Before you communicate to any audience of consituents, you need permission first.
If you are the marketing and communications office for a unit, and your audience is entirely internal to your own school or unit (your own students or staff, for example), you have permission to communicate to them without approval.
However, if your audience is external to your own unit, permission to communicate requires approval by the data steward for that audience. Data stewards' responsibilities are to ensure that the data for their audience is being used responsibly and that their audience is not being overwhelmed by communications. Permission can be either granted or denied, and if denied, you are not permitted to communicate to the audience you had intended.
If you are collecting subscribers via a subscribe form, you do not also need to seek approval from the university's data stewards. This is explicit approval straight from the constituent and doesn't need any other approval.
Some examples
If you worked in Jacobs School of Music marketing and communications but wanted to email the students at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design, you would need Eskenazi's approval.
If your role was in University Events and you wanted to invite all IU Bloomington students to an event, approval from the Bloomington campus data steward is required.
A note about alumni, donor, and prospective student data
In situations when you've requested data from your campus's admissions office or via the Alumni Association and Foundation's Workfront, you have two weeks to use that data and then you need to delete it—you cannot store it long-term on departmental servers or in Marketing Cloud. If you are planning on future communications, you will need to request that data each time you plan on sending your communication.
The university's data stewards
Information on who data stewards are for the various campus-level audiences can be found here: