Privacy policy

The Development and Alumni Relations team Privacy Policy

The purpose of this policy is to explain how the Development and Alumni Relations Team (DART) will collect and use (process) your personal data, what rights you have in relation to that data and to provide transparency about the data collected about you.

DART is part of the University of Liverpool (UoL), and the University is the Data Controller. Full details of the University’s data protection policies are available here.

Who we are and what we do

Development and Alumni Relations supports the University’s objectives through engaging with alumni, students, stakeholders and supporters of the University. We do this by offering a range of academic, social and networking events and publications and providing access to University Library resources and employment and career advice for recent graduates. We also fundraise to support the University’s students, teaching, research and capital projects.

In order to provide these services, we have a database that contains personal data collected by the University of Liverpool during the course of our relationship with our students, alumni, donors and stakeholders. Developing a better understanding of our graduates and supporters through their personal data allows us to make better decisions, allows us to engage in a bespoke and relevant manner and helps ensure that you are getting the best contact available from DART for your purposes. It also helps us, where appropriate, to ask for your support with the things we believe you care about most.

Unless you have requested otherwise, the information you provide is used by the University, its Schools and Faculties and alumni associations to communicate with you for its engagement and fundraising purposes. These may include:

Providing you with the services and information you asked for
The promotion of benefits and services available to alumni
The promotion of University of Liverpool alumni events and reunions
Distribution of University mailings (e.g. the Alumni magazine, newsletters, annual reports)
University-related fundraising initiatives involving alumni
Eliciting non-financial support (e.g. careers advice to students, help with student recruitment).

Basis of data processing

We take our data protection responsibilities seriously and ensure the personal information we obtain is held, used, transferred and processed in accordance with all applicable laws. We rely on our legitimate interest as our legal basis for data processing for these activities wherever appropriate and possible. In respect of Higher Education Statistic Agency Surveys on the activities and perspectives of graduates, processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest.

The data we hold

If you are a student or graduate, most of the data we hold would have been transferred from your student record and in accordance with the University’s Programme Terms and Conditions. The vast majority of the information we hold will have been obtained directly from you; and if you interact with other departments, faculties, schools or University of Liverpool staff we may receive data from these areas in order to keep your details up to date. This includes:

Your name, title, gender and date of birth
Your home or parental address, email address and telephone numbers
Mode of study (e.g. full time, part-time, online learning)
Course details, academic department and programme of study
Start, end and graduation dates
Scholarship and other funding information

Some of the personal data we hold about you has been provided by you during interactions with the University of Liverpool and/or the Development and Alumni Relations Team, for example website activity, face to face meetings, event registrations, volunteering activity or making a donation, namely:

Your donation history, gift amount and Gift Aid status, where applicable, as required by HMRC
Updates to your contact details (address, email, phone and links to social media accounts)
Records of verbal or email conversations/meetings, including personal and philanthropic interests
Your family and partner/spousal details
Your recreation and interests
Your relationships with other University of Liverpool alumni, staff, donors and friends
Information about your engagement in University of Liverpool meetings, events, groups or networks
Your volunteering activity with the University of Liverpool
A record of the communications we have sent to you and any responses to such communications
Your contact preferences.

The Development and Alumni Relations team may hold personal data relating to your professional history. This data may have been provided by you, or it may have been obtained from social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook) or publicly available sources (Companies House and other business-related resources, the internet , publications and news articles such as Queen’s Honours List, Times Rich List, and the National Change of Address File and other services that provide email addresses and telephone numbers), namely:

Your employment status (e.g. part-time, full-time, retired)
Your current job title and work email address
Your previous role(s) and job title
Your current and past employers, name, address and telephone number
The dates that you have been employed in any particular role
Your photograph
Your income band

If you interact with the University through a third party (for example, supporting the University via JustGiving or through a recognised University volunteer or group) then we may obtain information about you from that third party. The receipt of personal information by DART in this manner is subject to the third party’s own privacy policy or the information they have provided to the data subject. Information obtained in this way is treated no differently to any other once held by the DART, and is bound by the terms of this Privacy Notice as soon as it is received.

