Alumni and supporters privacy notice

How we use your information

This privacy notice tells you what to expect when the University of Leicester collects personal information about you as a graduate, Family Programme Member, supporter or potential supporter.

The University processes personal data where:

• You have given us your consent or
• It is necessary in order for the University to seek support to further its objects as a place of education and of learning, in accordance with the University’s Royal Charter or
• It is in the legitimate interests of the University

We will process special categories of data where:

• You have given us explicit consent, unless reliance on consent is prohibited by law
• Processing relates to personal data manifestly made public by you

Graduates

In addition to this privacy policy, graduates of the University are directed to read the University’s policy on "Use of Student Data" which forms part of this privacy policy, which includes further information on how your information is used for statutory and survey purposes.

All students automatically become members of the Alumni Association on graduation or successful completion of their course (in accordance with the University’s constitution and prior existing student contract) and your student record has been used as the basis for your Alumni Association membership record.

Department and subject specific networks also exist, such as our Museum Studies Connect Network, and graduates will be invited to sign up to these networks where they exist.  This privacy policy also applies to the personal data submitted to these networks.

Scholarship recipients

If you have received a scholarship that is philanthropically funded, or otherwise administered through the Development and Alumni Relations Office (DARO), we will hold information relating to your scholarship. We also hold information you choose to provide to us in your scholarship report, as well as other information required for the administration of your scholarship. We will use the information you provide to us for stewardship and publicity materials (for a period of up to three years following your expected leaving or graduation date) to report back to our donors and also to encourage new donors to support further scholarships; you may change your consent for us to use your information in this way at any time.  Your scholarship report will then form a permanent part of your alumni record, but will only be used in line with our alumni privacy policy set out in this privacy notice.

Supporters

We look after personal data collected by the University during the course of our relationship with you if you give of your time, influence or money to philanthropically or otherwise support the University’s mission.

Potential supporters

If you have been identified as a potential partner or supporter of the University, your personal information will have been brought to the University’s attention either directly by yourself, or as a referral from a third person or through research conducted by DARO to find people who may have an interest in the work of the University arising from either geographic proximity or potential mutual interests.

We will contact you, as a potential supporter, with a view to securing a meeting or networking opportunity in order to discuss areas of mutual interest, partnership or benefit. We process your data in the legitimate interests of the University. We aim to contact you within one month of processing your information, at which point we will make you aware of this privacy statement and how we obtained your personal information.

Alumni and supporter communications

Your communications preferences are important to us. You can choose how you’d like to be kept in touch, by post, telephone, and email, by filling in our “stay in touch” form available on our website or contacting us using the details below. Any corrections you make are greatly appreciated.

Your contact details are used to provide you with information about:

• University news
• Events (including invitations to exclusive events)
• Products – such as courses of study or University merchandise
• Services – such as our Sports Facilities (accessible at a special rate to alumni), Careers support, and the University Library
• Opportunities to support the University – including volunteering opportunities (such as becoming a mentor to a current student, hosting or helping us to run an event), fundraising for us (perhaps by taking part in a sponsored walk, run, or bake sale), and direct fundraising appeals to support the University (such as for our cutting-edge medical research or student scholarships).

Further details

Graduates who have consented to receiving alumni communications via email will be sent our electronic newsletter from time to time (normally sent monthly), as well as invitations to events and other information relevant to your relationship as a graduate.  You can unsubscribe from these emails at any time, simply by emailing alumni.relations@le.ac.uk (this information is repeated within each email we send).

Our monthly e-newsletter and other one-to-many email communications are sent via our Alumni and Supporter Database, Raiser’s Edge; on occasion we use a third party provider, Dotmailer, to deliver our emails. We gather statistics about email opening and click-throughs using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve the content of the e-newsletter, and to ensure we communicate with you on topics which may be of interest.

Fundraising

As a charity, we take our duty to fundraise responsibly very seriously, and we are members of the Fundraising Regulator, abiding by the Fundraising Code of Practice.

Any telephone appeal is proceeded by a postal or email communication with information about the appeal, and contact details for any questions, and will only be made to alumni providing their phone number to the University. Alumni and supporters have generously contributed over £1.2m towards University appeals in this way since 2004.

