The board reads your flyer, not your description of it
A sentence in the application saying you will invite the day shift by email is a plan. The email itself, subject line and all, is the document. Reviewers want the second one, because the first thing a prospective participant ever reads about a project is not the consent sheet — it is a poster by the time clock, a forwarded message, or thirty seconds at the end of a huddle.
Every flyer, email, post and spoken script goes into the file exactly as a participant will meet it. Wording stays limited to what a person needs to judge eligibility and interest, promises nothing the protocol cannot keep, and matches the consent sheet.
What counts as a recruitment material?
Anything a prospective participant sees or hears about the project before they decide. That is wider than the word flyer suggests, and the items people forget are usually the informal ones.
- The printed notice, in the size and colours it will actually be printed.
- The invitation email, including its subject line and any signature block that names your role at the organisation.
- The message an administrator or manager forwards on your behalf, in their words if they will be writing it.
- The post in a closed professional group, and any follow-up comment you plan to leave.
- The reminder — a second contact is a second material, and boards notice when one is filed and the other is not.
- The spoken script: the sixty seconds at the end of a shift meeting, the sentence at the bedside, the answer you give when somebody asks what this is about.
That last one is where the most capable candidates lose a round. Federal guidance on recruiting, published by the Food and Drug Administration, does not stop at printed advertising: it treats the first spoken contact as reviewable too, and it warns that a bare assurance of confidentiality leaves a board no wiser about the handling behind it. It asks pointed questions of a script — what becomes of the details somebody gives before they hang up or walk away, whether the names of people who turn out to be ineligible are kept, whether paper goes into a shredder or a bin. If you would answer those questions differently for a script than for a form, the script needs writing down.
Why does the board treat the flyer as the first page of consent?
Because that is what the guidance says it is. The FDA's position on direct advertising is that it forms the beginning of the consent and selection process, and that materials should therefore be reviewed and approved as part of the initial package rather than produced afterwards. When a project later adds an advert, that addition is handled as a change to an approved study, not as a private decision.
The regulation underneath it points the same way. Consent has to be sought in conditions that leave somebody genuine room to weigh it up, with coercion and undue influence held down — and no such conditions start at the moment a form changes hands. They begin at the poster. So the flyer is read for the same qualities as the consent document: accuracy, restraint, and no promise the protocol cannot honour.
Recruitment is not the advertisement for consent. It is the first paragraph of it.
What may the wording carry, and what may it never say?
The FDA's guidance takes an unusual approach for a regulator. Rather than a prohibited list, it offers a short set of items that may appear when worded properly, and one governing principle: hold the material to what a prospective participant needs in order to work out eligibility, and to decide whether the thing appeals. Everything past that line is persuasion, and persuasion gets read closely.
| Material | What it should carry | What sinks it |
|---|---|---|
| The flyer or notice | Who is running the project and where; the topic or purpose; eligibility in summary form; what taking part involves; the time it asks; how to make contact | Bold type on an incentive; a headline implying a result; type sizes that shout one line and whisper another. Reviewers are told to look at the final copy, including relative type size and visual effect |
| The invitation email | The same content, plus a plain statement that taking part is a choice and that declining changes nothing | Being sent from a manager's mailbox without saying who wrote it; a subject line that reads as an instruction rather than an invitation |
| The spoken script | Word-for-word text, including what you say if somebody asks whether their manager will know | Existing only in your head. An unwritten script cannot be reviewed, and what cannot be reviewed cannot be approved |
Two prohibitions are worth stating plainly because they are so easy to write by accident. Do not describe anything as free when what you mean is that nobody will be charged for it — the guidance singles that phrasing out. And do not let the material state or imply a favourable outcome beyond what the protocol and the consent sheet support. In improvement work that error rarely looks like a miracle claim; it looks like a flyer headed help us cut falls on 4 West, which quietly promises the reader an effect the project has not yet found.
What changes when you are recruiting your own colleagues?
The file changes, and so does the reading it gets. WGU's published application asks about the research population directly, and it asks about relationship — the form names supervisor and employee, instructor and learner, and professional colleagues as the relationships it wants declared. It also asks, in the same section, whether the population includes anyone employed by or under the authority of the person running the project. Those questions exist because a colleague who cannot comfortably decline has not really been asked.
