Our Privacy Notice describes how The Office of Development and Alumni Relations (ODAR) processes your data, helping us develop and maintain engaging services and activities that enrich your experience with the University.
The Office of Development and Alumni Relations
Henry Robinson Hartley’s generous donation in 1862 laid the foundations for the University of Southampton. We have since developed into a world-renowned research-intensive University, with a strong educational offering, known for our innovation and enterprise. We have a mission “to change the world for the better” and we work towards this goal in partnership with our alumni, staff, donors and the wider community.
This Notice sets out how the University’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations (“ODAR”) uses your personal data to help create a mutually beneficial relationship with you, whilst always processing data fairly and securely.
We value your privacy and recognise the need to treat your data appropriately in accordance with the principles of the Data Protection Act 2018 and The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).
Data refers to personal information that we hold about you from which either on its own, or in combination with other information, you are identifiable. A list of the data we process is set out in this Privacy Notice.
Processing means doing anything with your data, such as collecting, recording or holding the data as well as disclosing, destroying or using the data in any way.
The University of Southampton is the data controller. Our Registration Number in the Data Protection Public Register is Z6801020. We keep this Privacy Notice under regular review and it may be amended from time to time.
Our Alumni and supporters (definitions)
Alumni
When you have studied at the University of Southampton for 10 weeks or more you automatically become a member of University alumni community. We inform you of this annually at enrolment and at your graduation. We inform you that your personal information, and education records from the University, will be processed by ODAR to enable us to provide you with support throughout your lifetime, via applicable services and opportunities.
We believe that the University has a duty to offer our alumni an ongoing relationship with their alma mater. This relationship should be beneficial to you at each stage of your life and you always have control over how this relationship is managed. We will endeavour to stay in contact with you and keep you up to date with what is happening at Southampton, whilst offering you services, fundraising opportunities, benefits and support.
Supporters
Our supporters and future supporters are people or employees at organisations who assist the University in a variety of ways e.g. through volunteering, donating, advocacy, attending events, being a staff member and or a student caller etc. Our supporters and future supporters are key to our success and growth, and like our alumni, we want to develop a long-term relationship with them.
We want them to have the best possible experience of the University, and one that reflects their incredible commitment to us. To enable us to grow our supporter base, we make connections with people who are new to the University, but who we believe have a connection to us, through a subject, cause or location, for example. If you have not provided us with your data, we will provide this Privacy Notice at the earliest appropriate point, for example, in our first written communication to you.
Accessing your information
You can update your data or contact preferences by emailing us at alumni@soton.ac.uk or calling us on +44(0)23 8059 2747.
If you do not want us to continue to process your data, we will retain minimal details on our database to ensure your details are not re-added in the future for another purpose. If you are an alumnus, we will need to retain your educational details with the University, for future reference e.g. for degree validation/replacement transcripts. This will include name, date of birth and education record/s details.
Your personal data is processed by ODAR for a number of purposes. For full details see section 3.0 of this Privacy Notice. It may include the following:
Alumni data
We collect personal data from your student record when you become an alumnus of the University (after 10 weeks of study). This data includes:
When you graduate, we will ask you to refresh your contact details and provide us with consent for contacting you via email.
As we continue to maintain a relationship with you, we may also gather:
We will only process sensitive data where you have shared it with us or it is for our legal requirements e.g. where giving in memory of a loved one and providing health details, for due diligence or where you are attending an event. This will always be done in a respectful and relevant manner. For more information on lawful basis for processing, see Section 7.0.
Supporters’ (non-alumni) data
Our supporters and future supporters are people who assist the University in a variety of ways e.g. through volunteering, donating, advocacy, attending events, being a staff member and/or a student caller etc. This includes supporter and future supporter data for Gift of Sight Appeal, John Hansard Gallery, Turner Sims Appeals and The Parkes Institute.
If you are not an alumni, and you provide us with a donation, we will record the information you provide us at the point of donation, this includes:
As we continue to maintain a relationship with you, we may also gather:
Where we processed sensitive data, it is where you have shared it with us or it is for our legal requirements e.g. where giving in memory of a loved one and providing health details, for due diligence or where you are attending an event. This will always be done in a respectful and relevant manner.
Future supporters’ data
If you are not an alumni or a supporter, we may wish to make contact with you to discuss opportunities to be engaged with the University of Southampton e.g. if you have supported a similar cause; are notable in your area; have a local affiliation etc. To enable us to connect with you in the first instance, we process the following data:
Once we have made our first contact with you, if you do not wish to be connected to the University we would cease processing your data. If you do go onto develop a relationship with us, we would use and store your data as detailed in ‘Supporter - How We Use Your Information’ section of this Privacy Notice.
If you are not an alumnus and we have not gathered your data directly from you, we will inform you about the personal data we hold at the time of our first communication with you.
Staff data
We will only process data on staff members if they have registered for an event (organised by ODAR). As with supporters, they will not be added to mass marketing mailing lists, unless they opt to do so.
