Our objectives
The Alumni Association is formally recognised by Save the Children UK, and as such is bound by all its policies and values. The Save the Children logo is used by permission. The Alumni Association is an independent organisation, and Save the Children UK accepts no liability for any statements or comments made on this site. This site is operated by the Alumni Association and not Save the Children UK.
If you are already a member, please use the Login page to access the main site Forum. If you have forgotten your password, please go to the Password Reset page.
This page defines our objectives and eligibility criteria, describes the functions of the Alumni Association, and sets out our policies towards the management of your data. If you are eligible and accept our policies, you are very welcome to join the Alumni Association. Once your registration is accepted, you will be able to set up your own profile inside the site, join discussion threads, and communicate with other members.
We are the alumni association of Save the Children UK. Legally, we are an independent unincorporated association with no financial or contractual ties to Save the Children UK. The objectives of the Alumni Association are:
- To provide alumni with a forum for discussion, covering a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, the work of Save the Children.
- To offer a vehicle to alumni for social interaction, including professional development.
- To offer continued support to the Save the Children movement in its widest context.
Are you eligible to join?
You can join the Alumni Association if you meet all the following conditions:
- You support the objectives of the association as described above
- You worked for Save the Children UK for a minimum of 6 months
- There were no disciplinary aspects to your departure
How does the site work?
If you are not registered, you can view all the public information areas of this site. If your registration is accepted:
- You will have full access to the members’ area and functions. You can edit you own directory entry which is visible to other members.
- You can add Events and Jobs to the Public area – the public can only submit requests. You are responsible for the data you add.
- You will be able to contact any other member by a Private Message (PM) facility. Other members cannot see your email address, but you can choose to give that out via a PM to any other member.
- You will receive an occasional newsletter by email. Exactly how regularly this newsletter will be produced will be determined over time All alumni will be encouraged to contribute to the newsletter from time to time.
The site has been built specifically to avoid current forms of social media; there are no links to Facebook, X, Instagram etc, and there is no third-party advertising at all. This policy will not change in the foreseeable future, but like everything else to do with the Alumni Association will be determined going forward by its members.
How do I register?
After you’ve read this page including the GDPR policy statements below, click here to Register. There’s a very easy form to fill in and then press Submit. There’s an extremely light-touch approval process (nothing to worry about at all) when we verify your application through SCUK HR records. That usually takes between an hour and 10 days, depending on a variety of factors. By all means send an email to admin1@SCUKAlumni.org if you haven’t heard back.
GDPR
Here is the legally required section on GDPR compliance as we store some of your personal data. This is the ‘small print’ you should find in all websites where you seek membership; we have tried to make it a little more comprehensible than most.
Is this members area private?
This members’ area contains no guarantees of security or privacy. To avoid an unwarranted feeling of privacy, we need to be clear that we do not know for certain:
- that any member is definitely who they claim to be
- whether a bona fide member has left their device logged on in a public place, where it might be accessed by someone else
- whether we or our service provider has been hacked
- whether there is a human error missed in site testing that means non members can see your posts.
That said, we take steps to make the site reasonably private. It might be helpful to draw the analogy that you should express opinion and share information on this site exactly as if you were with friends in a quiet corner of a coffee shop or bar. Even if it’s reasonable to assume that you are chatting amongst friends, you don’t know for certain that you aren’t being overheard.
Is the Alumni Association subject to GDPR?
Yes, without doubt. That is why this section has been written to meet our legal requirements; to clearly express the aims of the organisation, what will happen to your personal data, and why the act of registering to become a member represents a legal definition of consent. If you become a member you are consenting to the GDPR data definitions and usage policy below.
What personal data do we collect and why?
a) Personal Data
When you register on this site, you are required to provide a small amount of personal information about yourself. Some of this is mandatory eg your name, while some is optional eg your date of birth. There are two reasons we require you to share this data.
- In order that the Alumni Association and Save the Children, if appropriate, can verify who you are.
