Contact the Notify team to get a copy of the agreement or to find out if your organisation has already accepted it.
{% endcall %}To accept these terms, you must be the service manager for your service.
If we accept your service onto GOV.UK Notify, we agree to:
You agree:
We’ll send all the messages you pass to us, as long as they meet our guidelines.
We aim to provide a continuous service so you can use GOV.UK Notify 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
We’ve made sure that GOV.UK Notify can handle large volumes of messages. For text messages we use multiple delivery providers at any one time. If a provider’s service fails, GOV.UK Notify will automatically switch to a different provider.
You’ll be able to see how the service is performing on our status page.
We have a ticketing system and escalation routes to address incidents. We also provide 24 hour support for high-priority issues.
We also have a chat room for talking to the GOV.UK Notify team. We are available to discuss your needs, and to see how Notify is working for you.
GOV.UK Notify has been through an information assurance process to assess information risks, to determine appropriate treatments for those risks and to obtain risk acceptance from the Cabinet Office Senior Information Risk Officer (SIRO). This work includes the completion of a privacy impact assessment to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act.
Cabinet Office act as data processor, as parent organisation of GOV.UK Notify. Your organisation remains the data controller.
Contact us if you want more information about our approach to data protection and information risk management.
We’ll email to tell you what is changing and when the change will come into effect.
This includes when any of our email, text message or postal providers change.
You agree to get your service assured through your organisation’s information assurance (security) process. You don’t need to include assurance of GOV.UK Notify or our delivery partners, since we’ve already done that - we can share the work we’ve done.
You must tell us immediately if you have any security breaches. This is so we can make sure other services are not affected.
You must follow industry best practices for keeping your API keys secure.
You must ensure you have obtained correct levels of consent - both to send messages but also for how data is shared, stored, and processed in order to do so.
GOV.UK Notify is for sending transactional messages and subscription based alerts or reminders.
Transactional messages relate directly to something the user did. For example:
You don’t need to ask permission to send messages that directly relate to a transaction. By making a transaction and providing their contact details, a user is implicitly agreeing to receive messages about that transaction.
Subscription based messages relate to something a user has explicitly asked to be updated with. For example:
All subscription based messages must, by law, contain a way for users to unsubscribe.
If you do use GOV.UK Notify to send unsolicited messages, we may refuse to accept further messages for delivery.
Your messages must follow our design patterns, style guide and information security guidelines.
Your messages must not contain any personally or commercially sensitive information.
When you send messages through GOV.UK Notify, we provide feedback on the status of every text message, email and letter you send.
You agree to use our delivery data to check (and potentially remove) bounced email addresses, mobile numbers, and postal addresses from your database.
You agree to ensure your user’s personal data is kept accurate and up to date, in line with Data Protection Act principles.
If you have consistently high bounce rates, we will investigate and may refuse to accept further messages for delivery. This is to protect delivery rates for other services using GOV.UK Notify.
You can remove your service from GOV.UK Notify at any time. Contact us and we’ll delete your account.
Any data that you have already processed through GOV.UK Notify will be deleted as part of the existing data deletion processes and data retention periods.