Terms of Service

Last updated: 5 October 2026

These Terms govern use of the VertoNow platform by the organisations that publish Vertos, including through our VertoNow subscription, and the respondents who answer them.

1. Agreement to these Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a legally binding agreement between you, whether personally or on behalf of an organisation ("you"), and Play Verto Global Ltd, trading as Play Verto ("Play Verto", "we", "us" or "our"), a company registered in England and Wales with company number 09474024 with its registered office at 5 Ashford Gardens, Cobham, England KT11 3HN. Our VAT number is 332857882.

They govern your access to and use of app.playverto.com, playverto.com, and any other site or application of ours that links to them (together, the "Services").

By creating an account, publishing a Verto, or answering one, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Services.

We may update these Terms from time to time. The updated version is indicated by the date above. Where a change materially affects your rights we will notify account holders directly.

2. The Services

VertoNow is a platform on which organisations create and publish interactive, card-based sets of questions ("Vertos") and respondents answer them at a public link.

• Creators — organisations such as charities, councils, schools, funders and research partners — build Vertos, publish them, and receive the responses collected through them. Creators subscribe through VertoNow (section 5A).
• Respondents answer a Verto at its public link. No account is required.
• Commons questions are questions from our question library, including the standard demographic questions described in section 6. They are marked as Commons questions when you build a Verto, and their answers help build the Data Commons (section 8).

We may add, change or remove features at any time.

3. Who can use VertoNow

You must be at least 16 to create an account. Where local law sets a higher minimum age for consenting to online services — including 18 in India — that higher age applies.

We ask every respondent which age band they fall into, and use that answer to apply this rule.

Respondents of any age may take part in a Verto without an account, under the arrangements made by the organisation running it. Where children take part, that organisation is responsible for any consent required from a parent or guardian, and for its own safeguarding arrangements.

If we become aware that an account has been created by someone below the applicable age, we will close it and delete the associated account information.

4. Accounts

There are two kinds of account, and they are not the same:

• A creator account is used to build and publish Vertos and to view their results. It carries the responsibilities in section 5.
• A respondent account lets someone keep a copy of their own answers and receive updates about Vertos they have taken part in. It gives no access to anyone else’s data.

You must provide accurate information when creating an account and keep your login credentials secure. You are responsible for activity under your account. We may reclaim or change a username that is inappropriate or misleading.

5. Creators: your Vertos and your responsibilities

You decide what your Verto asks and why. That means:

• You are responsible for the content of the Vertos you publish — the questions, descriptions, consent wording, media and any links you include.
• Where your Verto collects personal data, you are the data controller for that research. You are responsible for having a lawful basis, for giving respondents the information they are entitled to, and for obtaining any consent required — including, where children take part, any consent required from a parent or guardian. Our standard consent step tells respondents about Commons questions and the Data Commons; if you replace it, your own wording must do the same.
• If your Verto asks about health, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or other special category data, you are responsible for having an additional lawful condition for it and for telling respondents. Our standard questions do not ask for it.
• You may not use the Services to collect personal data unlawfully, or to target, harass or discriminate against respondents.
• You receive only the responses collected through your own Vertos. You are never given access to another organisation’s responses.

5A. VertoNow subscriptions

Plans and fees. VertoNow is sold as a subscription per organisation, billed monthly or annually. The fee is the price shown when you subscribe, payable in advance, and is exclusive of VAT, which we add where it applies.

Trial. A new subscription starts with a three-week trial. You give us a payment card when you subscribe; nothing is charged during the trial, and the first payment is taken on the day the trial ends unless you cancel before then. A trial is offered once per organisation.

Renewal. Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period — each month or each year, depending on the plan you chose — unless you cancel before the renewal date. We will remind you by email before your trial ends, and give you at least 30 days’ notice of any price change.

Cancellation and refunds. You can cancel at any time from your account settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. We do not refund part-periods, except where the law requires it.

Late payment. If a payment is overdue by more than 14 days, we may suspend access to creator features until it is paid. Respondents can still answer live Vertos while access is suspended.

Your data at the end. After your subscription ends you can export your results for 30 days. We then delete your Vertos and their responses as described in section 10.

