Alumni Privacy Policy

We collect information in the following ways:

• When you leave a programme of study at Central. After you complete or leave your programme of study, your information will be transferred to our alumni database from our student records system. At that point, the alumni database becomes the primary record of your ongoing relationship with Central, unless and until you commence another programme of study or work at Central. 
• When you give it to us directly. You may give us your information in order to sign up for one of our events, make a donation, request a copy of a transcript or communicate with us.  Your information will be uploaded to our alumni database. 
• When you give it to us indirectly. Your information may be shared with us by independent event organisers, for example the fundraising sites like BTDonate or Everyday Hero. These independent third parties will only share your data with us when you have indicated that you wish to be contacted by Central. You should check their privacy policies when you provide your information to understand fully how they will process your data.
• When you give permission to other organisations to share or it is available publicly we may combine information you provide to us with information available from external sources.  This enables us to contact you in the event that you change your address or phone number, or didn’t provide it to us.  We may also use this information to gain a better understanding of our supporters to improve our fundraising methods, events, and alumni benefits and services. The information we get from other organisations may depend on your privacy settings or the responses you give them, so you should regularly check them.  

This information comes from the following sources:

• Third party organisations

You may have provided permission for a company or other organisation to share your data with Central specifically or with ‘other organisations’ more generally.  This could be when you buy a product or service (e.g. post redirection service) or sign up with a networking site (e.g. LinkedIn).

• Social Media

Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media and messaging services like Facebook or Twitter, you might give us permission to access information from those accounts or services.

• Information available publicly

This may include information found in places such as Companies House and other business-related resources, the World Wide Web or published in articles/newspapers.

The personal data we can currently store and process may include:

• Biographical information
• Contact details
• Programme studied and year of graduation
• Any previous names or stage names
• Work contact information 
• Gender 
• Disability
• Date of birth
• Relationships to other alumni, donors and friends
• Donor status
• Records of communications, meetings and marketing activities by Central
• Details of volunteering by you on behalf of Central and its students (e.g. placement provision)
• Membership of other professional networking programmes linked to Central (e.g. ICV)
• Teaching history
• Registration and attendance at events
• Donation details if you express an interest in or make a donation to Central. (If you make a donation to Central, you have the option of deciding whether your name can be used on donor lists or other stewardship materials).

We ensure that there are appropriate technical controls in place to protect your personal details.  

We review our retention periods for personal information on an annual basis. We are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations. We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as it is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with us. Read our Data Protection and Records Retention Policy for more detailed information.

We consider our relationship with alumni, donors and other stakeholders to be life-long. This means that we will maintain a stakeholder record for you until such time as you tell us that you no longer wish us to keep in touch. In this instance, Central will delete the majority of your personal data it holds.  We will retain permanently the basic personal data contained within your educational record (e.g. name, previous name [if applicable], name of programme(s) studied, outcome(s) and year(s) completed) and records of donations made (if applicable).

We will not sell or rent your information to third parties.

We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Occasionally, we use external companies to collect or process personal data on our behalf. We do comprehensive checks on these companies before we work with them, and put a contract in place that sets out our expectations and requirements, especially regarding how they manage the personal data they have collect or have access to.

Personal data is shared with third party organisations in a limited number of instances. The University is required to disclose some personal data of graduates to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for the purpose of a survey of new graduates.

On rare occasions we may need to use a supplier who runs their operations outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Although they may not be subject to the same data protection laws as companies based in the UK, we will only transfer personal data to organisations which are in countries that have the same level of protection as UK data protection law. By submitting your personal information to us, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing at a location outside the EEA.

We may need to disclose your details if required to the police, regulatory bodies or legal advisors.

We will only ever share your data in other circumstances if we have your explicit and informed consent.

Your rights regarding your information: 

Updating your information
We really appreciate it if you let us know if your contact details change. If we find that we don’t have your up-to-date details and we need to contact you, we may use publicly available sources to keep your records up-to-date (e.g. the UK Post Office’s National Change of Address database and information provided to us by other organisations as described above).

Accessing your information
You have the right to ask for a copy of the information the School holds about you, known as a Subject Access Request. You can find out how to request this data.

Withdrawing consent and erasing your information
You have a right to ask us to stop processing your personal data. If you do so, we will delete the majority of your personal data we hold if it’s not necessary for the purpose for which you provided it to us. We will retain permanently the basic personal data contained within your academic record (name, previous name [if applicable], name of programme(s) studied, outcome(s) and year(s) completed) and records of donations made (if applicable).

For more detailed information on Central’s data protection procedures, please read our Data Protection and Records Retention Policy.

Changes to this policy

We keep this policy under regular review. This policy was last updated on 28 March 2018.

Complaints or queries

We take any complaints we receive about the use and security of your personal information very seriously. If you think that our collection or use of your information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate please contact the School’s Data Protection Officer by email or write to them at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 62-64 Eton Avenue, London NW3 3HY.