We use your data for a variety of purposes, depending on your relationship with the University. This could include:
Communicating and engaging with you:
Providing you with beneficial services and opportunities:
Creating and promoting benefits including:
Informing our interactions by:
Summary
ODAR uses publicly available data to enhance our knowledge of a limited number of our alumni. We do so to ensure our contact with alumni, supporters and future supporters is relevant and timely. To complete this, we use a number of processes/tools, detailed in this section of the Privacy Notice.
Prospect research – briefings and profiles
To make sure we do not make inappropriate fundraising requests or send irrelevant communications to you, we may undertake prospect research to understand more about your capacity and likelihood to make gifts to the University and/or how you may like to be involved with us. This research could be conducted in house or through approved and trusted third party providers.
Research helps us to identify people and organisations who may be able to support the institution through a significant gift. It also helps to identify other individuals or organisation that the University would like to engage with for purposes other than philanthropy. For example, Council member nominations, honorary graduate nominations, preparation for meetings with senior individuals by University leadership or events etc. The information gained allows us allocate resources of our staff efficiently.
Prospect research is not excessive in nature; it is conducted if relevant to your current or potential relationship with the University at the time of research, and guided by our findings as our research unfolds. Research can include reviewing/updating your contact details; biographic details; areas of interests for philanthropy; financial capacity for philanthropy (based on assessment of visible assets); and inclination ratings for giving.
Research briefings and profiles may include details on:
All information is sourced from reputable publically available information to help us make an appropriate approach to you. We only include what is relevant to our need at that time.
If you would prefer us not to use your data in this way, please email alumni@soton.ac.uk or call 023 8059 2747.
Wealth screening
Wealth Screening (sometimes referred to as data enrichment and screening), is a process used by fundraising organisations to learn more about their constituents using trusted third party providers, who assimilate public domain data to provide information back to the organisation.
This screening can include sourcing new prospects and an analysis of propensity and capacity, although not always. It supports planning for our fundraising and engagement campaigns – allowing us to prioritise the portfolio for fundraisers and senior leadership.
When conducted screening, we only use vetted suppliers with the appropriate contracts in place. Some of these could include: Factary, Prospecting for Gold, Lagotto etc.
If you would prefer us not to use your data in this way, please email alumni@soton.ac.uk or call 023 8059 2747.
Why do we prospect research/wealth screen?
Our prospect research and wealth screening activities is:
Creating the best experience for our alumni and supporters:
Assisting affective fundraise for the University:
Adhere to guidelines and follow good practise:
If you would prefer us not to use your data in this way, please email alumni@soton.ac.uk or call 023 8059 2747.
Data updates/hygiene
To allow us to continually communicate with our alumni, supporters and future supporters, we will periodically undertake cleansing of our data, or ‘data hygiene’ – this is conducted with trusted third party data hygiene providers. These activities will include screening (a limited volume of) alumni and supporter data against data registers, in order to flag and suppress deceased and/or gone-away (constituents who have changed address where no forwarding address can be identified) records and where possible update address information for alumni and supporters who have changed address and where a forwarding address can be identified.
When conducting updates/hygiene activites, we only use vetted suppliers with the appropriate contracts in place. Some of these could include: Experian and The REaD Group etc.
If you would prefer us not to use your data in this way, please email alumni@soton.ac.uk or call 023 8059 2747.
Due diligence
In accordance to the Gift Acceptance Policy, the University will process data for due diligence purposes to understand the source of income for a gift. A report of due diligence may be provided to an internal Gift Acceptance Committee who will consider whether the donation can be accepted. Donors will be informed of this when they are considering their gift or at the point of their gift.
We complete due diligence to ensure we do not develop a relationship with, or receive a gift from, an untrustworthy or unethical source or constituent - the Charity Commission expects charities to ‘Know your Donor’ – through due diligence checks on donors, beneficiaries and local partners and monitor end use of funds .
If you would prefer us not to use your data in this way, please email alumni@soton.ac.uk or call 023 8059 2747.
Automated decision making and profiling
We sometimes use your data to create automated models or profiles that help us to understand, analyse or predict certain aspects relating to you/your behaviour. We use the outcomes to shape our interactions with you, making them beneficial and timely e.g. tailor the communications you receive to ensure you are told about events or let you know about fundraising campaigns/groups that may interest you. This could include using data models that help predict your personal preferences, interests or behaviour.
Whenever we use automated processes, we base our work on facts found through our database, or from reputable sources, to create tested algorithms/models. We always use appropriate mathematical or statistical procedures for the profiling, whilst continually checking for inaccuracies.
We never use the outcome of this work to make decisions that could damage you personally or your relationship with the University. They are only used to help us best manage your data and relationship with us effectively.
If you would prefer us not to use your data in this way, please email alumni@soton.ac.uk or call 023 8059 2747.
We collect your data from a variety of sources – covered in section 2.0 of this Privacy Notice – in more general terms, this can include:
If you are not an alumnus and we have not gathered your data directly from you, we will inform you about the personal data we hold at the time of our first communication with you.
