New Membership Applications

Welcome to the RHS Fruit Group. To make an application you must follow an easy three steps

1. Read our membership rules and press the submit consent button.
2. Fill in your membership information and press the submit button
3. Pay your membership

If you need help to complete an application please contact Christine at membership@thefruitgroup.org
You must have an active membership with the RHS to apply to the RHS Fruit group

STEP 1: Please read, agree and consent

The RHS Fruit Group (TFG) is a special interest group consisting of a friendly bunch of gardeners with a particular interest in growing fruit. The RHS Fruit Group is an RHS Affiliated Society, open to all members of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) on payment of an annual subscription.

Our core purpose is to promote the education and interest in growing quality fruit by organising talks, webinars, visits, workshops and other activities in a yearly program.

Our roles, procedures and activities are regulated by our Constitution. By applying for membership you agree to abide by this document. 

download constitution

To be able to communicate and have you informed of our activities and news, we kindly ask you to allow us to keep some limited amount of data to be able to operate. This includes:

  • Your name and surname
  • Your contact details including phone, email and address.
  • Your preferred way of paying your membership.

We also store some information of our own to helps us manage your subscription, like

  • The date you started/terminated your membership
  • Any notes of your membership we should be aware of, like “this is a gift”, or the date you renewed your membership
  • The status of your membership, being “applicant”, “active”, “cancelled”, “honorary”, “RHS”. “student”, “no response”
  • If you belong or subscribe to news from one of our regional groups.
  • Some extra tick-boxes or fields we may need for our activities, like “volunteer to autumn event”. These are occasionally created and deleted once they are no longer needed.

We store this data on an AIRTABLE passworded database where only the Membership coordinator and the IT Administrator (for technical support) have full access. Nobody else in the committee or The RHS Fruit Group can see, copy, store or edit the master table that contains your information.

At times, for example when we need to update and coordinate within the board, we may extract a limited view of this information for a particular purpose. For example if the newsletter editor needs to confirm the updated list of recipients, we can extract and share with him/her exclusively a list of surnames and emails he must send his letter to, without the rest of your personal information.

This sharing is only done withing the committee members or a designated activity coordinator, limited to the indispensable information for their task, and only for the purpose of their needs to complete said task.

CONSENT:  When you sign up, or renew your membership, you specifically authorize us to store and use your data in the terms here specified for the purpose of  managing your membership. 

The Fruit Group does not store, or need, your personal banking details.

Members and the public can use several methods to pay The RHS Fruit Group for their membership and activities

  • BANK ORDERS (BACS and Standing orders): You may instruct your bank to pay us to our account for periodical payments like your membership, or a payment for an event. Bank orders are only received, read and managed by the treasurer.
  • SUMUP: TFG has an account with SUMUP so we can operate a card reader at events including but not only the payment of memberships or visits. This card reader may be used by the treasurer, a board member, or a volunteer member of TFG that is helping out in the event.
  • STRIPE: TFG has an account with STRIPE so we can enable payments of events and memberships in online places like our website or at local activities.

These means of payment will contain data like your name and email to identify your payment, and the data will be read by The RHS Fruit Group Treasurer and the IT Admin (for support purposes) and may be shared in a limited way with other board members like the Membership or the Event coordinator to identify your payment and ensure actions like assuring you completed a booking or to confirm your membership renewal.

A limited amount of information of a payment, like a tick-box of the payment of an event or a date where you renewed your membership and the means you used may be stored on our AIRTABLE for the use of the membership coordinator to record such payment.

CONSENT:  When you sign up or renew as a member you are explicitly authorizing us to store and use your payment data for the purposes explained above.

The RHS Fruit Group will send you periodical information of your interest as a member.

To send you our news and communications we have an account with MAILCHIMP, were we will store your name and email on our Mailchimp account and add you to our distribution list. Mailchimp uses technologies that allow us to see statistics of our distribution list, including if you have opened our mail.