6. Respondents

Taking part in a Verto is voluntary. You will see a consent step before the first question and can decline at any time.

Every Verto ends with a short set of standard demographic questions — an age band, where you live, and gender. You can skip them. These are Commons questions: once aggregated and anonymised, the answers help build the Data Commons (section 8). The consent step tells you which questions in a Verto are Commons questions.

Your answers are stored without a name, email address or account attached. Where you choose to create an account, the link between your account and your answers can be removed at any time on request.

Response integrity. When you answer a Verto, the player records a few compact engagement signals and sends them with your answers: how long you spent on each question, whether you reached the end of a list of options long enough to scroll, whether a slider was ever moved before its opening position was recorded as an answer, whether the same position was chosen repeatedly across a block of questions, and whether free-text answers were left effectively blank. From these we calculate a score and a band for the response. They are stored with the response itself, are deleted when it is, and are used only to report on the integrity of results and to decide what is eligible for the Data Commons. The score describes the response, not the person: it is never used to profile, contact or make a decision about an individual, and creators see the score and band, not the underlying signals. The player does not record your screen, your keystrokes or your cursor movements, and we use no third-party analytics or session-replay tools.

You are responsible for the accuracy of the answers you choose to give.

7. Content and ownership

Our content. The VertoNow platform — its software, design, databases and branding — belongs to us or is licensed to us, and is protected by the intellectual property laws of England and Wales and by international conventions. You may use it only as these Terms allow.

Creators’ content. You keep ownership of the questions, branding and media you upload to your Vertos. You grant us the licence we need to host, display, translate and deliver them as part of running the Services.

Respondents’ answers. You keep ownership of the answers you submit, and grant the organisation that published the Verto a licence to use them for the purpose the Verto was run for.

What you must not upload. You confirm that content you provide is yours to provide, is not unlawful, misleading, obscene, harassing or infringing, and does not breach anyone’s privacy or publicity rights. We may remove content that breaches these Terms, and we may edit or re-categorise content where necessary to run the Services. We are under no obligation to monitor content.

What we will not do. We do not sell, resell, publish or broadcast individual responses, and we do not use them for advertising. Our rights over your content are limited to what is needed to run the Services and to the aggregated use described in section 8.

8. Aggregated data and the Data Commons

Aggregated data means information that has been combined and summarised so that it no longer identifies any individual and cannot reasonably be linked back to one. Once data has been aggregated in this way it is no longer personal data.

By taking part in a Verto, you grant Play Verto a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to include your answers to Commons questions — in the aggregated and anonymised form, and as the redacted quotes, described in this section — in our research outputs and in the Data Commons. Organisations that publish a Verto grant the same licence in respect of the answers to Commons questions collected through it.

Contributing your own data. An organisation may offer to contribute answers to its own questions. If we accept, it grants the same licence in respect of that data ("Contributed Data"). Contributing organisations have access to the aggregated insight they help build. Answers to your own questions that you do not contribute are never included in the Data Commons.

Quality. We decide what is included. We may decline a contribution, or later exclude data, that does not meet our quality standards. We include only responses that pass our response-integrity checks, and only data collected with a sound method and from enough respondents to be meaningful.

Two gates, both required. A Verto’s answers are used to build the Data Commons only where the organisation that collected them has offered it, has not withdrawn it, and Play Verto has accepted it after review. An offer can be narrower than a whole Verto — an organisation may contribute the Commons questions while keeping its own questions out — and a question outside what was offered never becomes part of the Commons.

Withdrawal. A contributing organisation can withdraw a Verto at any time, without giving a reason. Withdrawal takes effect immediately: from that moment its data answers no further questions. Figures already combined into an aggregate cannot be separated back out, so withdrawal stops future use rather than unpicking published aggregates — which is why nothing is contributed without the offer described above.

Protecting individuals. Nothing is published through the Data Commons or returned by Ask Verto about a group of fewer than 10 respondents. Within an organisation’s own results, a breakdown by place or by demographic group is withheld below 5. The floor is applied to each figure rather than to the group as a whole, so a group large enough overall is still withheld on a question most of them skipped; and a withheld figure is absent rather than shown as zero, because a published zero in a small group is as identifying as a published one.