Who will my information be shared with?

The University’s Volunteering portal, Liverpool Connect is hosted by Aluminati Network Group which is contractually bound to provide this service to the University and our alumni, students and supporters. Liverpool Connect allows users to update their details online, access a directory of registered University of Liverpool alumni, and, subject to an individual registrant’s authorisation, participate in online mentoring and e-networking. To enable us to offer this service, some of your personal information will be stored in Liverpool Connect.

The University has a legal obligation to supply some of the information we hold about you, as a graduate, to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) – the official agency for the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative information about higher education in the United Kingdom. HESA will treat your personal information in line with its Student Data Collection Notice. HESA produces official statistics (such as university league tables) and its outputs are regulated by the UK Statistics Authority, which has a direct line of accountability to Parliament. Graduates will be contacted after graduation to the Graduate Outcomes (GO) Survey.

The University also participates in national surveys from some of its programmes to rank the quality of its teaching, learning and research, for example the Financial Times Rankings for University of Liverpool Management school ranked courses. In such instances, your personal information may be shared with the survey body in order to contact you for its research purposes; where this is the case, we will always ensure that there are no further uses of your personal information without your consent. These rankings are important as they feed into university league tables and rankings, which in turn are a measure of quality and further enhance the value of your degree.

The University may also use third-party data processors to support activities described in this Privacy Notice. Where this is the case, the third party will always be contractually bound to the University and required to hold personal information confidentially and securely and not to use it in any other way than as instructed by the University. Personal information will only be kept by the third party for as long as it is required to fulfil its obligation to the University, and will then be destroyed.

From time to time we may work in partnership with other charitable organisations contractually bound to the University on joint fundraising initiatives, and we may – in limited circumstances – share your name and information about the nature of your relationship with the University (e.g. the fact that you are an existing donor to the University) with those organisations. We do this solely to ensure that you are contacted for these joint initiatives only by the most appropriate partner. In such cases, all parties are bound by a contractual agreement governing the types and uses of the shared data and will not be permitted to retain the data nor use it for any other purpose (for example, fundraising beyond the joint project). Please note that these ‘partnership approaches’ encompass a very small number of individuals who are likely to make major philanthropic gifts to the specific charitable area the University is working in partnership to support.

Wealth screening, research, data analysis and updating your contact details

The University of Liverpool was founded on philanthropy and philanthropy continues to make an enormous impact at our University. As we are a fundraising institution, we may gather information about you from publicly available sources – for example, Companies House, the Electoral Register, the internet and the media – to help us to understand more about you as an individual and your ability to support the University, including financially. We may carry out wealth screening, a process which uses trusted third-party partners to automate some of this work. You always have the right to opt out of this processing. We may use information gathered from public sources or other departments, schools or faculties within the University of Liverpool, alongside the information you provide, to undertake analysis of who might support the University and to understand the preferences of our alumni about events, communication and services.

Through such profiling, we may also hold data that has been created by the University of Liverpool Development and Alumni Relations team, such as:

Wealth capacity ratings, which is an estimated asset worth
Philanthropic interests
Internal classifications and ratings as a potential donor
A rating level on your engagement which is created from a mix of your event attendance, donation history and other interactions with the University.

By doing this, we can focus conversations we have with you about fundraising and volunteering in the most effective way, and ensure that we provide you with an experience as an alumnus/a, donor or potential donor which is appropriate for you.

We also use publicly available sources to carry out due diligence on donors in line with the University’s Gift Acceptance Policy and to meet money laundering regulations.

Fundraising is a key part of DART’s work, and we are committed to working in a transparent, ethical, responsible and honest way. To reflect this commitment, we are a member of the Fundraising Regulator and committed to the Regulator’s Code of Practice.

