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Recruitment materials at GCU: the flyer, the email and the script, exactly as the board will read them
Recruitment is where consent begins. The first sentence a prospective participant ever reads about your study is not the consent document — it is a flyer on a break-room wall, an email forwarded by an administrator, a post in a closed professional group. Grand Canyon University treats all of those as one document, issues a single template for them, and asks that the template not be changed. What reaches the board is not a description of how you plan to recruit. It is the recruitment itself, word for word, as participants will see it.
The short answer
Build every flyer, email, post and script from GCU's current recruitment template, keeping all required content, matching eligibility and activities to the consent document and application exactly, meeting the reading level with evidence attached, and filing each item as participants will see it.
Why does a board read a flyer as carefully as a consent document?
Because federal practice treats direct advertising to prospective participants as the opening move of the consent and selection process rather than as marketing that precedes it. That is why review bodies expect to see the final copy of printed material and the final version of anything recorded before it is displayed or sent, and why a page that promises something the consent document does not is a problem with consent, not with tone.
There is a second reason, less often named. Under 45 CFR 46.111 a board must satisfy itself that the selection of participants is equitable, judged against the purpose of the research and the setting it runs in. Recruitment is the evidence for that finding. A flyer that reaches a wider group than the sample section describes, or an email routed through a supervisor who can see who replies, changes who ends up in the study and under what pressure. The board can only assess that from the material itself.
What does GCU's recruitment template require?
One template covers the lot — email, letter, advertisement, flyer, script — and GCU's instruction is not to alter it, with every item in it included wherever it is used. The blocks it asks for are these.
- Who is asking. Your role, the professor supervising the work, the college, and your full name. Not a study title floating free of a person.
- Why. The purpose in two or three sentences of lay language — the same plain statement the consent document opens with, not the purpose statement from your manuscript.
- Who can take part. Inclusion criteria as bullets, exactly as they appear in the application and the consent document, with required demographic questions listed among them.
- Who cannot. Exclusion criteria as bullets, again exactly as filed elsewhere. GCU's own note is worth repeating: exclusion is not simply the mirror image of inclusion. Some exclusions are characteristics that would interfere with a study even in someone otherwise eligible.
- What participation involves. Every activity with its estimated time, its mode and its location — an interview on a named platform, a follow-up meeting somewhere real, a questionnaire completed online. Optional demographic questions belong in this list, not in eligibility.
- That it is voluntary — and, where an incentive exists, what it is, when it arrives and how it is delivered, stated once and identically in the consent document.
- The workplace sentence, where it applies. If you are recruiting where you work, GCU supplies wording acknowledging that complete confidentiality cannot be guaranteed because others may recognise or infer participation from your role or name.
- How data will be protected, in a sentence or two of ordinary language, consistent with the data security plan filed with the application.
- A live link, where a survey is involved, and a contact route that a participant can actually use to ask a question or say yes.
What can a recruitment page never say?
GCU is explicit on three prohibitions, and each of them is a translation of an ethical rule into editorial terms. Recruitment must not emphasise payment; the incentive is disclosed, not advertised, because an inducement that dominates the page starts doing the deciding for people who need the money. Recruitment must not lean on words such as free or exciting; those are the vocabulary of promotion, and a study is not a product. And recruitment must not mislead about the purpose of the research — the page has to say plainly that participation in research is what is being sought.
Then there is the unglamorous rule that catches more files than the ethical ones. This material is participant-facing, so GCU expects it to be free of typographical and grammatical errors, and states that documents containing mistakes are sent back for revision. A flyer is a small document; that is precisely why an error in it is visible from across the room.