One characteristic at a time. Figures are broken down by age band, or by gender, or by country — never by two of them together. Combinations are where re-identification actually happens, so they are not produced at all rather than produced and withheld.

Free-text answers and quotes. Where a contributed Verto asked an open question, the Data Commons holds the themes found across the answers and a small number of the answers themselves, word for word. Before any answer can be quoted: contact details, web addresses, social handles and long runs of digits are removed; what remains is assessed for whether it could still identify its author and dropped if it could; answers longer than 300 characters are rejected rather than shortened, because a long answer is far easier to trace to one person; and a member of staff reads every quote before the Verto it came from is accepted. Answers held by a moderator are never quoted. No other part of an individual response is published.

Apart from the quotes described above, this licence covers only data that has been aggregated as defined above. It does not permit us to share, sell or publish individual responses.

Aggregated data in the Data Commons, alongside Play Verto’s own primary data and partner research data included with the partner’s agreement, is pooled and used:

• To submit research and reports, and respond to calls for evidence on subjects we have insight on.
• To share aggregated and distilled data and trends with issue-based organisations and impact leaders, where it may positively affect their strategy or advocacy work.
• To share aggregated data and trends within academia.
• To build a meta-database that can be queried through our Ask Verto feature, which is accessible to subscribers and to anyone to whom Play Verto grants access, including on a paid basis.

Apart from those quotes, no individual response is pooled, sold or shared across organisations, and each organisation sees only the responses collected through its own Vertos.

We do not sell the Data Commons or licence it as a dataset, and access to Ask Verto never buys a larger share of it: what any reader can see is decided by what has been contributed and accepted, never by who they are or what they pay. We do not use the Data Commons to make or support a decision about an individual, for advertising or audience targeting, or to train or fine-tune AI models.

Why the Data Commons exists. It helps make sure the voices of lived experience are part of the decisions that affect them: an organisation with 300 responses can say little about how its community compares with anyone else’s, and the same 300 responses alongside tens of thousands can. Organisations that contribute get access to the aggregated insight they help build, and subscriptions to Ask Verto keep Play Verto sustainable.

Because aggregated data is no longer personal data, we retain it indefinitely. Closing an account does not withdraw this licence in respect of data already aggregated, because that data no longer identifies any individual and cannot be separated out. Where you have contributed a Verto, withdrawing it under the paragraph above stops any further use of it.

9. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• attempt to identify any individual from aggregated or anonymised data made available through the Services;
• submit responses you know to be false, or submit multiple responses in order to distort the results of a Verto;
• use the answers or results from a Verto to identify, contact, or attempt to contact an individual respondent;
• use the Services to collect personal data without a lawful basis, or in breach of any applicable data protection law;
• publish a Verto that is unlawful, deceptive, or infringes someone else’s rights;
• systematically retrieve data from the Services to build a competing collection, compilation or database;
• use automated means — bots, scrapers, spiders — to access the Services, other than standard search engine indexing;
• attempt to disrupt, overload, or gain unauthorised access to the Services, or to circumvent their security features;
• impersonate another person, or use another person’s account;
• upload malicious code, or anything that interferes with the operation of the Services;
• harass, intimidate or threaten our staff; or
• reverse engineer the software behind the Services, except as applicable law permits.

We may suspend or remove a Verto, or an account, that breaches this section.

10. Data protection

Roles. Where an organisation publishes a Verto, that organisation decides what to ask and why, and is the data controller for the research it collects. We act as its processor in respect of those responses, processing them on its documented instructions. The organisation instructs us to aggregate and anonymise answers to Commons questions, and any Contributed Data, for the Data Commons as described in section 8.

We act as a controller in our own right for account information, service and security logs, analytics, and for aggregated and anonymised data.

Our commitments as processor. We will process personal data only on the creator’s documented instructions; keep it confidential, and ensure our staff are bound by confidentiality; apply appropriate technical and organisational security measures; engage sub-processors only as listed in our Privacy Notice, giving creators notice of any new sub-processor and a chance to object; assist in responding to data subject rights requests and with data protection impact assessments; notify the creator without undue delay on becoming aware of a personal data breach affecting their data; make available the information needed to show we meet these commitments, and allow reasonable audits; and delete their data within 30 days of their deleting a Verto or closing their account, unless the law requires us to keep it. Data already aggregated is not affected.

