What we hold, and what we don’t.

Next Practice is a program of the Entertainment Audience Research Association, incorporated as a nonprofit, with 501(c)(6) status pending. In this policy, “the association,” “we,” and “us” mean the Entertainment Audience Research Association, which is responsible for the personal information described here and decides how it is collected and used. Questions and requests under this policy go to hello@nextpracticeassociation.org.

This policy covers this website, applications for membership, the interest list and waitlist, membership administration, member polls, and the association’s communications. It does not cover LinkedIn or Discord themselves. Those are independent services under their own terms and privacy policies, and your use of them is governed by those documents, not this one.

• Sign-in through LinkedIn. Your name, email address, and profile photo. We request nothing else from your LinkedIn account and we never post to it.
• Your application. Your LinkedIn profile URL, current title, employer, industry segment, years in research, a sentence on how you use AI in your work, your attestations, and an optional referrer name.
• The waitlist. When applications are closed, a work email address.
• Membership records. Your application, the decision on it, the signed member agreement, and routine administrative records such as contact details and membership status.
• Correspondence. Email you send us and our replies.
• Technical data. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, including IP address and pages requested, to operate and secure the service. Site analytics are aggregate and cookie free: page counts, referrers, and country-level location. We do not build profiles of visitors.
• Cookies. Only what sign-in strictly requires, meaning a session cookie once you sign in. No advertising cookies and no cross-site trackers.

• Reviewing your application, including eligibility under the vendor rule
• Administering your membership and the member agreement
• Running member polls and publishing anonymous aggregates
• Operating, securing, and improving the site
• Communicating with you about your application, sessions, membership, and the governance of the association

On employer. Your employer is used only to check eligibility against the vendor rule and to review conflicts. It is never published and never returned in any public response.

On referrers. If you name a referrer, we may ask that person to confirm they know you. We share nothing else about your application with them.

Member names and employers are never published. The public roster, once it exists, shows discipline, segment, level, and years only, and no cut with fewer than five members is ever shown. Poll results are anonymous, reported only in aggregate, and subject to a five-response floor. Live sessions are never recorded by the association: no video, no audio, no transcripts, no AI notetakers.

• Steps prior to a contract, and performing it. Processing your application and, if you join, administering membership under the member agreement.
• Legitimate interests. Securing the site, keeping honest records of admissions, enforcing the vendor rule, and understanding site usage in aggregate.
• Consent. Optional fields, and any announcement list you choose to join. You can withdraw consent at any time by contacting us.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising. Sharing is limited to:

• Service providers. Hosting and analytics (Vercel), authentication (LinkedIn), the member community platform (Discord), and email service. Providers process data to supply their service to us, under their own published terms.
• The board. Application materials are reviewed by the board under confidentiality obligations.
• Legal. Where disclosure is required by law, or necessary to establish or defend legal claims.
• A successor. If the association reorganizes, including completing its nonprofit recognition, records transfer to the successor entity under this same policy.

• Applications that are declined or withdrawn: deleted within twelve months of the decision.
• Membership records: kept while your membership is active and for three years after it ends, for governance and recordkeeping.
• Waitlist and interest-list emails: kept until you join, ask to be removed, or twenty-four months pass without applications opening to you.
• Correspondence: up to three years.
• Server logs and analytics: retained briefly by our providers on standard rotation.
• Discord. Server history persists on the platform. Leaving the server does not delete past messages. Discord’s own retention and deletion controls apply to content there.

We use reasonable administrative and technical safeguards: encryption in transit, access limited to the people who need it for review and administration, and reputable infrastructure providers. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure. If you believe your information has been compromised, contact us and we will investigate.

Wherever you live, you can ask us for a copy of your information, ask us to correct it, delete it, or export it, and object to or restrict how we process it. Write to hello@nextpracticeassociation.org from the email address you signed in with, so we can verify the request. We respond within thirty days.

Three limits. We may retain what the law requires us to keep or what is necessary for legal claims. Anonymous aggregates, such as published poll results, cannot be traced back to you and therefore cannot be deleted. Content on Discord is subject to Discord’s controls rather than ours.

If you are in the EEA or UK, you also have the right to complain to your data protection authority. If you are a California resident, note that we do not sell or share personal information as California law defines those terms, and the rights above are available to you. We do not track visitors across other sites, so cross-site opt-out signals have nothing here to opt out of.

The association is for working professionals. This site is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

We are based in the United States and process information there. If you apply from outside the US, your information is transferred to and processed in the US, which may have different data protection laws than your jurisdiction. This policy applies to everyone, everywhere.

Changes are posted here with a new effective date. Material changes are announced to members by email before they take effect. Consistent with how this association works, the date changes here first.

All privacy questions, requests, and complaints: hello@nextpracticeassociation.org. Earlier versions of this policy are available on request.