Privacy policy

Your privacy

At the British Veterinary Association (BVA), we respect the privacy of visitors to our website (www.bva.co.uk). This policy is concerned with how we collect information, what we do with it and what controls you have over your personal information.

BVA is the national representative body for the veterinary profession in the UK. We guide our members throughout their careers, from student to retirement, with the support and knowledge they need to achieve their goals and speak up for them on the issues that matter most.

We are the only UK veterinary association that looks after the interests of all vets in all disciplines. Our members are at the heart of everything we do, and with the power of more than 18,000 members behind us, we’re able to provide a voice to represent members and services to support them.

We are a not-for-profit organisation so any money that we make is reinvested to serve the veterinary profession.

We take our duty to process your personal information very seriously. This policy explains how we collect, manage, use and protect your personal information.

We may change this document from time to time to reflect the latest view of what we do with your information. Please check back frequently; you will be able to see if changes have been made by the date it was last updated.

Refer to the sections below for more details on how and why we use your personal information:

  1. Who are we?
  2. What personal information we collect and how we use it
  3. Legitimate interests
  4. Sharing your information
  5. Retaining your information
  6. Your details on the web
  7. What are your rights?

1. Who are we?

In this policy references to the British Veterinary Association (BVA), or to ‘we’ or ‘us’ are referring to BVA. BVA is a registered company in England and Wales, Company No 206456.

2. What personal information we collect and how we use it

What we need

The BVA is what’s known as the ‘Data Controller’ of the personal information you provide to us. We will usually collect basic personal information about you such as your name, postal address, telephone number, email address and your payment details if you are purchasing a membership or other items from us.

Sometimes we will collect other information about you such as your date of birth, gender, employment details, veterinary interests and other details. We will be very clear with you that we wish to collect such information and our reason for collecting such information.

Why we need it

We collect your personal information in connection with membership activities, to keep you informed of news and developments in the veterinary world, to provide you with services, to facilitate access to our membership portal and for other specific activities, such as campaign updates, newsletter requests, product purchases, feedback, donations, competition entries, information you provide in public forums on our sites and applications.

The information is either needed to fulfil your request or to enable us to provide you with a more personalised membership service. You don't have to disclose any of this information to browse our site. However, if you choose to withhold requested information, we may not be able to provide you with certain services.

Our marketing

Sometimes, with your consent, we will process your personal information to provide you with information about our work or our activities that you have requested or are expecting.

On other occasions, we may process personal information when we need to do this to fulfil a contract (for example, if you have purchased something from our shop) or where we are required to do this by law or other regulations.

The BVA also processes your information when it is in our legitimate interests to do this and when these interests do not override your rights. Those legitimate interests include providing you with information on our products, campaigns, services, products, newsletter requests, feedback, competitions and other activities. Please see the section on 'Legitimate Interest' for more information.

How we obtain your details:

  • We will also hold information about your details so that we can respect your preferences for being contacted by us.
  • We collect your personal information in several ways: When you provide it to us directly as part of your communication with us for membership services, training and other interactions.
  • When you provide permission to other organisations to share it with us (including Facebook or Twitter).
  • When we collect it as you use our websites or apps.
  • When you have given it to a third party and you have provided permission to pass your information on to us.
  • From publicly available sources (where possible) to keep your information up to date (e.g. the Post Office’s National Change of Address database).
  • We combine the information from these sources with the information you provide to us directly.

Children

If you are under 16 please ensure you obtain your parent/guardian's consent before sending any personal information to any website or the BVA.

Please note that we will not knowingly market to or accept orders for goods or services from persons aged under 16 years.

As a parent or guardian we encourage you to be aware of the activities in which your children are participating, both offline and online. If your children voluntarily disclose information, this may encourage unsolicited messages. We suggest that you discourage your child from providing any information without your consent.

Anything else?