We do not sell or share any information contained in our distribution list to third parties or businesses to spam you and will strive to comply with Mailchimp’s terms of service at all times.

CONSENT: By renewing your membership you give us explicit consent to include you in our Mailchimp distribution list so we can send you news and communications regarding your membership in the terms listed above.

If you wish to unsubscribe at any time and not receive our news you may do so using the unsubscribe button included on every footer of the newsletter, or sending an email to the editor (editor AT thefruitgroup.org ) or the IT admin (admin AT thefruitgroup.org). 

Our website (www.thefruitgroup.org) offers members a list of events and in some cases tickets to participate in our activities. Such events and tickets are managed by the plugin extensions of WordPress “The Events Calendar” and ” Event tickets”. The payments of such events are then directed to our Stripe account, the same one we use to receive payments like your annual membership.

The website plugin holds a list of the attendees that have bought a ticket including their name and email, the date of purchase and status of the payment (complete). This information allows us to make a list of attendees to manage the event participants and send them information using tools like mailchimp and email of the event, like where to park or what to do on the day.

This internal website data is only visible to the committee members with admin rights to the website admin features, who may share the attendee list only with the event organizer, the treasurer and the events officer as described in our constitution.

We do not use this limited data for any other purpose, or share it with any other third party.

CONSENT: By using our website system to buy tickets for our events you are giving us consent to store and manage your data using the “events calendar” and “events ticket” plugins for the  purpose of coordinating the event you have purchased a ticket for in the terms we described.

Should you want to rectify and edit your data or delete it permanently (for example if you move house or change email, or you are cancelling your membership) you should send us an instruction to our membership coordinator at membership AT thefruitgroup.org

If you cancel your membership with us we will automatically remove you asap from our support tools, like removing you from our Mailchimp mailing list.

Unless you instruct us otherwise we will keep your data for a period no longer than two years from the date of your resignation request, for the sole purpose of communicating with you and ensuring that we assist you cancelling your membership efficiently. After that period all your data will be completely deleted from all of our records.

We will ask for your renewal of consent every year, when you join us and with the annual renewal of your membership in January. Please read the terms of consent carefully before agreeing, as we may change and update some Terms and Conditions as our systems evolve.

During the rest year we will operate under the rules of consent you have agreed with us.

We will consider minor changes for operational reasons- like adding a field or a checkbox in our database or creating a subgroup in Mailchimp – to be included in your consent of us managing the systems we have described.

If there are major changes that we feel we need to communicate to you because they significantly change the terms of your consent – for example using a different platform as a database – we will inform you first, allowing you time to send your questions and/or opt out- before we ask you to update your consent.

The RHS Fruit Group only needs to hold and use your data to keep you in touch and manage your membership. The RHS Fruit Group will never share or sell out any membership information with our knowledge to third parties for lucrative or spam purposes.

Please exercise caution when you receive a request to give your data, especially if this happens outside the expected yearly renewal or a new application website process. 

The ONLY person that can contact you and handle your membership data will email you from membership@thefruitgroup.org, and the ONLY  person who can contact you for any problem relating to your payments will use treasurer@thefruitgroup.org. Should you have any problem to use our IT -like our website or connect to a zoom webinar- the emails will come from admin@thefruitgroup.org.

Other committee members in The RHS Fruit group, FG, like the Chair who also has a @thefruitgroup.org email, will NEVER ask you or handle your membership data as they are not authorized to do so.

If you receive any unusual data request, and especially when it comes from emails that are not exactly those we described above, please don’t reply to their demands, don’t give any personal information, and contact The RHS Fruit Group immediately by you sending a clean new email to membership@thefruitgroup.org or talking to us in person in the next meeting or event and reporting the incident.

Remember that scammers can be very elaborate and skilful in convincing you that there is an incident that “needs to be solved” to have you hand them private and banking information.

If you have any questions about what you have read please send your inquiry to membership AT thefruitgroup.org . We are here to help you.

Once you have submitted the form

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