Aarhus University's Alumni Network

When you sign up for membership of the alumni network, we need your consent to process your personal data.

The following aims to inform you of the implications of your consent, i.e.  

• the kind of information Aarhus University registers and processes in relation to your membership of the alumni network
• the way in which the information is processed and
• your rights in this context.

The purpose of processing the personal data of our members is: 

• to stay in touch with and develop strong relations to our alumni
• to support engaging and rewarding interaction between alumni and between alumni, the university’s degree programmes, research and current students
• to enable us to communicate with our members in a professional, coordinated and relevant manner and to target and personalise our email marketing of news, research results, events and offers of competency and management development
• to develop our news products, events and competency development offers and other commercial initiatives aiming to strengthen Aarhus University’s alumni relations
• to conduct anonymised analyses and statistics, e.g. to explore the correlation between alumni demographics and degree programmes, occupation, areas of interest and engagement in the activities of the network.

Collection of personal data

Aarhus University is legally obliged to store and continually update personal data on students and alumni. This is done in the university’s course administration system (STADS).  

When you sign up for membership of the alumni network, your personal data from STADS will be integrated with the information you provide through the network sign-up procedure. The data registered on your membership profile in our alumni database will change concurrently with your updates of said information.  

In addition, we will register your subsequent interaction with the network e.g. when you receive emails from us with news, invitations, offers, requests, etc., when you register for events, participate in competency development offers or in “giving back” initiatives as a mentor, speaker, etc.

The scope of our registration depends on the nature and frequency of your engagement in the network and your interactions with us.

Categories of personal data

For alumni, former exchange students and current students, the following personal data already exists in the majority of cases and is retrieved from the course administration system (STADS).

• civil registration (CPR) number
• name
• gender 
• nationality 
• email address upon enrolment at the university 
• officially registered address 
• student registration number 
• AUID 
• completed/current course(s)/degree programme(s) with information regarding name, title, starting date and (if relevant) end date, department and faculty. 

When you sign up for membership of the Alumni Network, you must provide the following information: 

• name 
• current occupation - job title and company/organisation
• current email address 
• civil registration (CPR) number.

In addition, we (may) ask you to provide:  

• additional contact information (alternative email address, postal address and telephone number(s)) 
• your specific areas of interests.

Finally, when updating your member profile you can chose to add:

•  links to your presence on social media, e.g. website and/or LinkedIn.

Why do we need this information?

We ask for your civil registration number in order to be able to identify you and match your sign-up data with your data in the course administration system. 

We ask for an alternative email address in order to ensure that we can still get in touch with you, should your primary email address fail for some reason or have ceased to exist. 

We ask for your phone number in order to provide you with the best possible service, as situations may arise where a quick response or direct dialogue may be necessary. 

We ask about your current occupation and areas of interest as this help us target our information to you and make it as relevant as possible. The more we know about the interests and careers of our alumni, the better we are able to plan activities that meet the needs and wishes of our members.

You can change your areas of interest at any time in the bottom of the emails you receive from us or by requesting a direct link.

Processing activities covered by your consent:

Communicating with you:

We use your personal data to:

• select and send you emails with news, research results, event invitations and offers for competency and management development courses from Aarhus University - some of which are exclusive to members of the network.
• send you emails with information about member benefits and services
• send you requests regarding your possible interest in offering voluntary support, and using your competences, experience or network to benefit current students and contribute to developing Aarhus University and its external relations. These activities may include contributing to mentoring or alumni ambassador programmes, establishing internship(s), developing courses/degree programmes or research initiatives, etc.
• conduct surveys and collect feedback about our activities and initiatives.

However, our emails to members who are students and not alumni will primarily include career offers, e.g. event invitations or job offers, from the university’s career centres and their partners - companies and unions in particular.

Registering interaction history:

We collect and register the following information about our ongoing relations with you and your engagement in the network:

• Email communication from us
• Notes regarding our personal interactions with/relations to you, e.g. individual email correspondence, telephone conversations, agreements made etc.
• Your interaction with our emails - openings and clicks (e.g. “read more”, links and such), including the time of the interaction
• Your sign-up to and participation in our events, your participation in continuing education offers, member benefits provided to you etc.
• Record of your contributions - if any - , e.g. in the form of expertise, advice/coaching, mentoring, internships etc.  

