How we use your data

Who we are

The Global Engagement Division (GED) at the University of Bristol supports the delivery of the University’s key strategic priorities by facilitating philanthropic giving, expanding our international community of alumni and friends and demonstrating how engagement and philanthropy can make a positive impact on local communities across the world.

As part of this work, we facilitate public and civic engagement across the University, managing events and other activities involving the general public and representatives of local, national and international civic society.

Global Engagement Division Privacy Notice

The University of Bristol (“The University”) is committed to protecting your personal data and for keeping you informed about how information about you is used.

This notice outlines how the Global Engagement Division (GED) process your personal data in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

This notice should be read in conjunction with the University’s top level privacy notices.

The GED at the University of Bristol supports the delivery of the University’s key strategic priorities by facilitating philanthropic giving, expanding our international community of alumni and friends and demonstrating how engagement and philanthropy can make a positive impact on local communities across the world.

We work with a range of audiences as part of our work, including alumni, donors, civic partners and the general public. The statements below are common to these groups. Further information specific to these audience categories is outlined in detail later in this document.

Types of personal data processed

In order to keep you up to date with news from the University of Bristol and provide information about activities including events, volunteering opportunities and fundraising opportunities that may be of interest to you we need to process information relating to you.

The categories of personal data that we process will depend on your relationship with the GED as outlined below:

Members of the alumni community:

Biographic information including your name and title and your contact details
Information about your time at the University
Details of any volunteering carried out or donations received by the University
Donor status and wealth assessment information
Scholarship information which may include personal details about the award of that particular scholarship
Your professional activities and / or other information in the public domain
Your attendance at University events
Responses you supply to surveys
Your current interests and activities, which may include extracts from any related media stories
Relationships to alumni, donors and friends.

Donors to the University:

Biographic information including your name and title and your contact details
Details of any volunteering carried out or donations received by the University
Donor status and wealth assessment information
Your professional activities and / or other information in the public domain
Your attendance at University events
Responses you supply to surveys
Your current interests and activities, which may include extracts from any related media stories
Relationships to alumni, donors and friends.

Members of the public & current/prospective partners of the Civic team:

Event registration information including name and contact details
Information provided when registering for mailing lists
Your attendance at University events
Your current interests and activities, which may include extracts from any related responses you supply to surveys
Relationships to alumni, donors and friends.

We also need to process the following special categories of data:

Information about dietary, health or access requirements if you are attending an event organised by the University, or if you have supplied it and it is otherwise relevant to your relationship with us.

How we collect your data and how we use it

We will sometimes collect information about you that is publicly available and append it to your record, such as your current employment, or any awards or accolades you may receive, or information in openly available newspapers, publications or directories. This is to ensure that our records remain up to date, and that you continue to receive the emails, opportunities and invitations that will be the most appropriate and interesting to you, and in order to ensure our fundraising activity is as effective as it can be.

The information we process about you is also collected directly from you when you register and attend events and complete surveys.

We also process information about you that is already held in University systems, including our student record system.

We may also receive information about you from third parties, such as your friend passing on your details to us to invite you to a reunion. We will always check with you before using these details for marketing purposes.

Occasionally, we may ask external companies to add data about you to our existing record. This may include wealth screening companies or companies that will append additional information to the records we hold.

The information received from these companies may be generalised, such as Mosaic classifications based on your postcode, or personal, such as notifications that you have changed address, updated contact details, or an indication of your wealth or philanthropic giving capacity. The companies conducting this activity will be carefully vetted by the University to ensure that their processing of your data is fair, reasonable and compliant under relevant legislation.

We will use your information to:

Keep you up to date with news and progress regarding the University.
Promote University events, activities and programmes.
Promote benefits and services you are eligible to receive.
Further our charitable aims through a range of philanthropic fundraising appeals and programmes, including direct marketing (such as receipt of University publications), telephone and email fundraising and, where relevant, a request to meet you in person.
We may use your details for the purposes of telephone fundraising or market research. Our telephone fundraising campaigns are managed in-house or through trusted external agencies. Our callers are current University of Bristol students and are paid for their work, which provides them with valuable work experience whilst raising vital funds for the University.
Provide you with any services you have requested.
Produce statistics for reporting purposes. Where possible, this is done in an anonymous format.

We respect and honour the rights to privacy of our alumni community, and will fully comply with your requests on how you wish to be contacted by the University. We will conduct all our fundraising in accordance with the Fundraising Regulator’s Code of Fundraising Practice.

We will process your personal data either in ways you have consented to, or because it is otherwise necessary for a lawful purpose.

The lawful basis for us to process your personal data for the above purposes is:

Consent: because you have agreed to it being used as set out in this notice. This includes sending of electronic marketing to personal email addresses, which may include email newsletters, event invitations, volunteering opportunities, fundraising emails and other University updates, including those sent on behalf of the Alumni Association or volunteers. For donors we ask for your consent to make public a list of those making financial contributions to the University.
Contract: because we need to fulfil our obligations to you before, during and after our relationship with you, including for the sale of event tickets, merchandise, and any other similar transactions. This also includes you inclusion in our fundraising telephone campaign of any telephone number registered with the Telephone Reference Service (TPS). We also have a contractual obligation to donors to implement binding aspect of our gift agreement with you.
Public Task: because we are undertaking activities in the exercise of our official authority or to perform tasks in the public interest. This includes our core alumni functions related to the Alumni Association and any future body or mechanism replacing this body. It also included the provision of data to partake in the Graduate Outcomes Survey which involved graduates 15 months after graduation. This is facilitated by an external party and delivered to the Higher Education Statistical Agency.
Legal Obligation: because it is necessary to use your personal data to comply with the law. This includes facilitating Gift Aid claims here we must submit information to HMRC. We also need to satisfy regulatory requirement to “know your donor” by carrying out research on the financial and reputational background to large donations. We may also need to carry out some aspects of the processing of the receipt of gifts left in people’s wills.
Legitimate Interests: because it is necessary for the University’s legitimate interests or the interest of a third party

