By Mark Ford
Vivit Board Director/Community Chair

How did you celebrate GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) Compliance Day? If you reside in the EU, then you likely participated in an email blitz of opt-in requests from various organizations. Perhaps you even took advantage of this opportunity to remove yourself from a few mailing lists. Folks outside of the EU were included in the GDPR party as well with many receiving an unexpected barrage of Privacy Policy updates and acknowledgement requests. There was a lot of activity leading up to the May 25th GDPR compliance deadline, so what did Vivit end up doing to ensure compliance?

Vivit took advantage of this opportunity to perform a reassessment of the data we collect from Vivit members and how we communicate our usage of that data. This enabled us to brush up our Privacy Policy to fully outline this important piece of information. We also realized that our Privacy Policy was not easy to locate so we updated the Vivit website to provide a link in the following places:

• On the initial new member registration page
• On the About Vivit page
• In the Quick Links section located on the footer of every Vivit web page

We felt it was important to have this document easily accessible since it outlines the data we collect, who has access to that data, and how we use it. Don’t worry, we won’t sell or misuse your data in any way – guaranteed – it’s all there in our Privacy Policy.

We also took advantage of this opportunity to make the following updates as well:

• Removed several optional fields from your Vivit member profile that we don’t even use like business address, website, fax number, home address
• Updated our website’s new member registration process to require opt-in approval for a Welcome email with a link at the end of the registration process to opt-out of any Vivit communications if desired (anyone can adjust their communication preferences at any time from their Vivit member profile)
• Created a new Data Protection Policy to reflect how we keep your data secure
• Updated our Leader Affiliation Agreement to reflect guidelines set forth by GDPR (more info on that to come)

We also emailed all of our Vivit members living in the EU to ensure they wanted to continue to be a Vivit member. Many reconfirmed their membership and some took the opportunity to cancel or opt-out of further communications. We also did some clean up with our membership database and feel that we are now in an even better position to be good stewards of your data. Thank you for your assistance and patience during this process. I think we’ll all benefit from the improved focus and attention that GDPR brings to data privacy and security.