Recruitment and Advertising

DEFINITION

• Recruitment includes efforts and materials use to enlist participants into research studies. Examples of recruitment  include advertisements, flyers, telephone scripts, newspaper ads, radio and television announcements, bulletin board tear-offs, Internet postings,  and posters.
• Advertising is a type of recruitment method with the intent to reach prospective participants and to solicit their participation in a study.

Policies/Guidelines

• Only recruitment material approved by the IRB and stamped with an IRB approval stamp can used and distributed for recruitment purposes.
  • The IRB must review and approve all recruitment procedures and materials before use.
  • Retention efforts and materials must also be reviewed and approved prior to use.
  • Any advertisement material must be reviewed and approved by the IRB prior to use.
    • Some sponsors provide advertising materials which can be used for study recruitment.
    • Examples of Advertisement Methods

Direct Advertising: Newspaper, radio, TV, bulletin boards, posters, flyers, etc.

Social Media Advertising: Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

• A recruitment plan should include the following elements:
  • Anticipated Recruitment Projections
  • Efforts for Finding Participants
    • Active Clinical Patients (patients on the daily appointment schedule)
    • Inactive Clinical Patients (patients from a medical record review)
    • Referral Clinical Patients
    • Community Outreach (community centers, churches, hobby or interest organizations, support groups, etc.)
    • Media Outreach
  • Recruitment Materials
• UMMC IRB Guidelines for Recruitment and Retention.

Templates/Forms

• Recruitment plan 101 - PDF
• Recruitment plan template - PDF

Training

• Additional resources:
  • Research Participant Recruitment Application (RPR)

RPR offers researchers a centralized, coordinated resource to connect with interested, potential study participants.

• The Patient Cohort Explorer (PCE)

PCE is an application that allows access to the Research Data Warehouse, which contains data from Epic of de-identified patient information.  This help for estimating recruitment projections. Direct access to this application is available on the UMMC Intranet.