Personal information contained in your record

In most cases, your basic record contains information you have provided to the University such as your name, date of birth, contact details, subjects studied with the University (where applicable), your profession or job, and any contact preferences you have expressed.

In the case of potential supporters, your basic record will be provided by referrals, public sources, or contact information that you have made publicly available.

An alumni or supporter profile, summarising the personal information we hold on your record, may be compiled into a report to aid University staff who might want to meet with you or host you at a University event.

Appending information to your record

In order to ensure we communicate with you in an informed and appropriate way, we will keep your record up to date where possible with details about your interactions with the University including meetings, events, and communications with us, and appropriate additional information from public sources and referrals, including:

• Information you have shared through professional social networks such as LinkedIn
• Information published by your place of work e.g. job title or business contact information
• News items related to your career, including any honours or awards bestowed on you, and other interests you have or causes you support

We have set up “Google Alerts” to bring these to our attention, as well as occasionally searching the internet and newspapers for relevant stories about our graduates and supporters. These alerts are reviewed by a member of DARO and added to your record if it is relevant to your relationship with the University.

Screening your information against other data sources

We occasionally screen our records against data sources provided by third party organisations, acting on behalf of the University.  The University does not sell personal data, and your information will not be retained by the organisations we use to screen our data. The data sources used for screening will include databases to help us ensure your address or telephone number is accurate and up-to-date.  We will change the address we hold on your record if you have consented to sharing your address in this way e.g. through the Royal Mail address forwarding/change service (the National Change of Address database (NCOA)). We may also use the Electoral Roll and Royal Mail files, to contact our “lost alumni” with the opportunity to reconnect with the Alumni Association. We do not append email addresses or telephone numbers to your record unless you have given specific permission to do so, or they are published as business contact information and it is relevant to add these to your record.

We also, from time to time, screen our records against lists held by third parties, acting on behalf of the University, compiled from public sources of wealth, news stories, or demographic information – such as average or specific house prices, demographic profiling, company directorships, published salary information etc. This is to ensure we communicate with our graduates and supporters on topics of most interest to you, and to ensure you receive appropriate fundraising appeals in the most cost effective way.

This forms an important part of the University’s reputational and legal due diligence on donors, volunteers, award or honorific nominees, and potential donors and supporters, whom we would like to approach, in accordance with the University’s Acceptance and Refusal of Donations Policy, and to satisfy money laundering regulations.

Our third-party business partners, including RELX (UK) Limited, trading as LexisNexis ("LexisNexis"), may provide us with your personal information in order to enable us to conduct background checks and screening activities, comply with our legal obligations and for other purposes as described in this privacy notice. LexisNexis is responsible for any personal information which they may collect and hold about you until it is received by us. To learn more about how LexisNexis collects and uses your personal information, please see their privacy policy.

Occasionally we will use our alumni and supporter records to identify those for whom a particular communication or event would be most suitable, based on the choices of similar graduates or supporters; decisions taken are not automated and always involve a review by a member of the DARO team.

Retention of data and records

In order for the University to carry out its business functions of keeping alumni and supporters up to date with University activities, and building relationships with supporters and prospective supporters, it requires contact details and contact history (for example, appeals and donations made) to be held indefinitely whilst the relationship endures.

There is a legal/contractual requirement to keep records and data relating to payments for services, for example alumni events, for 6 years after the activity/ transaction has been completed.

Data relating to alumni and supporters as users of services or day to day administration, e.g., correspondence or queries, where the detailed information is not required for contact history, will be retained for three years. This includes information alumni provide which has time-limited use.

Alumni and supporters who request for their data to be erased from the University’s alumni and supporter database because they no longer wish to maintain a relationship with the University, will have the majority of their record deleted and an “inactive” flag placed on the record. Please note that in order to fulfil requests for no further contact, the University will need to retain some basic identifying biographical information (name and date of birth) in order to ensure that those individuals are not re-added to the database in future. In addition, alumni records will retain details on the qualifications studied for with the University, for purposes of statistical and historical analysis, and as part of the University’s public duty to maintain a register of its alumni.

