BOHS Logo Use Protocol

BOHS has traditionally been rightly protective of its logo and has restricted its use by members. BOHS is also one of the most widely-known providers of occupational hygiene qualifications in the world.

It has a reputation for high standards, technical excellence and scientific integrity means that it is seen as a bench mark of good practice. Perhaps because of this, the logo appears widely used by people without permission, but who have undertaken BOHS qualifications in the past. This sometimes has the effect of appearing to lend our endorsement to less scrupulous people, while depriving our members of the ability to highlight their ongoing association and commitment to us and to high occupational hygiene standards.

The Society wishes to use this reputation for the improvement of occupational hygiene and to further assist in worker health protection.

To this end, the Faculties and Board wish to work with members, partners, those who have gained its qualifications, training providers and other organisations to ensure that its brand is used as a benchmark of quality.

We should not discourage the use of the BOHS brand when associated with high quality occupational hygiene and initiatives to promote worker health protection. With appropriate use of the BOHS brand, we can work to raise standards and public awareness of good occupational hygiene practice. In order to do this, the Society proposes to provide a free registration scheme for the use of custom logos to help highlight good practice, qualifications and association with the Society. The registration scheme aims at enabling fair use of the Society’s logos, providing a more commercially useful set of branding products for partners and managing the data challenges of the many thousands of people and organisations who might legitimately wish to highlight their valuable association with BOHS.

This would mean that a current member could download a custom logo, denoting BOHS membership and membership grade and/or logo identifying the level of qualification attained from BOHS. Non-BOHS holders of BOHS qualifications could also do so, but would have to pay an administration fee. The mechanism for downloading this would be via an online “store” provided by Mimeo. As part of the contract for fair use, logo-users would define what purpose they wished to use the logo for and undertake to abide by the BOHS rules. The logo would be valid for one year and would be renewed for free. Logo users would agree to have their data held for the purposes of determining whether the logo was being used correctly. Logo users would undertake to help protect the brand of BOHS by being vigilant for misuse by others so that we can work with Trading Standards to prosecute rogue traders who affix the BOHS logo to installations and otherwise use it inappropriately.

We are interested to get feedback from members as to what they think they would wish to use the logo for so that we can design appropriate purposes.

We should not discourage the use of the BOHS brand when associated with high quality occupational hygiene and initiatives to promote worker health protection. With appropriate use of the BOHS brand, we can work to raise standards and public awareness of good occupational hygiene practice.

BOHS Head Office

5/6 Melbourne Business Court, Millennium Way, Pride Park, Derby, DE24 8LZ, UK T: + 44 (0) 1332 298101 | membership@bohs.org | www.bohs.org The views expressed in this issue are not necessarily those of BOHS Board