Consent

When we take photographs or video that focus on you as a main subject, or when we gather testimonials or other statements from you, we must seek your informed consent:

• for the content featuring you to be stored and used
• for your contact details to be stored in case we need to contact you about the images.

We usually do this by asking you to sign a consent form before the photo-shoot or video-shoot, but sometimes we may gather consent in other ways. For example, by asking you to read out a consent statement that we record, or by emailing you (especially if, for some reason, you didn’t sign a consent form at the time of the shoot).

Consent form

Our consent form asks for a few brief details including contact information, and asks you to indicate whether you are a UK/EU student or an international student. We’ve included this latter section to help us ensure that images are used appropriately, for example to illustrate a webpage for international students with images depicting international students rather than UK/EU students.

We recommend using the online form but also have a PDF version for print if required.

Documents

• Online general consent form
• general consent form (PDF, 117kB)

Usage

We produce images and video, and collect testimonials and other statements, for use in our marketing, publicity and general communications across a range of media. These include prospectuses, banners, hoardings, flyers and posters, leaflets, the University website, University social media channels and University publications such as the Annual Report.

We also provide some images for use by partner organisations, agencies working on our behalf (designers, marketing agencies etc) and print/online media publishers (for example, The Times University Guide or The Guardian).

Testimonials (written or spoken)

If you are providing statements for testimonials, we may need to make minor editorial changes to your words (shortening, clarifying, etc), depending on the intended use. We reserve the right to make minor editorial or grammatical changes to your responses, but we will not materially alter the substance of your submission.

Storage and retention

We store images, video, testimonials and any related information on secure servers, located either on its own systems or in externally hosted facilities, always in compliance with the University’s data protection obligations.

Images featuring students are normally held in the University’s image library for general use for six years from the date of the photoshoot, after which they are removed from circulation.

Images that do not feature students (for example shots of buildings, landscapes and objects) are often kept in circulation for longer.

We will usually keep audio-visual material in our library for no longer than seven years. However, we reserve the right to store images or video of particular importance or value for a longer period if still appropriate for our needs.