Security of data
Everyone working at the University has a legal duty to keep information about you confidential. There are strict codes of conduct in place to keep your information safe. Staff abide all current data protection legislation and the University Data Protection Policy.
We ensure that suitable measures are in place to prevent the unlawful or unauthorised processing and against the accidental loss of, or damage to, your personal information. This includes:
Holding data
We create and hold your data both electronically and on paper. ODAR consider its relationship with alumni, supporters and potential supporters as ongoing and as such will maintain a record until you tell us you no longer wish to keep in touch or we have a requirement to delete information.
As an alumnus we may need to retain some information about your education with us and for identification purposes. If you are not an alumnus or donor and do not engage with us, we will remove the majority of your details, but retain a small amount to know you have not engaged and we will not pursue the relationship.
We will only process your data for the specific purpose, purposes that we tell you, or if specifically permitted by the Data Protection Regulations. We will only process your data to the extent necessary for that specific purpose or purposes.
Accurate data
We always aim to keep your data accurate and up to date. Data that is inaccurate can be amended on your request. Please notify us if your personal details change or if data we hold about you is inaccurate.
Depending on your privacy settings, we may use social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and/or other data enrichment services to validate your data and help us maintain our communication with you.
Data retention
Our alumni are lifelong members of the University community, and as such will look to retain alumni personal data until the individual would ask us to remove it from our records. A minimal amount of personal data may be retained in order to us to keep a record that you have asked to be removed, but that you have an education with the institution.
We believe that donors illustrate their connection to the institution and as such we maintain their personal data to support a future relationship.
If you are not a member of the alumni community, but we have identified that we would like to engage with you, we will hold your data to make an initial contact with you. If you have not provided us with your data, we will provide this Privacy Notice at the earliest appropriate point, for example, in our first written communication to you.
All alumni, supporters and potential supporters can decide that they no longer wish to receive communication from the University at any time – please see the ‘Control of Your Data’ section in this Privacy Notice.
For further information on the University’s policy regarding Information Governance, including Data Retention, please visit: Policy and guidance page
The lawful basis decisions are based on our Data Protection Impact Assessment and a Privacy Impact Assessment and are detailed below:
| Data type | Legal basis | Why? |
|---|---|---|
|
Alumni, supporter or future supporter data (all except email and sensitive information) |
Legitimate interest |
It is our legitimate interest to support your ongoing relationship with the institution and for the University to continue to provide you with services, information and other activities that maybe of interest to you. |
|
Alumni emails,/p> |
Consent |
For larger mailings, we ensure we gain consent for email communications at point of graduation, take into consideration your mailing preferences and the method of contact you have provided to us. |
|
Supporters emails |
Consent |
For larger mailings, we ensure we gain consent for email communication at point of donation, event attendance or via a request form etc (dependent on how the individual connects with our office). |
|
Future supporters emails |
Legitimate interest |
We only use future supporters emails, sourced through research or through a peer/colleague/recommendation to make an initial individual, bespoke connection. They are never added to any marketing communication lists, unless they give us consent (opt-in). |
|
Alumni or supporter sensitive data for events e.g. access requirements, dietary requirements (health) |
Consent |
Individuals consent to us gathering and storing this data for the purpose of the event administration. |
|
Current or potential supporter sensitive data for due diligence e.g. to allow us to cultivate a relationship and ask for a gift |
Legal requirement OR Consent (at point of gift) |
We have a legal and ethcial requirement to ensure we accept donations from reliable source, and not engage in a relationship that could damage the University. At point of initial contact, light touch information is gathered on constituents and sensitive data is minimal (and, where found, not recorded – but used a decision making tool). When we go onto receive a gift, our donors are informed of due diligence via a Gift Form/Gift Agreement. This is detailed in our Donor Charter. By giving the gift, they are consenting to this information being researched/stored. |
|
Donation detail |
Legal requirement |
Certain aspect of recording a gift are a legal requirement via HMRC and other guidelines, and processed/retained in line with this. |
If you would like further information on our legal basis, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer.
You have the right to:
If you would like to access your personal information please make a request in writing to:
The Data Protection Officer
Legal Services
University of Southampton, Highfield
Southampton, SO17 1BJ
Email: legalservices@soton.ac.uk
You will need to be able to provide proof of identity (e.g. full name, address, date of birth). We will provide your information within 30 calendar days of receiving your request.
For further information on the University’s policy regarding Information Governance, please visit: Policy and guidance page
For further information, please see the University’s Data Protection Policy and Electronic Use Policy.
If you are unhappy with the way that we have handled your information you can contact us at:
Email: alumni@soton.ac.uk / Telephone: +44(0)23 8059 2747
If you have any serious complaint, you have the right to lodge this with the supervisory authority, the Information Commisioner's Officer
From time to time we may use your data for new purposes not described in this Privacy Notice. If there are changes we will always post the policy changes on this Privacy Notice.
Last Updated: 15 May 2019