All the personal information we process is processed within the EEA. However, for the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance your information may be situated outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). This will be done in accordance with guidance issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you would like to change the way you hear from us or no longer wish to receive direct marketing communications from us, then use the contact form on our 'Contact Us' page or go to your online membership.

3. Legitimate interests

We have a number of lawful reasons that mean we can use your personal information. One of these is something called 'legitimate interests'. Broadly speaking Legitimate Interests means we can process your personal information if:

We have a genuine and legitimate reason.

and

We are not harming any of your rights and interests.

Please read the information we have provide in the 'Legitimate Interest' policy for more detailed information.

4. Sharing your information

We do not share your information with any other organisations or individuals unless we are obliged to by law, for purposes of national security, taxation and criminal investigations and in the following instances:

  • If you have agreed that we may do so.
  • When we use other companies to provide services on our behalf, e.g. processing, mailing or delivering orders, answering customers’ questions about products or services, sending mail and emails, affiliate services, customer analysis, assessment, when using auditors/advisors or processing credit/debit card payments.
  • If we merge with another organisation to form a new entity, information may be transferred to the new entity.
  • We may disclose aggregate statistics about our site visitors, supporters, customers and sales to describe our services and operations to prospective partners, advertisers and other reputable third parties and for other lawful purposes, but these statistics won’t include any personally identifying information.

5. Access to BVA journals

The website for BVA's journals is provided by Highwire (who are located in the United States) via the BMJ Group located in London. The details to enable you to login at www.bva.co.uk will be shared with these companies to make usability and member experience across BVA’s suite of websites as straightforward as possible. The details will be used for no purpose other than creating a parallel login.

6. Canine Health Scheme

The Canine Health Scheme is a jointly run scheme with The Kennel Club where both BVA and the Kennel Club are Controllers of the personal information collected.

The personal information provided as part of the Canine Health Scheme application process is required to provide the results to the relevant owner, agent or veterinary practice. It is not shared with any third parties. The personal information provided during participation of the scheme is held securely on BVA servers for a period of 7 years as part of our accounting practices. The Kennel Club does not receive any personal information, merely the results of the assessment for the dog that has been tested. These are noted on the relevant dogs Kennel Club record.

7. Retaining your information

We hold your information only as long as necessary for each reason that we use it. We have provided some examples of the time we will keep your information in this paragraph but you can contact us for more information.

If decide not to support the BVA any more or request that we have no further contact with you, we will keep some basic information in order to avoid sending you unwanted materials in the future and to ensure that we don’t accidentally duplicate information.

If you make a purchase from us, we will keep the purchase information for a period of seven years for accounting purposes.

8. Third-Party Links

This website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of the website you visit.

9. What are your rights?

You have a number of rights about how the personal information you provide can be used. These are:

  • Transparency over how we use your personal information (right to be informed).
  • The ability to request a copy of the information we hold about you, which will be provided to you within one month (right of access).
  • Update or amend the information we hold about you if it is wrong (right of rectification).
  • Ask us to stop using your information (right to restrict processing).
  • Ask us to remove your personal information from our records (right to be 'forgotten').
  • Object to the processing of your information for marketing purposes (right to object).
  • Obtain and reuse your personal information for your own purposes (right to data portability).
  • Not be subject to a decision when it is based on automated processing (automated decision making and profiling).

If you would like to know more about your rights under the data protection law, you can find out more at the Information Commissioners Office website (www.ico.org.uk).

Remember, you can change the way you hear from us or withdraw your permission for us to process your personal information at any time by using the form on our 'Contact Us' page.

10. How to contact us

If you wish to talk through anything in our privacy policy, find out more about your rights or obtain a copy of the information we hold about you, please contact us (details at the bottom of this page), we will be happy to help.

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal information, you can contact the Head of Membership who will investigate the matter. If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your personal information in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

If you wish to talk to us about anything in the policy or the information we hold about you please contact us:

By telephone: 020 7636 6541

By email: [email protected]

By post: 7 Mansfield Street, London, W1G 9NQ

This document was last updated: May 2018

Legitimate interests

The new data protection requirements have a number of reasons by which we can use the personal information you provide to us. One of these is called ‘legitimate interests'.

