rights over your personal information. You can exercise any of these rights at any time by emailing info@sadanceboard.co.za. We will respond within 30 days.

The SADB website uses a minimal set of cookies, all strictly necessary for the site to function properly:

• Login cookies — Used to keep you logged in to the dancer portal. Deleted when you close your browser, unless you choose "Remember me".
• Security cookies — Used to verify form submissions and protect the site from abuse.
• Verification cookie — Set by Google when you complete the "I'm not a robot" check on the registration form.

We do not use analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies. We do not profile you for advertising purposes, and we do not share cookie data with advertising networks.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, legal requirements, or the services we offer. When we make material changes, we will:

• Update the "Effective Date" at the top of this page
• Bump the version number
• Notify all registered dancers by email if the changes materially affect how their data is processed

We encourage you to review this page periodically to stay informed about how we protect your information.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, want to exercise any of your rights under POPIA, or wish to report a concern about how your data is handled, please contact our Information Officer: