Privacy policy

We treat your data with respect and collect, store, manage and share it in line with your reasonable expectations, our values and our legal obligations. For more details please read our privacy policy below.

We are proud that our alumni and donors remain part of the York St John University family. They are integral to the success of York St John University. 

The Fundraising and Alumni department exists to meet the needs of our alumni at all stages of their careers and lives. Our work helps current and prospective students thrive through engagement, networking, and mentoring. Your support of our fundraising lets current and prospective students get the most out of their education. It helps fund our world-class research, our work for social justice, and supports our mission to provide excellent education for all.

If you have any questions or concerns then please contact us at: 

Alumni and Fundraising
York St John University
Lord Mayor’s Walk
York
YO31 7EX
alumni@yorksj.ac.uk 

The Alumni and Fundraising department is part of York St John University and the University is the Data Controller. Full details of the University’s data protection policies can be found in the University's privacy policy.

Data Protection and our Regulatory Duties

In order to ensure our service to you is of the highest quality and tailored to your needs we collect, process and store personal data about our alumni, partners and friends.

The legal basis for processing your data is for the purpose of meeting our legitimate interests: communicating with you to keep you updated about the university; offering you services, benefits and opportunities throughout your post-university life; enabling you to volunteer or donate if you wish to do so in order to further the University’s educational mission.

The Alumni and Fundraising office relies on legitimate interest as the legal basis for processing your data, however this only applies where it is not overridden by your interests and rights. We understand that legitimate interest is not the only lawful ground for processing data and so we will sometimes assess your data on an alternative legal basis – for example, if you subsequently give or withdraw consent.

Your personal data is held and processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and any other relevant legal requirements and we are committed to respecting and keeping safe any personal data you share with us, or that we collect from other sources.

How we collect, store and update your data

In order to process your data securely we keep it in a database. This database is updated at the end of every academic year with information from the student record system for new graduates, it is also updated by the online form filled in and submitted by you. It may also be updated manually when you contact us through email or by telephone, or if you interact with other departments or schools within the University. We may also collect and store information if you register to attend one of our events, volunteer for the university or provide personal information for any other purpose.

We have a legal duty to ensure your personal data is up to date and relevant and we aim to periodically check that your details are correct and to update where necessary. This may mean use of third parties such as the Royal Mail’s National Change of Address database.

We may also, in future, use publicly available information in order to research your ability and inclination to support us through volunteering or financially in order to ensure any communication we have with you about these activities is relevant and personal. We do not currently use external wealth screening companies and any future policy will be compliant with the Information Commissioner's Office guidelines and updated on these pages.

The kind of data we collect

The personal data we store and process may include:

• Name, nationality, preferred gender and date of birth
• Contact details including postal address, email address and telephone number
• Your year of graduation and subject studied
• Your occupation
• Records of donations and Gift Aid status, where applicable (as required by HMRC)
• Records of communications sent to you by York St John University or received from you
• Volunteering by you on behalf of the University
• Information on your engagement in University meetings, events, groups or networks.

Please note we do not collect or store any credit or debit card details in our database.

How we use your data

We may use your information to:

• Keep you updated about the University, our research, our events and other news
• Contact you to ask for a profile
• Invite you to relevant events including networking and social events
• Offer you opportunities to donate whether that is through volunteering, gift lecturing or financially
• Thank you for financial donations and update you on any projects you have helped with
• Maintain communication records
• Conduct surveys, focus groups and any other research which helps us serve our community better
• Carry out research, profiling and wealth screening in order to tailor our communications about our fundraising activity.

We assess your data to ensure all communications are relevant. This may be by looking at your geographical location, previous events attended or your area of study and we may look at your giving history.
When seeking or accepting major donations we are required to undertake a minimum level of diligence to protect the reputation of York St John University.

Access to and protecting your data

Your data can only be accessed by the Fundraising, Alumni and Database teams and all staff take robust mandatory data protection training. We may send you communications that may be of interest to you on behalf of other departments or schools within the University or other alumni, for instance reunion information, but we do not hand data over to any other department.

The Alumni and Fundraising department may process your data for a range of alumni engagement and fundraising purposes across mail, email, telephone and social media including:

• University publications
• Notification of alumni events
• Fundraising information
• Promotion of alumni and student mentoring services.

We may pass your information to third-party providers for the purpose of delivering services to you, for instance mailing houses. Additionally you may interact with the University through a third party such as Justgiving. Any third parties we employ must provide evidence of their data protection policies, likewise when we engage with third parties like Justgiving we comply with them. We do not share or sell your data to third parties for their own purposes unless we are required to do so by law.

When working with third parties it is possible that some data may be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area. We will ensure all third parties guarantee to provide protection in accordance with UK data protection law.

Retaining and deleting your data

The University considers its relationship with alumni, donors and other friends to be lifelong, and we will keep your details until you tell us you no longer wish to hear from us.

Should you request your data be erased, we will safely dispose of all information. We will continue to retain a core set of personal data (name, class, year of graduation, unique student record number and date of birth) to ensure we do not contact you again, and to maintain records of your academic qualifications. There may also be data which we are obliged to keep for tax, accounting and compliance purposes.

Your rights

We will also try to ensure the data we hold is relevant, up to date and meets your reasonable expectations.

You have the right to:

• Be kept informed as to how we use your data (via this Privacy Notice)
• Access or request a copy of the data we hold about you via a Subject Access Request
• Update or amend the data we hold about you
• Change your communication preferences
• Ask us to remove your data from our records
• Object to or restrict the processing of your information for any of the purposes outlined above
• Raise a concern or complaint about the way in which your information is being used.

Policy Changes

York St John University takes our legal responsibilities under the Data Protection Act 2018 very seriously. Therefore when this Act is updated, revised or replaced we will review our data processing practices and update our privacy policies accordingly.

We are at an early stage in our fundraising and alumni strategy and so we may in the future use your information for new purposes not currently described in this privacy notice. In this case we will update our policies accordingly and post them on this page.

Last updated on: 23 October 2019