Registration Questions – Why Do We Need This Information?

Whether you are registering a brand-new group, or re-registering an existing group, you will need to complete our online Registration Form at some point during the year. 

Durham SU wants to support our SU-registered Student Groups to ensure that they are run effectively, receive the support that they need, and operate in a legally compliant way to protect the reputation of Durham SU, the Durham SU Student Groups and your members. None of the questions are meant to trip you up, or prevent you from existing and putting on your events/activities, we just need to make sure that we have all of the information that we need.

Most of the questions on the form are pretty self-explanatory (we need to know who your exec are, what membership you want to charge etc) but we also need to know some more specific questions so we can best support you and make sure your groups are legally compliant. We’ve talked about some of the sections below so you can find out a bit more about these questions, why we need this information and what we need to know from you. 

When a group is first setting up you will be asked to answer all of these questions so, please provide as much information as you can as this will help us process the application quicker. 

For groups that are re-registering annually to keep the group active for the upcoming academic year, you will be asked these questions again in case anything has changed since your previous submission, for example if you have decided to affiliate with an external organisation during the year, or decided to change some of your aims to include working with children in schools. Again, please make sure to answer these questions as fully as possible to help your group be re-registered. 

• AFFILIATIONS
• DATA PROTECTION
• WORKING WITH CHILDREN/VULNERABLE ADULTS
• ACTIVITES OUTSIDE THE UK
• PUBLISHING ONLINE
• PAID/UNPAID VOLUNTARY ACTIVITIES
• CONSTITUTION CHANGES

AFFILIATIONS

Your group may be a part of, and raising money for, a national charity, or it may have a professional industry body that it wants to affiliate with. Affiliations with external organisations are generally fine for groups to have, but as a Durham SU-affiliated group any affiliations / contracts with external organisations need to be checked by the Durham SU staff team to make sure nothing in those affiliation agreements / contracts goes against Durham SU’s principles and values. Contracts / affiliation agreements also need to be signed by the SU staff team, rather than the group, as Durham SU is the legal entity we need to sign all paperwork, if your group has any affiliations, or any other contracts, then please send all paperwork to the ASK Team to check and sign off.

DATA PROTECTION

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) impacts how personal data is collected and used by organisations, including the Students’ Union and our student groups. There will be penalties issued to any organisations (data controllers) and, more notably, for individuals (data processors) who breach these regulations, so the SU need to ensure that we, and our Student Groups, comply with the GDPR. 

In order for us to help ensure that all of our groups are complying we ask a number of questions to understand what data you collect, where it is stored, who has access to it and if it is shared with any third parties, all of this is to help us to be able to work with your groups and support you all to be able to handle data within the data protection regulations.

WORKING WITH CHILDREN/VULNERABLE ADULTS

Some of our groups will carry out activities that include working with children (going into schools to demonstrate activities for example) or vulnerable adults (e.g. groups whose aims are to help vulnerable people within the Durham community).  We ask these questions so that we can work with those groups to ensure that the appropriate safeguarding measures are in place, to protect student group members, and the children / vulnerable adults that your groups may be working with.

ACTIVITES OUTSIDE THE UK

Some group activities will happen outside of the UK, whether that be taking part in an overseas trip, or having activities in home countries for overseas students before they come to Durham. We need to be aware of these activities so we can help support the groups ensure that the events are running safely, and also that the activities are being ran within the regulations and laws of that country.

PUBLISHING ONLINE

Some Student Groups decide to set up their own external websites, publish blogs, create in-print content etc. Groups that publish either online or in print need to take some extra actions to make sure that the groups are covered in case of libel charges, copyright infringements and any other potential legal issues that might occur from the content, so we need to know which groups publish so we can work with them to make sure all of the mitigations are in place to protect them. 

Please note this does not include content on group pages on the Durham SU website, or social media pages (Facebook, Instagram, X etc) but does include any external websites groups have, blogsites, in-print material etc.

PAID/UNPAID VOLUNTARY ACTIVITIES

Some groups decide to work with external organisations to provide volunteering opportunities for members. We need to know which groups are working with other organisations, including the University, to carry out volunteering, so we can make necessary checks on those organisations to ensure they don’t contravene any of Durham SU’s principles and values, and if the volunteering opportunities are paid, to make sure the funds are being transferred and used within Durham SU’s finance procedures. 

CONSTITUTION CHANGES

All of our groups need to use the standard constitution template, sections are highlighted throughout that groups are asked to update when starting out. Existing groups can also make changes to certain sections throughout the year (assuming they follow the correct process to make those changes and having members vote and approve the changes). We ask if any changes have been made to the template so we can check them over to make sure that they don’t go against any of the other sections of the constitution, or against the principles of Durham SU, certain sections also require pre-approval of the SU before being approved too.

For any issues relating to accessing the links above, please get in touch here.