We will similarly erase information on potential supporters if they request no further contact or indicate otherwise that a relationship with the University is not desired, or else if they do not respond to our communications within 6 months of initial contact.

Disclosure of personal information

The University will never sell your personal data.

Unless you have requested otherwise, alumni records may be shared with University academic and professional departments and recognised alumni associations and chapters, sports and other clubs associated with the University. Alumni and supporter records may also be shared with external organisations acting as agents for the University, as noted previously.

This may in some circumstances mean that we share your personal information with other organisations who are based overseas. When doing so, we will ensure that procedures, technologies, and contractual conditions are put in place to maintain the security of all personal data which is processed overseas e.g. our Alumni and Supporter database, the Raiser’s Edge, is a platform provided by Blackbaud Europe Ltd, hosted in secure data centres based in the European Union; data to process financial transactions may also flow to data centres based in the USA; standard contractual clauses are in place to ensure data security standards meet the necessary legal requirements for these transfers to both the EU and the USA.

Graduation information is published each year in graduation books and is therefore considered to be in the public domain.

You can also request further information on:

• Agreements we have with other organisations for sharing information;
• Circumstances where we can pass on personal data without your consent e.g., to prevent and detect crime and to produce anonymised statistics.

Your rights

Under data protection law, you have rights we need to make you aware of. The rights available to you depend on our reason for processing your information.

You can change or withdraw your consent for us to contact you for alumni and supporter communications, or you may opt out of receiving specific communications or fundraising appeals by emailing alumni.relations@le.ac.uk. A chance to opt-out of fundraising is given in each of our fundraising communications.

In addition, you also have the following rights:

• The right to erasure - please read our “Retention of Data and Records” section for more information
• The right to request access to your personal data held by the University
• The right to have incomplete or inaccurate data rectified
• The right to restrict the processing of personal data – individuals have the right to block the processing of their personal data by the University in specific situations
• The right to data portability – individuals have the right to request provision of some elements of their information in digital form in order to provide it to other organisations.

In the first instance, please contact the University’s Information Assurance Services if you would like to discuss any aspect of your rights in relation to your personal data.

Graduate Outcomes survey

All students who graduate after 1 August 2017 will be invited to participate in the Graduate Outcomes survey.  The invitation will be sent by email or phone approximately 15 months after graduation.

Your contact details will be supplied to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for this purpose, regardless of your alumni contact preferences.

It is not compulsory for a graduate to complete the survey but your participation helps to ensure that accurate data on the outcomes of publicly funded and subsidised higher education is available to the public.

All information is used in compliance with the Data Protection Act 2018.

Processing of your information to conduct the Graduate Outcomes survey is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the Data Controller and for statistical and research purposes.

• HESA student data collection notice

How to raise a concern

DARO aims to achieve the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. For this reason, we take any complaints we receive about this subject very seriously. We encourage you to contact us if you think that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate. We would also welcome your suggestions for improving our procedures.

This privacy notice was drafted with brevity and clarity in mind. It does not provide exhaustive detail of all aspects of DARO’s collection and use of personal information. However, we are happy to provide any additional information or explanation needed. Any requests for this should be sent to the address below.

If you have any feedback or concerns in relation to the processing of your personal data please contact the University’s Information Assurance Services. If attempts to resolve a concern or complaint informally are not successful and you feel you have reason to complain, you may submit a formal complaint via the University’s Complaints Procedure.

External advice is available from the Information Commissioner who can be contacted via:

• Information Commissioners Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK95AF
• 0303 123 1113
• ICO website

Changes to this privacy notice

We keep our privacy notice under regular review. This privacy notice was last updated on 30 January 2023 to clarify that the University may conduct reputational due diligence and background checks on donors, volunteers, award or honorific nominees, as well as potential donors and supporters, as part of our duty of care and legal responsibilities. The previous version of the notice referred to these groups as “donors and supporters”.

How to contact us

If you want to request information about our privacy policy you can email us at alumni.relations@le.ac.uk or write to: Development and Alumni Relations Office, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK.

You can also contact the University’s Data Protection Officer.