Industry Sponsored Content – Standards/Best Practices for Disclosure

[Radha Chitale]

Hello,

I’m interested to know how you handle industry-sponsored content about drugs, programs, and so on on your communication channels reaching a patient audience. These channels might include newsletters, blog posts, areas of your website, social media posts, videos, and others. Specifically:

– What kinds of internal standards and disclosure language have you developed and what do you do to enforce them?

– How do you differentiate branded vs ‘unbranded’ content and do you still have some sort of disclosure language, even if something is unbranded? (sponsored by, with support from, developed through an unrestricted educational grant from’ etc etc)

– How do you handle potential resistance to disclosing financial support?

– Are there instances where you would consider sharing completely unbranded, non-disclosed content?

I’m sure there are other questions and considerations that I’m missing. I’d love to hear all your thoughts on these topics!

Many thanks,

Radha Chitale

Senior Director of Communications

Kidney Cancer Association

[[email protected]]

Hi Radha. Really important questions. Keeping your audience in mind, I would not run sponsored content without disclosing in any circumstance I can think of but if you have one in mind, I’m happy to give feedback. Associations are often criticized for representing big business and that jeopardizes not only trust from your audiences, but also potentially your 501c3 status. In my magazine days, we labeled all sponsored content as advertorial and gave it a different look (a stripe down the side of the page, a frame around the content). You need to have a policy in place so a funder can read it before creating copy for your channels. You can also use it to push back on requests and hold to your ethical standards. I’m sure you can find stats (ChatGPT?)about the erosion of trust based on consumers believing your brand is trying to “get one over on them.” Consumers are more savvy than some marketers give them credit for. Good luck. 

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