Compliance and Your Website

We have clients who read their blogs often and write posts on occasion. We have clients who just drop in every once in a while to have a look at their blogs, because the whole point of hiring a blogger is to avoid doing that work yourself. But we also have clients who need to think about compliance: making sure that their blog meets legal requirements.

Whether it’s HIPAA or SEC compliance, internal concerns or federal laws, compliance checks are a reality for plenty of websites.

Compliance checks can slow you down

Maybe you have a legal team, a compliance officer, or a group of doctors that check blog posts before they’re published. In an ideal world compliance checks go quickly, efficiently, and smoothly.

Unfortunately, the real world rarely works ideally.

These checks may take weeks. A blog post may end up bouncing from person to person, sitting unread in multiple inboxes. Miscommunication and information silos can complicate things, and the use of quotations in a post can add another level of difficulty to the mix.

This impedes workflow, resulting in slower, less efficient, and less profitable work.

Speeding it up

When you hire a company you trust to write your web content, you get the luxury of sharing responsibility for compliance checks. However, outsourcing can create obstacles, too. Here are some tips for meeting compliance requirements without too much delay:

• Use plugins like Edit Flow to make it easy for everyone to check content and leave comments.
• Separate style and compliance. If you don’t like the tone of a post, deal with it separately to avoid slowing down the process with multiple iterations.
• If there are rules, or even useful generalizations, let your blogger know. For example, we had a client who needed us to say “many” rather than “most” if we weren’t using a specific percentage. We can do that, once we know.
• Limit the number of people involved. Ideally, one compliance officer should be responsible. 
• Agree on a schedule and deadlines. If your compliance officer needs two weeks of lead time, your web team should have the content ready two weeks ahead of their deadline.
• Within that agreement, make a plan for what your web team should do if a post has not been approved by the time it is scheduled to publish.
• Develop a policy and process for making unforeseen but necessary changes quickly.

The best way to limit the possible negative effects of your compliance checks is by working closely with your content writers. Communication is key. Contact Haden Interactive to work on your content marketing strategy.