Royal Holloway, University of London is committed to protecting your privacy

Royal Holloway, University of London, is a university and an exempt charity. Though a fully autonomous institution, it is also a constituent college of the University of London.

The Philanthropy & Alumni Engagement (P&AE) team communicates with alumni, students, donors and other University’s stakeholders. We help you keep in touch with Royal Holloway and with fellow alumni; host academic, social and networking events; provide access to exclusive alumni services; and send news bulletins by email and mail. We also support Royal Holloway’s students through fundraising for scholarships and bursaries, as well as teaching, research and capital projects.

To carry out our work, it is necessary for us to process and store personal information relating to students, staff, alumni, supporters and friends of Royal Holloway according to the principles of UK GDPR.

Royal Holloway processes the information outlined in this Privacy Notice in pursuit of our legitimate interests in:

• communicating with students, staff, alumni, and past, current and potential supporters
• providing benefits and services to students, staff, alumni and supporters, including mentoring and careers support after graduation
• furthering Royal Holloway’s educational and charitable mission (which includes fundraising and securing the support of volunteers)
• enabling Royal Holloway to achieve its strategic and operational goals

We may pursue these legitimate interests by contacting you by email, telephone, SMS, post, or social media. Information about how you can manage the ways that we contact you, including how to opt out from some or all contact from Royal Holloway, is outlined in the ‘How we use your personal data’ section below.

Whilst Royal Holloway relies on legitimate interest as the legal basis for processing where this is not overridden by the interests and rights or freedoms of the data subjects concerned, it recognises that legitimate interest is not the only lawful ground for processing data and that certain data types cannot be included under this provision. As such, where appropriate, we will sometimes process your data under an alternative legal basis - e.g. because you have given us consent to do so in accordance with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) 2003, or through the “soft opt-in” as detailed in the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (DUAA).

The P&AE team maintains a record of all alumni of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, along with supporters and other stakeholders. Student records are transferred to the P&AE database upon graduation, as stated in the Student Data Collection Notice. 

The P&AE database, Raiser’s Edge NXT, is securely cloud-hosted by Blackbaud Inc in UK / EU data centres. Blackbaud is a global company with servers in several regions. It complies with the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework. Its security certifications are reviewed on an ongoing basis.

We gather personal data from you when you enquire about our activities; register for an event; make a donation; volunteer; subscribe to any Royal Holloway initiatives; engage with our social media channels; or otherwise provide us with information. In some circumstances, we may ask you if you are a UK taxpayer so that we can claim Gift Aid. Third parties, such as charitable giving platforms like the Charities Aid Foundation or alumni reunion organisers, may also share your personal data with us if you have given your permission. You should consult their privacy policies to understand how and what may be shared.

If you interact with any other individuals, departments or schools within Royal Holloway, we may receive data from them providing you have given the appropriate consents. We always aim to keep your details up-to-date, and we will do this by communicating directly with you, as well as by using publicly available resources such as the Royal Mail’s National Change of Address database (NCOA).

The vast majority of the information we hold is obtained directly from you, in the ways outlined above. In addition, we may also obtain data from trusted public domain sources.

The personal data we hold about you may include:

• name, title, gender and date of birth
• contact details including postal address, email, phone number and links to social media accounts, together with your communication preferences
• degree details and date of graduation, etc
• membership of clubs, societies and other extra-curricular activities in which you participated as a student
• occupation, professional activities and other life achievements
• recreations and interests
• family and spouse/partner details and your relationships with other alumni, supporters and friends
• records of donations and Gift Aid status, where applicable (as required by HMRC)
• records of communications sent to you by P&AE or received from you
• volunteering by you on behalf of Royal Holloway
• financial information relating to you and your family, including data and estimations around your income, assets and potential capacity to make a gift
• information about your philanthropic donations and volunteering with other organisations
• media articles about you
• information on your engagement with Royal Holloway via meetings, events, groups or networks
• personal data provided by you for a specific purpose (e.g. access and dietary requirements for event management purposes)
• information about your use of Royal Holloway resources or facilities

Royal Holloway does not store any credit/debit card details and is PCI-DSS compliant. Bank details used for processing Direct Debits are held under the Direct Debit Guarantee scheme.