- To share with other registered Alumni. All the data you enter will be shared with other registered Alumni except your email address and your password. The Site Administrator can see your email address, but not your password.
b) Posts
When members leave posts on the site we collect the data entered, as well as the visitor’s IP address and other technical information (‘metadata’) to help spam detection. All discussion boards do this.
You can delete your own posts individually. If you wish to withdraw your consent and retire from the board, please contact the Site Administrator and all your posts will be retained but anonymised to an unnamed ‘Guest’ poster.
c) Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid including embedded location data that is confidential to you. This is because visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
If you choose to upload resources eg images or other material (eg research papers), you must do so on the understanding that they effectively become ‘public domain’ as soon as they are uploaded. This is because they could be downloaded by any member at any time and fall outside our control. Even if at a later point you withdrew your consent, your data has passed outside our purview.
d) Cookies
You must have an account to log onto this site. We will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data as defined under the appropriate legislation.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Typically, login cookies last for a few days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select ‘Remember Me’, your login will persist. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish on the main forum, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data, and simply indicates the post ID of the forum message.
e) Embedded content from other websites
Posts on this site may include embedded content (eg videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content (including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged into that website.)
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Where is my data stored?
Your data is stored on the servers of our hosting organisation called one.com. The servers currently physically are in Denmark and are therefore subject to all EU legislation, specifically GDPR. We may decide to change providers in the future but commit to staying inside UK/EU legislative areas. We will not move your personal data to geographies controlled by US legislation.
How secure is my data?
Considering this is a volunteer-maintained social site with no financial data whatsoever, we’ve taken reasonable steps to protect your data.
- Data moving between your PC/smartphone and our servers in Denmark is encrypted through standard SSL protocols (this prevents non-military grade hacking of your data in transit, though you should assume nothing would stop a malevolent party with a weapons-grade hacking capability).
- Your data on the one.com servers is protected by CloudFlare, a leading ‘anti-bot’ defence that protects us against DSoS attacks to normal commercial standards.
- We test each release of the site to try to make sure the members area is secure. This testing is undertaken by humans not bots and is therefore subject to error.
By way of analogy, we try to secure your data better than a Yale lock on your house, and we believe we would deter ‘opportunistic’ thefts. It is not reasonable however to expect effective security protection against state sponsored hacking attacks, or indeed no matter how hard we try, human error.
Who we share your data with
Subject to security considerations discussed above, the members’ area is intended as a private site for Save the Children alumni.
Given that one of the prime objectives of the Alumni Association is to support Save the Children, it follows that your data (eg a post that contains important insights to a development issue, as well as personal data) may be passed to that organisation, where it would be subject to their data privacy considerations. Note that the personal data on all membership applications may be passed to Save the Children UK for the purposes of verification and confirmation of your eligibility statement.
We formally state that we will not pass any of your information to any other organisation without your prior explicit written consent eg a journalist might request your contact details from the Site Administrator, with the sole exception of Save the Children UK..
Under no circumstances will we sell any of your data to any organisation.
How long do we retain your data?
If you make a posting, the posting and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
We also store the personal information that registered alumni provide in their user profile. All users can edit their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username).
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us.
You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security purposes. We will delete images and other resources you uploaded if requested, but, as described above, we need to point out that copies of these items may legitimately already be outside our control.
All requests are to be made in email to the Site Administrator.
Advice on email address and passwords used to access this site
- We recommend that you do NOT use the same email address to access this site as you use for internet banking facilities. This is to minimise the consequences to you if our site were to be hacked.
- We strongly advise you do NOT use the same password as you would for internet banking facilities. A good technique for a simple password appropriate for this site is use the first or last letters of a memorable phrase from a favourite song, poem or quotation. So ‘Summertime, and the livin is easy, fish are jumpin …’ could be used to generate ‘Satliefaj’ or ‘Edensyhen’. This technique is okay for most social sites on the internet, but something more random is advised for financial sites.