recruitment materials
The words you will actually say, on the page.
Herzing's Research Protocol Application gives recruitment one instruction: describe how participants will be selected or recruited. A description is not an approvable artefact. What a board can approve is the wording itself — the flyer as printed, the email as sent, the sentence you will speak at a huddle — because that wording is where the consent conversation actually begins and where fairness in selection is either present or absent.
Helen Marsh, PhD · filed 2026-08-23
File every recruitment artefact in its final wording: posters, emails, spoken invitations, reminders, referral requests. Herzing's form asks only for a description, but the board approves what participants will meet, and any compensation named must match the application and the consent exactly.
Where does Herzing's application ask about recruitment?
In one narrow place. Step 4 of the Research Protocol Application, under Participant Information, holds a free-text box reading: describe how participants will be selected or recruited. Directly above it sit questions about whether everyone can give informed consent, whether anyone will be under eighteen, whether the participants will be Herzing's own faculty, staff or those enrolled there, and whether anyone receives compensation — with a second box asking you to detail that compensation.
The Healthcare Improvement or Innovation Project Application has no recruitment box at all. Its checklist reaches signatures, questionnaires and surveys, a CITI certificate, external board paperwork and a Program Chair letter, and then stops. As with consent, the silence is not a ruling. The board still decides whether the work meets the Common Rule's definitions, and if it does, everything a participant would be shown becomes relevant to that reading.
What neither application says out loud is that the description box and the artefacts are different objects. The box explains your method. The artefacts are the method in operation, and only one of those two things can be read by the person you are recruiting.
Why is a description not enough on its own?
Two reasons, and both come from the approval criteria rather than from Herzing's form.
The first is fairness. Among the findings required by 45 CFR 46.111 is that participants be selected equitably, with particular attention to anyone whose circumstances make a free choice harder. That judgement cannot be made from "participants will be recruited via email." It can be made from the email — from whether it went to a whole department or only to the people you know will say yes, from whether the shift that never reads email was reached at all, from whether the sender's name carries authority over the reader.
The second is that recruitment is the front end of consent, not a separate marketing exercise. The regulators' long-standing position is that direct advertising to prospective participants is the first step in the consent process, which is why boards review the finished wording before it is displayed rather than after. Everything 45 CFR 46.116 forbids in a consent document — overselling benefit, burying what is being asked, wording that quietly discourages a refusal — is equally unwelcome in the message that gets someone as far as the consent document.
There is a plain test. If a sentence would change whether a reasonable person volunteers, the board wants to have read that sentence.
What gets filed, channel by channel?
The rule of thumb is that anything a prospective participant could see or hear before they consent belongs in the folder in final form. That is broader than most people expect, and the spoken items are the ones most often forgotten.
| Channel | What you attach | What a reviewer reads it for |
|---|---|---|
| Printed poster or flyer | The artwork as it will be posted, including any logo and the tear-off strip | Whether a passer-by learns this is research and that taking part is optional |
| Email or internal newsletter item | Subject line and body, exactly as they will be sent, plus who sends it | Whether the sender holds authority over the reader, and whether the site's letter covers using that channel |
| Spoken invitation at a huddle or team meeting | A written script of what you will say | Whether a room of colleagues can decline unobserved |
| One-to-one approach by the investigator | The opening you will use, written out | Whether your other role in that setting is disclosed at the start |
| Reminders and follow-ups | Each reminder in full, and how many go out | Whether persistence has crossed into pressure |
| Community or social post | The post as published, with any image | Whether reach is honest about who is eligible and who is not |
| Referral or snowball request | The words you will ask participants to pass on | Whether someone's participation is revealed to the person they refer |
| A gatekeeper forwarding on your behalf | The forwarding note itself, not just your attachment | Whether a manager's covering sentence has turned an invitation into an instruction |
Which tests does a recruitment message have to survive?
Seven, and they apply to a poster and a spoken sentence alike:
- It says this is research, or an improvement project, and names you and your role. An unattributed invitation is asking for trust it has not earned.