Your data is used by Royal Holloway to communicate with you in a variety of ways, including:

• the promotion of the relationship between the University and its alumni, supporters and other stakeholders for mutual benefit
• University-related fundraising initiatives
• eliciting non-financial support (e.g. mentoring / careers support for students and assistance with student recruitment activities)
• sending invitations to alumni events and other events of interest organised by the University
• University mailings, both postal and electronic (e.g. alumni magazines and e-newsletters)
• promoting the benefits and services available to alumni

Communications to you may be sent by post, telephone, email, text or via social media, depending on the contact details we hold and the preferences expressed by you about the types of communication you wish to receive.

Tools may be used to help us improve the effectiveness of Royal Holloway’s communications with you, including tracking whether the emails we send are opened and which links are clicked within a message. We monitor website visits and use applications such as Google Analytics to improve our website and services.

If you prefer not to receive certain types of communication, or any communication whatsoever, you can amend your preferences at any time by emailing alumni@rhul.ac.uk or writing to:

Philanthropy & Alumni Engagement
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham
Surrey
TW20 0EX

We will not contact you for any purposes by post, email, text message, social media or telephone if you have told us that you do not wish to hear from us by any of those channels. If you are registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) but have provided us with a telephone number, we will assume that we have your consent to call you on this number until notified otherwise.

If you unsubscribe from any or all of the communication channels mentioned above, we will update our records to stop further communication as quickly as we can. Please be aware that it can sometimes take a short while for the change to be fully implemented. Furthermore, if your details are held on other mailing lists (e.g. those managed at a Faculty or Departmental level) you will need to unsubscribe from them separately.

Royal Holloway is an institution founded as a consequence of philanthropy. Philanthropy has since enabled it to increase access to education, further research and improve facilities for students. Ethical and transparent fundraising is therefore central to the University’s mission.

In order to ensure that this is carried out as efficiently as possible, whilst respecting the rights and wishes of alumni, supporters and potential supporters, we may gather information about you from trusted publicly available sources to help us understand more about you as an individual and your ability to support the University in ways financial or otherwise.

We may perform wealth screening, a process which uses trusted third-party organisations, to help us identify a small percentage of alumni and other potential supporters who may be interested in becoming more closely involved in the strategic aims of the University, and may have capacity to influence or give support at a significant level. We may use information gathered from public sources, or other Departments or Faculties within Royal Holloway, alongside the information you provide, to undertake analysis of who might support the University and better understand their preferences with regard to events, communication and services. By so doing, we can more effectively focus the conversations we have with you and ensure that we provide you with an experience that is appropriate.

From time to time, we may carry out research into individuals before we have provided our Privacy Notice to them on the basis of Article 14.5.b of UK GDPR, which states that the obligation to provide a privacy notice shall not apply where the action “is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of the objectives of that processing”. Such individuals will still be provided with the Privacy Notice at the point of first contact or as soon as it is reasonable to do so.

Publicly available sources are used to carry out due diligence on donors in accordance with the University’s Ethical Gift Acceptance Policy and adhere to money laundering regulations. We may also undertake data-matching, e.g. via the National Change of Address database (NCOA), to find new contact details for alumni with whom we have lost touch.

Royal Holloway is a member of the Fundraising Regulator and committed to its Code of Practice.

The publicly available sources we use to conduct research and perform due diligence include:

• Companies House and other business-related resources
• company websites and annual reports
• Charity Commission, Guidestar, US Foundation Directory and other sources for non-profits
• annual and donor reports of other organisations
• rich lists
• philanthropy press
• Xapien (due diligence tool)
• general internet and press searches
• Who’s Who and Debrett’s People of Today
• The King’s Honours Lists
• LinkedIn
• National Change of Address database (NCOA)

Your personal data is held on the P&AE team’s database, access to which is controlled with tiered levels of security, and related systems including those used for bulk emailing. Data extracts may be requested by other individuals contracted to or employed by the University, e.g. staff working within a Department or Faculty, who have requested it for a specific purpose such as analysing alumni employment destinations, and who have signed a data-sharing agreement.