This means that we have the potential to use your personal information if we have a genuine and legitimate reason and we are not harming any of your rights and interests. So, what does this mean in practice? When you provide your personal details to us we may use your information to keep you informed of the services, news and events from BVA. Before doing this, though, we will also carefully consider and balance any potential impact on you and your rights.

The main reasons we would use your personal information in this way would be when we might use the approach for preventing fraud, direct marketing, maintaining the security of our system, data analytics, enhancing, modifying or improving our services, identifying usage trends and determining the effectiveness of our campaigns.

How we may use your personal information

Direct Marketing: We will send postal or email marketing which further the aims and objectives of the BVA. When you have been a member or attended one of our events we are keen to keep you informed of our other news, developments and events.

Ordering online: In order for us to process an order, payment has to be taken and contact information collected, such as name, delivery address and telephone number.

Your best interest: Processing your information to protect you against fraud when transacting on our website, and to ensure our websites and systems are secure.

Personalisation: Where the use of the information enables us to personalise, enhance or otherwise improve our services and communications for the benefit of our members, supporters and stakeholders.

Analytics: To use your personal information for the purposes of customer analysis, assessment, profiling and direct marketing, on a personalised or aggregated basis, to help us with our activities and to provide you with the most relevant information as long as this does not harm any of your rights and interests.

Research: To determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and advertising and to develop our products, services, systems and relationships with you.

Due Diligence: We need to undertake due diligence on potential customers and business partners to determine if those companies and individuals have been involved or convicted of offences such as fraud, bribery and corruption.

We will also hold information about you so that we can respect your preferences for being contacted by us.

Your interests

Before we use your personal information for our legitimate interests, we will always consider and balance any potential impact on you and your rights under data protection legislation and any other relevant law. Our legitimate business interests do not automatically override your interests – we will never use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law).

Remember, you can change the way you hear from us or withdraw your permission for us to process your personal details at any time by using our contact form on the 'Contact Us' page.

Last Review Date: May 2018

Privacy policy: Cookie policy

This policy explains what cookies are, how BVA uses them on our websites and what you can do to manage how they are used.

Cookies and how they benefit you

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you'd expect.
  • Remember your settings during and between visits.
  • Improve the speed/security of the site.
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook.
  • Continuously improve our website for you.
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do).

Granting us permission to use cookies.

If the settings on your browser that you are using to view this website are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

How long do cookies last?

When a web server sends a cookie, it asks your browser to keep that particular cookie until a certain date and time. These dates can be:

  • Some date in the future – which might be a few minutes or a few hours from now (to track something like your form completions). The cookie might expire many years in the future, to keep track of your browser for a long time.
  • When you close your browser - this is called a session cookie, the next time you start your browser these will have vanished.
  • Some date in the past – this is how the server asks a browser to remove a previously-stored cookie.

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions.
  • Allowing you to add comments to our site.
  • Helps the website to know when you have access to certain parts of the site
  • There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Site improvement cookies

We regularly test new designs or site features on our sites. We may do this by showing slightly different versions of our websites to different people and anonymously monitoring how our site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps us to offer you a better website experience. 

Anonymous visitor statistics cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using, how long they spend on the site, what page they look at, etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These analytics programs also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, helping us to to develop our services for you. Our site uses the following analytics programs:

Google Analytics

Advertising or targeting cookies

These types of cookies are used to deliver adverts which will be more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement and to help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. They are normally placed by advertising networks with our permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Targeting or advertising cookies will often be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.

YouTube

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Social website cookies

So you can easily 'Like' or 'Share' our content on social network sites, we have sharing buttons on our site

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Turning cookies off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of our website and a large proportion of the world's websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.