Compassion in Practice Awards 2026
Privacy Policy
17 September 2026

Who we are

This notice is issued by Veterinary Business Development Limited, trading as Vet Times, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 02185105), registered office C/O Hunters Law LLP, 9 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, London, WC2A 3QN (correspondence address: Eventus, Sunderland Road, Market Deeping, Peterborough, PE6 8FD) (“Vet Times”, “we”, “us”). We are the controller for the personal data described in this notice, except where this notice says otherwise.

The Awards are sponsored by Animal Friends Pet Insurance Services Limited (“Animal Friends”). Animal Friends is a separate controller for the personal data it receives from us — see “Who we share your information with” below.

If you have a question about this notice, or want to exercise any of the rights described below, contact us at awards@vettimes.com or by post to the address above.

Why we use your information, and our legal basis

We use the information described in this notice to run the Awards: receiving and judging nominations, running the public vote, preventing fraud and abuse (including the IP address checks described below), publishing the Gallery of Compassion, and contacting and rewarding winners.

Because a nomination can be submitted about someone before we, or they, have had the chance to ask their agreement — see “Nominating someone else” below — we do not rely on consent as the legal basis for most of this processing. Instead we rely on our legitimate interest in recognising compassion across the veterinary profession, and in running the Awards fairly and securely. Where we do collect your consent for something specific, we will make that clear at the time.

Who we share your information with

If your nomination is approved, its content — your name, role, practice name, story, and any photo or video — is shared with Animal Friends for judging, publicising and promoting the Awards. We do not share nominator contact details, practice address, or voting data (including IP addresses) with Animal Friends.

We also use two other organisations to run the Awards website on our behalf: Cloudflare, Inc. provides the Turnstile bot check described below, and Mailchimp Transactional (formerly Mandrill) delivers the emails the site sends, including the confirmation email we send when you vote. Both are US-headquartered, so using them involves transferring some data outside the UK — technical data including IP addresses in Cloudflare’s case, and your email address and the name of the person nominated in Mailchimp’s case. Both are certified under the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and our contracts with both also incorporate the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, which applies if that certification lapses.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with anyone else except where the law requires it.

Preventing duplicate and automated voting

When you cast a vote, we record the IP address of the device you vote from, alongside your email address and the time of your vote. We do this to protect the integrity of the result: the public vote decides the Compassion Champions of the Year, and we need to be able to identify duplicate or automated voting.

An IP address is not used to block a vote automatically. Veterinary practices commonly share a single internet connection, so several colleagues voting from the same practice will appear to us as votes from the same IP address – that is expected, and it is not treated as suspicious in itself. Where a pattern of voting looks unusual, it is reviewed by a member of the awards team, and any decision to discount votes is taken by a person, not by software.

The rest of the vote record

We also record whether your vote has been confirmed. After voting you are sent an email containing a confirmation link, and only confirmed votes are counted towards the result. We standardise the format of email addresses so that the same address cannot be used to vote more than once.

Individual votes are never published. Only totals are used, and these are not displayed while voting is open.

The bot check

Our voting form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to distinguish people from automated scripts. Turnstile does not set cookies and does not track you across websites. It checks the technical characteristics of your browser and connection, including your IP address, and returns only a pass or fail result to us.

Nominating someone else

When you nominate someone else, we ask for their name, role and contact details, so the awards team can reach them if their story is shortlisted. A nomination should not be submitted without the knowledge of the person or team being nominated. We ask nominators to make the nominee aware wherever they reasonably can, and where possible we also contact the nominee ourselves to let them know before anything is published.

Because a nominee’s own agreement cannot always be obtained in advance, we do not rely on consent as our legal basis for using a nominee’s details. Instead, we rely on our legitimate interest in recognising compassion across the veterinary profession. We only do this where it is fair to the nominee: their contact details are used solely to reach them about the Awards and are never published, and if their story is approved, only their name, role, practice name, story and any submitted photo or video are shown in the public Gallery of Compassion.

If you are nominated and did not know about it, or would prefer your story not to be published, contact us and we will withdraw the nomination or remove it from the Gallery.

IP addresses when you submit a nomination

The same applies when you submit a nomination, not just when you vote. Nominations are collected using the same form software (Gravity Forms) that runs the voting form, and it automatically records the IP address of the device used to submit the form. Separate automated checks built into the form guard against spam and automated submissions; these do not use the IP address. We keep the IP address so that we can look into any nominations that appear duplicated or fraudulent. As with voting, colleagues submitting from the same practice network will often share an IP address — that is expected on its own and is not treated as suspicious.

How long we keep your information

Published Gallery of Compassion entries are kept permanently, as a record of the Awards, unless you ask us to remove yours. Everything else is kept for 12 months after the close of that year’s Awards and then deleted: nominations that were not approved, voting records including IP addresses, and general correspondence about the Awards.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to how we are using it — including where we rely on legitimate interests, as described above. To do any of this, contact us using the details at the top of this notice.

How to complain

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, we would like the chance to put it right — please contact us first. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk, by phone on 0303 123 1113, or by post at Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.