We may on rare occasions share contact details with affiliated bodies, principally the University of London, enabling alumni to be invited to events in which they may be interested. This is decided on a case-by-case basis when it is impossible for Royal Holloway to issue the invitations directly (e.g. in the case of embassy receptions with rigid security protocols). Such transfers would be single-use only, with no data retained by the event organiser. If you would like to be excluded from such activities, please email alumni@rhul.ac.uk.

No personal data will be disclosed to external parties, other than those contracted by P&AE in order to assist with its routine activities as detailed above, or where we may be required to do so by law. An example of the latter is that Royal Holloway 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 UK. New graduates will be contacted regarding this 15 months after completion. Another example is the processing of Gift Aid by HMRC when donors have completed a Gift Aid declaration.

Where data is shared with a third-party contractor (e.g. for the purposes of analysis, updating or cloud-storage), we ensure that we have a data processing and non-disclosure agreement in place. This means that any third party is only able to use information we provide for specified purposes and must keep it secure. We do not sell your personal data to other organisations, nor share it as part of any reciprocal arrangement.

Special conditions surrounding studentships offered by Techne Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP)

The Techne Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) is a consortium of nine universities based in South East England, and Royal Holloway is the managing partner.

Techne is one of several DTPs that are funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which, as a funder, requires us to report on our alumni each year in the form of an Annual Report. The Techne studentship offer letter informs the student that we will pass information to the AHRC that is requested about their progress, including submission of thesis. The student signs and returns a letter accepting the terms we offer.

Techne contacts students who are in the last 6 months of their programme to let them know that we would like to keep in touch with them and that we will add their name to an alumni mailing list.  We do not add anyone to the list who asks us not to do this.

Techne will use the data of its alumni to:

• comply with AHRC reporting requirements
• publicise and market Techne studentships online or in publications that may be produced by Techne or its partner institutions.

International transfers Any transfers of data overseas (outside of the European Economic Area), for example to an international alumni chapter, are protected either by a European Commission “adequacy decision” (declaring the recipient country as a “safe” territory for personal data), or by standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission, which obligate the recipient to safeguard the data. Further information about the measures we use to protect data when being transferred internationally is available from Royal Holloway’s Data Protection Officer by emailing DataProtection@rhul.ac.uk.

Royal Holloway maintains a permanent record of all former students and, as such, we hold education details in perpetuity. Other personal information is managed in line with the University’s Records Retention Policy and the Jisc Records Retention Schedule and will be deleted when retention criteria are no longer met. 

You have a number of rights in relation to the processing of your personal data by the University:

If you are not satisfied with our response to any of your above rights, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at www.ico.org.uk. Our registration number with the Information Commissioner’s Office is Z7056965.

The University may be entitled to refuse any request in certain circumstances and, where this is the case, you will be notified accordingly.

Where the lawful ground relied upon by the University to process any of your personal data is your consent, you have the right to withdraw such consent at any time without having to give any reason. However, if you do so, the University may not be able to provide some or all of its services to you, or the provision of those services may be affected.

You will not have to pay any fee to exercise any of the above rights, though the University may charge a reasonable fee, or refuse to comply with your request if any request is clearly unfounded or excessive. Where this is the case, you will be notified accordingly.

To protect the confidentiality of your personal data the University may ask you to verify your identity before fulfilling any request in relation to your personal data.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this notice, or you wish to exercise any of your rights, you should email Royal Holloway’s Data Protection Officer via dataprotection@rhul.ac.uk.

Please read other privacy notices relevant to services you may access at Royal Holloway

Because of changes to legislation or institutional data management policies, we may have cause on occasion to amend elements of the information processing described above. If this should happen, we will always alert you by publishing the latest version of our Privacy Notice here and, where possible, emailing or postal mailing you.

Last updated on: 14 November 2025