We continuously review records of alumni and supporters to ensure our data is as accurate as possible. We may consult alternative publicly available sources in order to do so, e.g. Royal Mail address files, BT phone directories, reviewing job information that you have made available via LinkedIn or Facebook (as per their Privacy Policies), newspaper articles, company websites and other publicly available sources. We may use third-party partners to automate this process. By ensuring our data is up to date, we can avoid wasteful postage costs of mailing incorrect addresses and ensure you can continue to enjoy the lifelong benefits that come with being alumni of the University of Liverpool.

To ensure that our communications are relevant to you and your interests, we may use tools that help us track whether the emails we send are opened and which links are clicked within a message. We may also track website visits and use analytical tools, such as Google Analytics, to use this information to improve our website.

We do not use your personal data to make any automated decisions about you.

How is data stored?

Personal data of alumni, donors and other stakeholders is stored in a cloud-based database supplied by Blackbaud, Inc. called Raiser’s Edge (RE) under a contract for service. RE is hosted by Blackbaud on their servers located in the EEA. Access to personal data is restricted to the staff in DART and any other members of the University staff who have a requirement to maintain a relationship with you, and is controlled through password protection and user security profiles. Blackbaud Inc. do not permit their staff to have access to the personal data stored in RE.

The personal data of some alumni and supporters may be stored in a proprietary software application used to manage fundraising campaigns conducted by telephone. Access to the software is restricted to students employed under a contract to make calls to alumni and supporters, the campaign manager and DART staff and is controlled through user name and password.

How long is personal data held?

The University keeps personal data for as long as it is needed for the purpose for which it was originally collected. Most of these time periods are set out in the University Records Retention Schedule. The Development & Alumni Relations team considers its relationship with alumni, donors and other stakeholders to be life-long, giving you access to selected University services and a vast support network. This means that we will maintain a stakeholder record for you until such time as you notify us that you longer wish us to keep in touch. In this instance we will delete the majority of the personal data that we hold for you, but will maintain basic personal data to ensure we do not inadvertently create a new record in the future.

What rights do I have when it comes to my data?

You are in control of your data and have the right to opt-out of all or specific communication types at any point. To change your preferences, please contact us via: alumni.data@liverpool.ac.uk or complete our contact preferences update form at: www.liverpool.ac.uk/alumni/preferences.

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, you may have the following rights with regards to your personal data:

The Right to subject access – you have the right to see a copy of the personal data that the University holds about you and find out what it is used for.
The Right to rectification – you have the right to ask the University to correct or remove any inaccurate data that we hold about you.
The Right to erasure (right to be forgotten) – you have the right to ask the University to remove data that we hold about you.
The Right to restriction – you have the right to ask for your information to be restricted (locked down) on University systems.
The Right to data portability – you have the right to ask for your data to be transferred back to you or to a new provider at your request.
The Right to object – you have the right to ask the University to stop using your personal data or to stop sending you marketing information, or complain about how your data is used.
The Right to prevent automated decision making – you have the right to ask the University to stop using your data to make automated decisions about you or to stop profiling your behaviour (where applicable).

Please note that not all rights apply in all situations. To find out more about your rights under the UK GDPR, please visit the Information Commissioner’s website.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy you can contact the Development and Alumni Relations team at:

DART Operations
Development and Alumni Relations
Victoria Building
Ashton Street
Liverpool
L69 3DR
alumni.data@liverpool.ac.uk

If you would like to request a copy of the data held about you please submit a ‘Subject Access Request’; more information on this can be found here.

For wider enquiries about how the University manages information or if you would like to make a complaint about how your data is being used, please contact the University’s Data Protection Team by writing to:-

Dan Howarth, Data Protection Officer
By email: legal@liverpool.ac.uk
Post: Legal & Governance, University of Liverpool, Foundation Building, 765 Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L69 7ZX.

In addition, you also have the right to raise any concerns direct to The Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5A, telephone: 08456 30 60 60 or 01625 54 57 45, website: www.ico.org.uk

Changes to the privacy policy

In the interest of being transparent, we may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any significant changes to this Policy or to the way we treat your data will be communicated via the University’s website.

Other websites

This privacy notice does not cover the links within this site linking to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.