Communication Problem.

Abstract

On 25 May, the Data Protection Act 1998 will be replaced by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation in the biggest overhaul of data protection legislation for more than 25 years. The change is expected to go ahead whatever happens with Brexit. But sometimes enforced change creates positive outcomes. The EU rules will require universities to be transparent about the data they hold on their students, and what they do with it, and, combined with the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, will have a big impact on the ways in which universities communicate with their alumni. In future, alumni will explicitly need to give universities permission to send them marketing communications. Mass emailings will be a thing of the past. It is likely that universities will lose contact with more than 90 per cent of their alumni contacts on centrally held databases no matter how compelling the message or how repeated the call to action to keep in touch. However, rather than seeing this as a threat to alumni engagement, universities must use it as a prompt to up their game. They must think more carefully about the value of their alumni and the nature of communications that will inspire alumni engagement. They must make it clear that the alumni relationship is not predominantly about raising money and instead focus on how alumni engagement can benefit both current students’ experiences of university and the alumni themselves.