POLICY (Note: this policy applies to all CTC-CK and CTCF-CK staff, directors and volunteers)
The Children’s Treatment Centre of Chatham-Kent (CTC-CK) and the Children’s Treatment Centre Foundation of Chatham-Kent (CTCF-CK) utilizes social media with the following goals in mind:
- To increase communication and understanding with clients, families, partner agencies, donors, sponsors, the community at large, and the Ontario Association of Children’s Rehabilitation Services
- To strengthen client relations
- To increase grassroots participation and volunteerism
- To build and coordinate awareness of Centre and Foundation, and their programs and events
- To support fundraising activities
Guiding Principles
Social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are excellent for not-for-profit and social service sector communication, but they do come with unique challenges, and hold unique risks for organizations and individuals. This policy addresses these challenges to clarify how to protect privacy and confidentiality, as well as personal, professional and organizational reputations, in order to fully benefit from social media tools. For the purposes of this policy, social media includes any social networking platform.
For most effective and efficient use of resources, the Centre accomplishes its social media goals through the Foundation’s social media sites. Foundation staff members are responsible for posting messages to sites, and will provide ongoing monitoring of comments and posts by other to ensure compliance with this policy.
Organizational use of social media is any use that is on behalf of, is sanctioned by, or is in the name of the CTC-CK and/or the CTCF-CK. All organizational use of the Centre’s social media presence must be authorized by and executed by the Foundation.
PROCEDURE
Code of Conduct for Social Media Use (personal and professional)
Be Accurate
Be Considerate
Do Not Reveal Confidential Information
If you post comments on or regarding photographs showing CTC-CK/CTCF-CK, a client, a donor or an issue related to the children’s rehabilitation sector, ensure you do so while respecting the privacy and confidentiality of clients and communities, and only in conjunction with the appropriate release permissions. When making decisions about your online content, refer to the following documents you agreed to when you became an employee:
- Employee Code of Conduct
- Provincial FIPPA regulations (if applicable)
- Personal Health Information Protection Act
- Centre confidentiality agreements
- Foundation confidentiality agreements
Clients and stakeholders should not be cited, referenced or pictured without their approval. Never identify a client by name without permission, and never discuss a client’s confidential details.
Respect Copyright Laws
Show proper respect for the laws governing copyright and fair use of copyrighted material owned by others, including the CTC-CK’s logo and associated branding and the CTCF-CK’s logo and associated branding. For reference, see the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Guidance.
Respect Work Commitments
Please remember that personal social networking activities are personal and are pursued on your own time unless you have specifically been assigned to perform an online activity related to CTC-CK/CTCF-CK.
Personal Use (any use that is not on behalf of the Centre or Foundation)
Do not use a “childrenstreatment-ck.com”(Centre issued) email address as a credential for personal use social networking sites. Staff are not to participate in social media networking with clients or with their families if a relationship with that client or family is initiated through your work.
Staff must maintain legal and professional standards of client privacy and confidentiality in all interactions in the community.
Staff are advised to decline any client/family invitations to ‘friend’ and not to issue such requests. In cases where the friendship predates the client relationship, staff are encouraged to discuss the privacy issues which may present a conflict.
Use Disclaimers
Make it clear that the views you are expressing are yours alone and not necessarily those of the CTC-CK/CTCF-CK.
Be Transparent
If you discuss CTC-CK/CTCF-CK, then you have a duty to disclose your role within the organization.
Be Professional
Reflect the appropriate professional image of CTC-CK/CTCF-CK and their respective brands. Be respectful to all our stakeholders and including but not limited to staff, donors, sponsors, clients, families of clients, community partners, and volunteers. We welcome community participation on social media platforms but reserve the right to remove any content deemed to be inappropriate and/or block users that have posted messages that contain:
- Vulgar language
- Personal attacks of any kind
- Offensive comments that target or disparage people with special needs, or of any other minority group
- Comments that infringe on the privacy of donors, sponsors, clients, staff, volunteers of CTC-CK or CTCF-CK
- Comments that damage the reputation or are libelous against any of donors, sponsors, clients, staff, volunteers, community agencies, or CTC-CK/CTCF-CK
- Spam or repeat postings
- Comments which are off-topic or promoting unrelated events
- Comments of a commercial or a partisan nature
- Comments advocating illegal activity
- Comments that are known or suspected to be infringing upon copyright or trademarks.
Approved: 2013/03/20 (CTCF-CK) and 2013/03/25 (CTC-CK)