Photography, video and testimonials: policies and guidelines
The regulations around use of your personal information, including images and statements, have changed substantially in recent years (for example, the General Data Protection Regulation was introduced in 2018). We have updated our policies and forms accordingly. This page gives supporting information for people who have been asked to sign our general consent form, introduced in April 2019.
Consent
When we take photographs or video that focus on you as a main subject, or when we gather testimonials or other statements from you, we must seek your informed consent:
- for the content featuring you to be stored and used
- for your contact details to be stored in case we need to contact you about the images.
We usually do this by asking you to sign a consent form before the photo-shoot or video-shoot, but sometimes we may gather consent in other ways. For example, by asking you to read out a consent statement that we record, or by emailing you (especially if, for some reason, you didn’t sign a consent form at the time of the shoot).
Consent form
Our consent form asks for a few brief details including contact information. If you are a student, we also ask you to indicate whether you are a UK student or an international student. We’ve included this latter section to help us ensure that images are used appropriately, for example to illustrate a webpage for international students with images depicting international students rather than UK students.
We recommend using an online form but also have a PDF version for print if required.
If your video or photoshoot will include young persons under the age of 18, you must acquire written consent from a parent or guardian. We provide a specific consent form online and as a PDF for under 18s.
Documents
General
Under 18s
Create your own consent form
We can also provide duplicate links for these forms so that you can access the responses and have them saved to your own files. Please contact content-creative@bristol.ac.uk to request this.
Acquiring consent for a specific project
Some contributors agreeing for their image and/or words to be captured may only agree to do so with restrictions. For example they may ask that their image be restricted for use in a specific project.
In these cases please contact the content and creative team who can provide you with the agreed modified text that can be used in a duplicate consent form.
Please read the storage and retention section to see how to store these images.
Usage
We produce images and video, and collect testimonials and other statements, for use in our marketing, publicity and general communications across a range of media. These include prospectuses, banners, hoardings, flyers and posters, leaflets, the University website, University social media channels and University publications such as the Annual Report.
We also provide some images for use by partner organisations, agencies working on our behalf (designers, marketing agencies etc) and print/online media publishers (for example, The Times University Guide or The Guardian).
Testimonials (written or spoken)
If you are providing statements for testimonials, we may need to make minor editorial changes to your words (shortening, clarifying, etc), depending on the intended use. We reserve the right to make minor editorial or grammatical changes to your responses, but we will not materially alter the substance of your submission.
Storage and retention
We store images, video, testimonials and any related information on secure servers, located either on its own systems or in externally hosted facilities, always in compliance with the University’s data protection obligations.
Images featuring people are normally held in the University’s image library for general use for six years from the date of the photoshoot, after which they are removed from circulation.
Images that do not feature people (for example shots of buildings, landscapes and objects) are often kept in circulation for longer.
If you have captured any footage or imagery, using a modified project consent form provided by the University of Bristol’s content and creative team, you must store these locally within a secure University system and not upload these restricted use images to the University of Bristol’s image library for general use.
We will usually keep audio-visual material in our library for no longer than seven years. However, we reserve the right to store images or video of particular importance or value for a longer period if still appropriate for our needs.
Our consent forms our currently stored centrally within the Strategic Communications and Marketing division. If you need to check if a consent form has been completed, or need to access information from a consent form related to your project, please email the Content and Creative team (content-creative@bristol.ac.uk).
Printed consent forms should be scanned and saved locally to a University of Bristol system. Once scanned hard copies should either be stored in a secure lock-up with limited access or disposed of using University confidential waste receptacles.