- It says what is being asked and roughly what taking part involves. Not the full protocol — enough that nobody feels ambushed at the consent stage.
- It says taking part is voluntary and that a decision either way stays private. Especially where the reader works for the sender.
- It does not promise a benefit the design cannot deliver. Improved care, career advantage and gratitude from leadership are all overreach unless the design produces them.
- It states compensation in the same words as the application and the consent. The form asks whether anyone is compensated and asks for the detail; three documents describing one incentive differently is a discrepancy a reviewer finds instantly.
- It offers one clear way to say yes and one way to ask a question first. A message that only allows a yes is not offering a choice.
- It creates no record of who declined. A clipboard on the break-room wall records refusals as surely as acceptances.
Attach each artefact under a file name that says what it is and which version it is, and keep the set together — the same discipline the consent documents pocket needs, for the same reason: the message you send to the IRB inbox is the whole of the record.
What changes when you recruit where you work?
Almost everything about the tone, and one thing about the review level. The Research Protocol Application asks whether participants will be Herzing's faculty, staff or the people enrolled there, and answers itself in a parenthesis: if yes, the study requires full IRB review. Recruiting inside the university is the heaviest path on the form, not the lightest.
Recruiting inside your employer is different again. Nothing on the form changes, but the words do. If you supervise, schedule or appraise the people you are inviting, say so in the invitation and put a route to yes that does not pass through you. Where an organisation's own email lists, noticeboards or meetings carry the invitation, those are the organisation's channels, and the permission letter has to say the organisation permits their use — which is why the site permission pocket and this one are usually opened on the same day.
Can a flyer carry the university's name?
Carefully, and after checking. The acknowledgements you sign on the Research Protocol Application treat data collected from Herzing's constituents as proprietary and forbid publications or external reports produced from the work from identifying, referencing or implicating the university. That clause governs what you publish afterwards rather than your poster — but it is a clear signal about how the university expects its name to travel, and any use of Herzing's name or marks in recruitment copy is worth verifying against Herzing's current IRB handbook or portal before it is printed. Meanwhile a flyer implying institutional endorsement of the intervention is a problem in its own right, whoever the institution is: it lends authority the design has not established.
What to do next
Write down every way a person could first hear about your project — including the sentence you would say in a corridor — and count the artefacts. If that count is higher than the number of documents currently in your folder, the gap is what a reviewer will find. Start with the free application review and tell us where and how you plan to reach people. Back comes a written reading of which artefacts are missing, which sentences will draw a question, and whether your setting pushes the filing toward full board review. If you would rather hand the whole pocket over, the third tab of how the practice works covers building it, and the step-by-step walk-through shows where recruitment sits in the sequence. The project remains yours from first draft to final report; the determination and the decision remain the board's.
Sources
- Herzing University, Institutional Review Board (IRB) — the page carrying both applications, the bylaws and the meeting calendar — herzing.edu/institutional-review-board-irb
- Herzing University, IRB Application for Research Protocol Approval — Step 4 Participant Information, the recruitment description box, the compensation questions, and the note that participants drawn from the university require full review — the Research Protocol Application (PDF)
- Herzing University, IRB Application for Improvement or Innovation Project Approval — the checklist, with no recruitment box — the Improvement or Innovation Project Application (PDF)
- Herzing University IRB, Statement of Principles — human-subjects definitions, review levels, and the approval findings a board must make — Statement of Principles (PDF)
- Herzing University, DNP Capstone Projects — the range of settings these projects recruit in, from clinics and long-term care to schools — herzing.edu/bhwet-grant/dnp-projects
- Equitable selection of participants and the other findings behind approval, 45 CFR 46.111 — Legal Information Institute
- Consent: understandable wording, the key-information opening, and the bar on exculpatory terms, 45 CFR 46.116 — Legal Information Institute
Herzing revises its IRB forms and pages without notice; where this article and Herzing's current IRB handbook or portal disagree, the current material governs. This practice is independent and is not affiliated with Herzing University.
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