Understanding GDPR and PECR in education marketing
This blog post has been written to help education suppliers understand what GDPR and PECR look like in education marketing, how to send campaigns responsibly, and how to make sure they’re always marketing compliantly.
All marketing comes with responsibility and rules to follow. Whether you’re independently managing your education marketing or working with a supplier, it’s important to make sure you’re always taking a compliant approach. There are two key areas you need to understand:
- GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation
- PECR – The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations
What they mean in practice
GDPR – You need to make sure the data you use for your education marketing campaigns is processed lawfully and transparently, that it’s always relevant to education roles and contexts, you only process and use what you need to deliver your campaigns, you manage it securely and you review your data on a regular basis.
PECR – To ensure your education email campaigns are PECR-compliant, make sure you send campaigns to schools and education professionals at professional work email addresses, that your content is relevant to your audience’s role in the school, you make it clear who the email is from, every email includes a clear and easy opt-out button or link and that you promptly and thoroughly action all opt-outs and objections.
What’s allowed (and what isn’t)
To delve deeper, here’s some further information on what you can and can’t do:
- You can send relevant campaigns to teachers – Every campaign you send should be relevant to the recipient e.g. will your offering help to streamline their workload, improve the learning experience for their pupils etc. When processing teachers’ contact information and data, you need to have a ‘legitimate interest’ in doing so that you can demonstrate e.g. you’re contacting teachers to inform them about an upcoming educational webinar that will support their curriculum delivery. There should be wider public benefits to your processing of their education data, e.g. helping to increase wellbeing amongst education staff and learners.
- Process education data lawfully and transparently – Only collect the data you need to fulfil your ‘legitimate interest’ in contacting teachers. And regularly and thoroughly update your education database, removing any unsubscribed teachers. You need to have a clear and lawful process for processing education data that you can easily explain to anyone who asks. You should always be able to demonstrate a legitimate interest for processing the data.
- Follow-up with teachers who reply directly to your email campaign – As soon as teachers share their contact details with you (by replying), you can respond and include them in your future mailing lists unless they request to be removed. Just always make sure they have the option to unsubscribe if you’re sending mass email campaigns (you don’t need to include an unsubscribe button if just liaising directly with them from your professional work email).
- Send campaigns directly to schools or through an education marketing agency – As long as you’re using accurate education data and only processing data you actually need to deliver the campaign, you can send campaigns directly to schools. You just always need to include a clear, ‘from name’, your postal address and state where the email is sent from e.g. ‘This email is sent by [Company] on behalf of [Your company]’.
You can’t:
- Process education data unlawfully or without transparency
- Send irrelevant campaigns to teachers
- Send campaigns without an opt-out option – You must always include an unsubscribe button or link to unsubscribe.
- Send campaigns that are unclear who the sender is – You need to state your ‘from name’ e.g. Sally at EducationWorkshops or just the company name, EducationWorkshops. You also need to include your postal address and who the campaign is sent from clearly.
Further information – You can learn more on GDPR here and further information on PECR here.
Final note
As long as you follow both the GDPR and PECR rules, your education marketing will be smooth and stress-free.
If you have any questions on either areas, feel free to reach out to our education marketing specialists. They’ll be able to share their expert advice on how to ensure your campaigns are compliant.
