Privacy policy

• Newsletter signup: your email address.
• Funding support enquiry: your name, email address, business name, and optionally your phone number, business stage and a description of what you are hoping to fund.
• Event waitlists and launch lists (the platform and podcast lists): your name, email address and business name.
• Event bookings: when you book a free ticket on Eventbrite, we receive your name, email address, and whether you booked, cancelled or checked in.

• Funding enquiries are shared with grant funding specialists from our network that suit your enquiry, so you have more than one option and they can contact you about them. This is the whole point of that form, and it is stated on the form itself.
• Waitlist and launch-list details are used to tell you when a place or a launch is ready, and nothing else.
• Newsletter signups receive the monthly email, and you can unsubscribe from any of them.
• Event bookings are used to run the event and to understand who our events reach: which towns, sectors and business sizes come along. We look up the business behind the email domain you booked with to do that, and report on it in aggregate to our sponsors. We never sell your details or pass them to sponsors as a list.

• AWS - eu-west-1 region, which hosts this site and serves it to you.
• Neon, which hosts the database that stores form submissions and event records.
• Brevo, which stores newsletter contacts and sends the newsletter. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing there stops the emails at source.
• Eventbrite, which handles event bookings under its own privacy policy, as the platform you book on.
• Grant funding specialists in our network: each funding enquiry goes to the ones that suit it, as described above, and each acts as their own data controller from that point. Ask us and we will tell you who received yours.
• Google Maps Platform, which powers the business search on the High Street Heroes nomination form, under Google’s own privacy policy.

• Nominations: when you nominate a business we collect your name and email address, the business you nominated (its Google Maps listing, or its name and town), the category and your reason. We use these to count one nomination per person in each category, to check nominations are genuine, and to give the judging panel your reasons. Your name and email are never shown publicly, and never passed to sponsors or to the businesses nominated.
• Sharing your reason: we may quote what you wrote about the business, without your name: on the awards and First Connections websites and social media, in awards publicity, press releases and printed materials, at the Gala Night, and to the business you nominated. We may shorten it. Reasons sent before 27 October 2026 without ticking the box to allow this are never quoted. To have a quote taken down, email us and we’ll remove it.
• Finding the business: the search box on the nomination form is provided by Google Maps. What you type into it is sent to Google to return matching businesses.
• Awards updates: if you tick the box to be kept updated, your name and email address are added to our High Street Heroes mailing list in Brevo. Every email carries an unsubscribe link.
• Contact form: your name, email address, organisation and message are sent to us as an email so we can reply. They are not stored in our database.

Our basis for nominations, including quoting your reason, is our legitimate interest in running and promoting a fair awards programme, and for awards updates it is your consent. We keep nomination records after the awards as the audit record of the results, so that a challenge to an award can be answered, for no longer than six years, and then delete them. You can ask us to delete your details at any time; your nomination is removed with them.