The approval criteria point the same way. Under 45 CFR 46.111 selection has to be equitable, with particular attention to groups open to coercion or undue influence, and safeguards added where such participants are involved. The training curriculum reflects it too: the standard human-subjects syllabus carries a dedicated module on research involving workers and employees, on exactly this ground.
None of that means you cannot recruit where you work. Most WGU capstones do. It means the wording carries more weight, and a few habits make the difference:
- Say who is asking and in what capacity — as a colleague running a capstone project, not as the charge nurse.
- Say what happens if somebody ignores the message: nothing, and say it in those terms rather than in the language of policy.
- Keep the ask out of any moment where attendance is required. A shift meeting is a captive room.
- Let a neutral party carry the invitation where you supervise the people you are inviting, and describe that arrangement in the application.
- Never make participation visible. A sign-up sheet on a break-room wall records who declined as faithfully as who agreed.
What has to match across the file?
Recruitment is the document most likely to disagree with the rest of the folder, because it is written last, written quickly, and written in a different voice. A reviewer reading four documents together finds the seams immediately.
- Eligibility. The wording that says who may take part is identical on the flyer and in the consent sheet. Not equivalent — identical.
- Activities. Everything the protocol asks of a participant appears in the invitation. A flyer mentioning a survey, where the design also includes an interview, has under-described the ask.
- Time. One figure, everywhere. Recruitment that estimates low and consent that estimates high is a mismatch a reviewer will name.
- Voluntariness. The promise made in recruitment cannot be softened in consent, and the anonymity claimed on the poster has to be what the security plan actually delivers.
- Contact. The same name and route on every material, so a person who wants out knows who to reach.
- Site channels. If the invitation travels on an employer's mailing list or intranet, that use of the organisation's channels belongs in the site permission page as an authorised activity.
One more distinction is worth holding onto, because WGU's own form draws it. The application asks you to describe the procedures you will follow to obtain consent, and instructs you not to reproduce the content of the consent document inside that answer. The narrative and the artefacts do different work: the application explains the process, and the materials are attached to be read as written. Filing a description where a document belongs, or pasting a document where a description belongs, both read as not having understood the ask.
What to do next
Write the materials before you write the application section about them. Print the flyer at full size and look at it from across a room; read the script aloud to somebody who does not work with you and note where they hesitate. Then lay flyer, email, script and consent sheet in a row and check the six matching points above, one at a time, changing whatever disagrees.
If you would rather that work were done for you, the free application review will read whatever exists and tell you where the branch honestly sits — including when a clean file needs nothing from us at all. Where it does, we draft every recruitment item in the form participants will meet it, keep it matched as the protocol moves, file the submission and answer each reply the board sends. The project stays yours; the board's decision stays the board's. See how it works, read the FAQ, or tell us where the capstone stands.
Request the free application review
Sources
- Recruitment as the opening of consent and selection; review of methods and materials; final copy including type size and visual effect; the limit to what a person needs for eligibility and interest; the free-treatment and payment-emphasis cautions; and the questions a board asks of a first-contact script — U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Recruiting Study Subjects — fda.gov, Recruiting Study Subjects
- Consent sought under circumstances that minimise coercion and undue influence — 45 CFR 46.116(a) — Cornell LII, 45 CFR 46.116
- Equitable selection, attention to groups open to undue influence, and added safeguards — 45 CFR 46.111, paragraphs (a)(3) and (b) — Cornell LII, 45 CFR 46.111
- Western Governors University Institutional Review Board, Request for Approval to Conduct Research (population, age, number and relationship of participants; the vulnerable-population question; the instruction to describe consent procedures rather than reproduce the document) — aliciabatesmedlt.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/6/3/126370100/request_for_approval_to_conduct_research__1_.pdf
- The workers-and-employees module in the standard human-subjects curriculum — CITI Program, the HSR series — about.citiprogram.org, HSR series
Routes, forms and portal wording at WGU move over time. Where this page disagrees with WGU's current handbook or IRB portal, believe the portal. This desk is an independent practice; it is not part of Western Governors University and does not speak for it.