These are our data processing terms. This section, together with the sub-processor list and the retention periods in our Privacy Notice, is the written agreement governing our processing of personal data on a creator’s behalf. Where a creator requires these terms in a separate signed document, we will enter into one on request.

11. Privacy and cookies

How we collect, use and protect personal data is described in our Privacy Notice and Cookie Notice, which are incorporated into these Terms. We set no analytics, advertising or session-recording cookies and use no third-party analytics tools, so you are not asked to make a cookie choice.

Our application servers and database are located in Germany. Some of our service providers are located in the United States, and we use the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum for those transfers. The full list of providers is in section 4 of the Privacy Notice.

12. Third-party websites and content

The Services link to sites we do not own — including Google, where you sign in or connect Drive, Sheets or Forms, and mapping and place-name providers. A creator may also include links in the questions, descriptions or consent wording of a Verto.

We do not investigate, monitor or endorse third-party sites or content, and these Terms do not govern them. If you follow a link away from the Services, you do so at your own risk and should review that site’s own terms and privacy practices.

13. Copyright infringement notices

We respect the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe material available through the Services infringes a copyright you own or control, please notify us at the contact details in section 23, giving enough detail to identify the material and your rights in it.

We will review the notice and act expeditiously where it is well founded, including by removing or disabling access to the material. A copy of your notice may be sent to the person who posted it. You may be liable for damages if you make material misrepresentations in a notice.

14. Managing the Services

We may, but are not obliged to: monitor the Services for breaches of these Terms; take legal action against anyone who breaches them or the law; restrict access to, or remove, content that breaches these Terms; remove files that place an unreasonable burden on our systems; and otherwise manage the Services to protect our rights and keep them working properly.

15. Availability, changes and interruptions

We aim to keep the Services available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted access. We may suspend access for maintenance, or to protect the security or integrity of the Services, and we may change, suspend or discontinue features at any time.

The respondent player works offline: a Verto opened while connected can be answered without a connection, and answers are submitted when the device is next online.

We are not liable for any loss or inconvenience caused by the Services being unavailable, and nothing in these Terms obliges us to maintain or support any particular feature.

16. Term and termination

These Terms apply while you use the Services.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches them, or where required by law.

Creators may delete their account and their Vertos at any time. Respondents may delete their account at any time, and ask us to remove the link between their account and their answers.

Ending an account does not withdraw the aggregated and anonymised licence in section 8 in respect of data already aggregated.

17. Disclaimer

The Services are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude all warranties, express or implied, including the implied warranties of satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We make no warranty about the accuracy or completeness of content on the Services, including content published by creators or answers given by respondents, and we are not responsible for third-party sites or content.

Nothing in this section affects the rights of a consumer that cannot be excluded by law.

18. Limitation of liability

Subject to the paragraph below, our total liability to you under or in connection with these Terms, whatever the cause and whatever the form of action, shall not exceed the greater of £1,000 (or its equivalent in the currency in which you were invoiced) and the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of data, or for indirect or consequential loss.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

19. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against any loss, damage, liability, claim or demand, including reasonable legal costs, made by a third party arising out of: the content you publish or submit; your use of the Services; your breach of these Terms or of your representations under them; or your violation of a third party’s rights.

We will notify you of any such claim and may, at your expense, assume its defence and control.

20. Electronic communications

Visiting the Services, emailing us and completing online forms are electronic communications. You consent to receiving communications from us electronically, and agree that electronic notices, agreements and records satisfy any legal requirement that they be in writing.

21. General

These Terms, together with the Privacy Notice and Cookie Notice, are the entire agreement between us in relation to the Services.

If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it. If any provision is found unlawful or unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues to apply. We may assign our rights and obligations; you may not without our consent. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture or employment relationship.

We are not responsible for any failure to perform caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

22. Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident in the EU, you keep the protection of any mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence.

23. Contact us

Play Verto Global Ltd, 5 Ashford Gardens, Cobham, England KT11 3HN, United Kingdom

Email: dpo@playverto.com  ·  Phone: +44 7702 645992