Processing data collected via tracking cookies:

In addition, we process data collected via tracking of your interaction with Aarhus University’s websites. We are able to combine data from your IP address collected via cookies with your email address. This allows us to take your online behaviour into consideration when we assess what information is relevant to you. Naturally, this requires that you have not blocked or deleted cookies when you visited the websites in question.

Read AU’s cookie policy here: https://international.au.dk/about/profile/cookies-policy/

Assessment of relevance

The information we send you is selected on the basis of information about your degree programme, seniority (if relevant), geographical location and nationality, occupation (job title and organisation, if relevant), any areas of interest that you have stated when joining the network or subsequently. It is also based on the collected data on your network engagement and your interactions with Aarhus University’s websites.

Access to your personal data

Your personal data may be shared within the university, and only in situations where it is necessary to serve one or more of the purposes described above, e.g. closed alumni associations, celebrating anniversaries/reunions, organising joint events across departments, coordinating  alumni relations across the University’s departments and faculties etc.

Aarhus University will under no circumstances exchange your personal data with any third parties without your consent.

Withdrawal of consent

You can at any time change your areas of interest and thereby the nature and extent of the information you receive from us. You do so by using the link at the bottom of the emails you receive from us or by requesting a direct link here.  

You can cancel your membership of the network at any time and thereby withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal data as described on this page. You do so by by sending an email to alumni@au.dk. 

Your withdrawal of consent only has effect for the future and does not affect the lawfulness of our processing based on your consent up until the time of withdrawal.  

If you cancel your membership and thereby withdraw your consent, we will stop processing your data as soon as possible. In practice, this means that you will no longer receive emails with information, offers or requests from Aarhus University.

Your withdrawal of consent does not include a withdrawal of your implicit acceptance of cookies when you visit the websites of Aarhus University. 

Retaining and deleting personal data

At the moment, we are unable to say for how long we will retain your personal data. This depends on an individual assessment. However, we can inform you of the overall criteria that we take into account when determining how long to retain your data.

We will retain your data as long as the consent to process the data is still active. The main purposes are to ensure that we have an overview of your total interaction history so that we can deliver relevant and targeted information to you and to document previous communication, participation in events, competency development courses, exclusive membership offers or “giving back” initiatives, etc.

After you have withdrawn your consent, we will continue to process the personal data that we are legally obliged to store and update, i.e. data on alumni, students or former exchange students, which is stored in the university’s course administration system.

In addition, the assessment is primarily based on:

• whether you have only received emails from us or whether you have/have had other kinds of interactions with Aarhus University. In case of the former, we will - as a rule - delete all information apart from the above mentioned.
• the nature of the interaction; i.e. the scope, the type and the continuity of your interactions with us. The more relations or the more interactions with us, the more interest you have shown towards our news services and other offers, the more you have participated in our activities, the more likely we find it that you will become more active again in future. This speaks in favour of retaining your data for longer.
• your basic affiliation with Aarhus University. If you are an alum, former employee or former exchange student, we base our assessment on the assumption that you will be more interested in maintaining a continuous relation than if you had no such affiliation.
• whether you are a former member of the network or have never been a member. In the former case, we consider your affiliation to be stronger and this speaks in favour of retaining your data for longer.

  

Protection of personal data

Aarhus University takes the security and protection of personal data very seriously.  

The university takes precautions to protect your personal data against theft, misuse, unauthorised access etc. through the use of appropriate administrative, physical and technical security measures. 

Personal data is always transferred via a secure and encrypted connection.  

Data Controller

The Data Controller is Aarhus University, CVR no. 31119103. 

Read more about data security and Aarhus University’s duty of disclosure, your legal rights in relation to your personal data etc. in Aarhus University’s privacy policy. 

https://international.au.dk/about/profile/privacy-policy/ 

If you have any questions regarding our processing of your personal data, please contact Aarhus University’s Data Protection Officer. Our data protection officer is  Søren Broberg Nielsen, dpo@au.dk.

Questions

In addition you can always send an email to alumni@au.dk, if you have any questions regarding the content of these guidelines or our processing of your personal data. 

Future changes to these guidelines

We reserve the right to make changes to these guidelines from time to time. Any changes will be reflected in the change of the date at the bottom of this page. In case of major changes, you will be notified directly in an email from us.