Privacy Policy

Overcome is a UK-registered charity (number 1191308) that provides free online mental health coaching. We help people with building healthy habits, as well as managing mild to moderate low mood, worries, or fears through a 6-session programme of one-to-one video calls with trained coaches.

We have a defined scope. We are not a crisis service, and we cannot provide specialist support for conditions like OCD, PTSD, personality disorders, or psychosis. We cannot make diagnoses or prescribe medication. This matters for how we handle data, because it means we need to know whether the people arriving at our site are people we can actually help.

We run advertising campaigns to reach people who could benefit from our service. But because we have a defined scope, it's important that those campaigns are reaching the right people. If an ad campaign or a partner referral is consistently sending people who need crisis support or specialist psychiatric care, we need to fix this as quickly as humanly possible.

The same applies to volunteer recruitment. If a campaign is consistently sending applicants who are not suitable to be coaches, we need to know so we stop running it!

We use the minimum amount of tracking needed to achieve these goals. We do not run targeted ads, we do not build profiles of users across the web, and we do not share this data with advertising networks for any other reason.

We use PostHog (hosted in the EU) for website analytics. This tells us things like which pages people visit, how long they stay, what browser they use, and where they came from. This data is anonymised; It is never tied to any specific person.

To sign up, users fill out a short questionnaire via Typeform. You can see the latest version of the form on our homepage. We assess eligibility before we ask for contact details. If a user fall outside our scope, we direct them to more appropriate services.

If a user is eligible, we also record the referral data attached to their visit (UTM parameters) so we can connect the sign-up to the campaign that caused it. This is how we measure whether our outreach is reaching the right people, as described above.

Coaches are never authorised to use AI tools during sessions without your explicit consent.

Coaches and other Overcome staff are never authorised to enter any personally identifiable information into any AI model, under any circumstances. We do not permit third parties to process client data with AI.

If you have specific requests around AI, email clients@overcome.org.uk before signing up. If you've already signed up, email both your coach and clients@overcome.org.uk to let us know.

We keep all personally identifiable information in an encrypted database.

For applicants and prospective trainees, we store applications for 6 years for those we accept (in line with UK government guidance on learner data retention for training providers) and 3 years for unsuccessful applicants (as applicants may reapply within this period). After this period, we anonymise the data by removing all identifiable information (e.g., email, CV, name), but keep scores and rankings. Applications are stored for 10 years where dishonesty or misconduct is strongly suspected (e.g., apparent lies on CV).

We keep disciplinary records for coaches, trainees, and staff (e.g., formal warnings) for as long as is necessary to protect clients and prevent those individuals from rejoining the organisation, assessed on a case-by-case basis.

We store all coaching data, including session notes, wellbeing questionnaires, and communication records, in an encrypted database. 7 years after the programme ends (as recommended by the Association for Coaching), we anonymise this by removing all identifiable information, retaining only outcomes, age group, and country. You can request earlier anonymisation by emailing us. Anonymising this information helps us understand who our service works well for and where we need to improve.

We keep all evidence of grossly unacceptable client behaviour (e.g., stalking) for as long as is needed to protect our staff and coaches. What exactly we store would depend on the nature of the incident. At the time of writing, we have had to do this approximately 5 times, affecting less than 0.1% of clients.