Terms & Conditions

These terms govern your use of the Keeper Educational Exchange Programme website (“KEEP”, “we”, “us”) at keeperexchange.org. By creating an account or using the site you accept them.

• Legal entity: Keeper Educational Exchange Programme
• Contact: info@keeperexchange.org

How we handle personal information is set out separately in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

• Keeper — an individual animal-care professional with a keeper account.
• Collection — a zoo, aquarium, sanctuary, park or other organisation with a collection account, and the team members acting for it.
• Placement — an exchange opportunity a collection posts on the site.
• Application — a keeper’s request to take up a placement.
• Content — anything you upload or write: profiles, CVs, listings, cover letters, messages, images.

KEEP introduces keepers to collections and gives them a place to arrange an exchange. We review registrations, moderate placements before they are published, and carry applications and messages between the two sides.

A placement is an arrangement between the keeper and the collection, not with us.

• We are not an employment agency or employment business, and we are not your employer.
• We do not guarantee that any placement will be offered, accepted, or that a placement offered will go ahead.
• We do not verify every fact in a profile, a CV or a listing. Moderation is a check for obvious problems, not an audit.
• We are not party to whatever the keeper and the collection agree between themselves, including any payment, accommodation or expenses.

Any date-clash warning the site shows you is a convenience based on what it knows about. Check your own commitments; the warning is not a guarantee that you are free.

You must be 18 or over to hold an account, and you must give accurate information when you register and keep it up to date.

Keeper and collection registrations are reviewed before they go live. We may approve or decline a registration at our discretion, and we will tell you which. Declining is not a judgement about you personally; it usually means we could not establish enough about the account to let it into a programme other people rely on.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your password to yourself, do not let anyone else use your account, and tell us promptly if you think someone has. Do not create an account for someone else, or hold more than one.

You agree that:

• Your profile, CV and applications are truthful, and describe your own qualifications and experience.
• You hold whatever registrations, immigration permissions and right to work or volunteer a placement requires. That is yours to establish, not the collection’s and not ours.
• You will tell a collection promptly if you can no longer take up a placement you have accepted, and withdraw the application.
• You will follow the host collection’s rules, procedures and safety instructions while you are with them.
• You will not use another keeper’s account, or apply on anyone else’s behalf.

You agree that:

• You are authorised to act for the collection, and the people you invite to your team are too. Anything they do on the site is your responsibility.
• Every placement you post is genuine, accurate, lawful, and one you are able to host.
• The checks are yours. Right to work or volunteer, references, qualifications, DBS or equivalent where the role needs it, safeguarding, health and safety, and adequate insurance covering a visiting keeper — all of these are for you to carry out and satisfy yourself about. We do not do them for you.
• You will treat applicant information as confidential, use it only to consider that application, and hold it in line with data protection law. You are a controller of it in your own right.
• You will not use the site to advertise anything other than a genuine placement, or to collect applications you have no intention of considering.

A collection can invite colleagues and give each of them a role, and can scope a member to a particular team so that they see only that team’s placements and applicants. Setting those permissions correctly is the collection’s responsibility.

Invitations are personal to the address they were sent to and expire. A collection must always keep at least one owner, and should remove members who no longer work there.

You keep ownership of your content. You give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store it, and to display it to the people the site is designed to show it to — your listing to keepers browsing, your application to the collection you applied to.

You must not post anything that:

• is false, misleading or impersonates someone else;
• infringes someone else’s copyright, trade mark or other rights — including photographs you do not have permission to use;
• is unlawful, discriminatory, defamatory, abusive or harassing;
• contains malware, or attempts to interfere with the site or with other people’s accounts; or
• discloses personal information about someone else without a proper basis for doing so.

You must not scrape the site, collect keepers’ details for other purposes, or use the messaging system to send unsolicited marketing.

We may decline to publish a placement, edit or remove content, or suspend or close an account, where we reasonably believe these terms have been broken or that the programme or the people in it are at risk.

Where we can, we will tell you why and give you the chance to put it right. Where the risk is serious we may act first and explain afterwards.

Alongside placements we list events and bespoke exchanges, some of which point at booking pages or forms on other sites. We are not responsible for those sites, their content or their handling of your information. Their own terms apply.

The KEEP name and logo, the design of this site and the material we write for it belong to us or to our licensors. You may read it and share links to it. You may not copy it for use elsewhere, or present it as your own, without our permission.

We work to keep the site running, but we do not promise it will be available without interruption or free of errors. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it, including for maintenance. Where a change is significant and you have an account, we will give you reasonable notice unless the circumstances make that impossible.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, and because we introduce rather than employ:

• We are not liable for the conduct of any keeper or collection, for what happens during a placement, or for a placement that is cancelled, changed or never offered.
• We are not liable for the accuracy of anything a keeper or a collection posts.
• We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of opportunity, or any indirect or consequential loss.
• Our total liability to you in connection with the site is limited to £100, or to any amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim, whichever is greater.

If you are using the site as a consumer, none of this affects your statutory rights.

You may close your account at any time. We may close it if you break these terms, or if we stop running the site. What happens to your information afterwards is described in our Privacy Policy. Clauses that by their nature should survive — content licences, liability, governing law — continue after your account ends.

We may update these terms. The date at the top tells you which version you are looking at. If a change materially affects your rights we will tell account holders directly, and continuing to use the site after that means you accept the new version.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction — except that if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.

Questions about these terms: info@keeperexchange.org, or through our contact page.