The following activities have been assessed by the University, and are carried out on the basis of Legitimate Interest. This means that they are considered to be in the legitimate interests of the University, and having balanced these interests with your rights as the Data Subject and the requirements of the UK GDPR, it is reasonable for these activities to be carried out:

Use of data to contact alumni and supporters, to provide newsletters, event invitations, volunteering opportunities, philanthropic fundraising communications and other University updates, noting that electronic communication and use of TPS registered phone numbers are only to be used with the consent of the recipient, as outlined above
Administration of donations, events, volunteering and other activity
Appending of data to the database using publicly available information or through use of third party data appending and wealth screening services
Profiling, segmenting and analysing of data to review or project the performance of our programmes and to target activity to relevant audiences, ensuring you receive the most appropriate and interesting content for you
Sharing of photographs, films or videos from University events or activities, or shared with the University by alumni and supporters
Production and publishing of class lists, showing the names of all those who graduated from a certain course at a certain time. We may also provide class lists in response to requests from alumni for networking purposes.

Stopping any of these activities would immediately have an impact on our relationship with you. Each activity is designed to support your experience, whether this is through invitations to engage in activities, processing or appending data to ensure that mailings and individual conversations are appropriate and likely to be of interest, or enabling us to review ongoing activity and stop programmes or approaches that are not well received.

The special category data as listed above, is being processed for the above purposes under the following additional lawful basis:

Explicit consent: unless there is a substantial public interest which allows us in certain limited circumstances to use this information without consent.
Reasons of substantial public interest: The use of special category data in certain limited circumstances, for example in fundraising for scholarships designed to support the widening of access to education by groups whose defining characteristics might be covered by a special category (e.g. fundraising for a scholarship for students from an ethnic minority.) Where this is relevant, the most applicable substantial public interest condition is paragraph 8 of Schedule 1: Equality of opportunity or treatment.

Sharing your personal data

Your personal data will be collected and processed primarily by University staff.

We may need to share your personal data with other teams or colleagues in the University to support a range of activities including:

When organising events or reunions, in order to confirm guest lists, dietary requirements, attendee information or accessibility needs
Supporting the Graduate Outcomes survey by providing contact details and employer information where we hold it
Providing details of former students who may be able to support Schools or Departments with their employability efforts by sharing employment details
Sharing case studies provided for marketing purposes with School and Departments across the University
Facilitating relationship building by sharing personal data to support appropriate engagement activities
Producing internal reports and analysis to support planning and evaluation of activities.

We will never sell or give away your data to other companies or charities. Where a task does not fall into our public duty, we will only share your data with third parties providing a service for the University. Personal information will not be disclosed to external organisations other than those acting on the instructions of the University.

Where this is the case, a written contract will be put in place between the University and the third party to set out the purposes for which the information can be used and the security measures that must be in place. The service provider will agree never to use your data for any additional purpose not set out in the agreement with the University. Such companies may include the use of a mailing house to facilitate the mailing of event information and other mass communications, a third party to provide a service such as ‘AskingBristol.’

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow third party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes, we only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

Please note that we may need to share your personal information with a regulator or to otherwise comply with the law, and the list above is not necessarily exhaustive.

Storage and retention of personal data

The University has put in place appropriate technical and organisational security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost or used, accessed, altered or disclosed in any unauthorised way.

Access to your personal data is limited to those that have a lawful and legitimate ned to access it.

We use US-based companies, Blackbaud Inc. and MailChimp, to process our email communications. We take steps to ensure that all of our partners have appropriate safeguards in place when personal data is transferred overseas, for instance standard contractual clauses and associated mechanisms.

We retain your data for varying amounts of time, depending on the nature of the data and the purpose for which it is used. Basic information on who you are and what you studied is required to be kept by the University. We have a detailed retention policy which is available on request from alumni@bristol.ac.uk.

The personal information we obtain will be held securely on the University’s supporter and alumni relations database. This is hosted within the EU and is fully SAS 70 Type II Certified and PCI DSS compliant. We take appropriate steps to ensure that we only record and store information which is relevant, that we keep it securely, that it is accurate and up to date and only kept for an appropriate length of time.

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

Your rights

Under certain circumstances, you may have the following rights in relation to the data we process:

Right to request access to your personal data
Right to request correction of your personal data
Right to request erasure of your personal data
Right to object to processing of your personal data
Right to request restriction of the processing your personal data
Right to request the transfer of your personal data
Right to withdraw consent.

For more information on these rights please visit the University’s guidance here. To exercise any of the above rights please contact the Data Protection Officer via data-protection@bristol.ac.uk

Questions, comments and complaints

If you have any questions or comments regarding this Privacy Notice, please contact: alumni@bristol.ac.uk.

You can also contact the University’s Data Protection Officer at: data-protection@bristol.ac.uk.

If you are unhappy or have any complaints about how we process your personal data, we encourage you to follow our internal complaints procedure, as outlined here on our website. Should you remain dissatisfied after exhausting our internal complaints process, you have the right to raise your complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).