The reading-level test applies here exactly as it does to consent. GCU's current recruitment template asks for lay language at a ninth-grade level, measured by a Flesch-Kincaid grade score at or below 10.0, with a screenshot of the result submitted alongside the material and labelled so a reviewer knows which document it evidences. The package checklist used on doctoral files words the threshold more tightly still. Where GCU's own documents differ, the version attached to the template you are filing governs, and the current wording sits in GCU's current doctoral handbook or IRB portal.
| Channel | Filed as | What travels with it |
|---|---|---|
| Flyer or printed notice | The finished page, not a description of it | Readability evidence; site permission where it will be posted |
| Email or letter | The text as it will be sent, from the template | Permission from whoever controls the distribution list |
| Social or professional group post | The post text, built from the same template | Screenshot evidence of the moderator's permission; the platform's privacy policy |
| Spoken or telephone script | Every word you will say, not talking points | Site permission where the approach happens on premises |
| Survey invitation | Template text plus the live, clickable link | A link that opens on the approved consent page first |
What are the rules for social media and closed groups?
This is where GCU's guidance is more specific than most candidates expect, and where files quietly lose time. For any social or networking site, recruiting from a group — closed, private or open — requires permission from that group's administrator or moderator, and belonging to the group yourself changes nothing. The single exception is your own page or feed. Everything else is somebody's community, and someone runs it.
Permission is evidenced rather than asserted. GCU asks for a screenshot of the exchange showing the group's name, the administrator's name, your name as the researcher, a message that states the study's purpose, how many people you hope to recruit, the approximate recruiting window and your contact details, together with the administrator's reply. The screenshot is pasted into a document and uploaded as a document rather than as an image file, and GCU warns that missing any of those steps triggers a revision request while the application is being processed.
The platform itself is also part of the file. GCU asks researchers to understand and explain how a site transmits and holds data, to attach the privacy policies of the sites used, and to assume participants have not read them. Online recruitment carries a confidentiality risk that a break-room noticeboard does not, and the honest way to handle it is to describe it — in the material, in the consent document, and in the application, in the same words each time.
Where do surveys and links fit?
If your study runs on an online instrument, the recruitment page carries a live link the reviewer can click, and the same link appears in the application where it is asked for. The sequence behind the link matters as much as the link itself: the first page is the approved GCU consent document, on its own; once agreement is recorded, demographic questions follow if you use them, and only then does the instrument open. A survey that greets a participant with question one has collected data before consent existed, and there is no repairing that afterwards.
What has to match, word for word?
Inclusion, exclusion and activities appear in four places: the application, the consent document, the recruitment material and, where a site is involved, the authorization letter. GCU's templates say in three separate documents that these must be identical, which tells you how often they are not. The usual cause is innocent — a criterion sharpened in one file during a late revision — and the effect is the same as if it were careless.
So recruitment is drafted with the consent document rather than after it, from the proposal as academic quality review approved it. Where a criterion changes, it changes in every document in the same sitting. The rest of the manifest is set out in the exhibits checklist; the page these materials most often disagree with is covered in consent documents at GCU; and the permission behind the channel is in the site authorization letter.
How this desk handles it
We write the recruitment set as one act with the consent document and the application: one purpose statement in plain words, one eligibility list, one activity list, carried into every channel the study will actually use. Each item is produced as it will appear — the flyer as a flyer, the script as the words you will say — with readability measured and evidenced the way GCU asks, permissions and privacy policies gathered for the platforms involved, and the survey sequence checked from the participant's side before anything is filed. Filing, and answering the board afterwards, stay on this desk as well — how it works sets out the whole arrangement.
What to do next
Recruitment is the exhibit candidates most often draft last and fastest, which is why it is the one most likely to disagree with everything else in the file. Send your draft materials and your approved proposal through the free application review, and you will get a written reading of what matches, what does not, which channels need someone's permission first, and what the current template expects. If the honest answer is that they are ready to file, we will tell you that. The FAQ covers what follows.
Sources
- Grand Canyon University, Recruitment template (College of Doctoral Studies, modified January 2026) — research.gcu.edu (Recruitment template)
- Grand Canyon University, Social Media/Networking and Internet Research Guidelines for PIs — research.gcu.edu (Social media guidelines)
- Grand Canyon University, IRB Package Checklist for doctoral files — research.gcu.edu (IRB Package Checklist)
- Grand Canyon University, IRB forms and templates — research.gcu.edu/irb
- Grand Canyon University, Steps to Prepare IRB Application — research.gcu.edu/steps-to-prepare-irb-application
- 45 CFR 46.111 — the approval criteria, including equitable selection — Legal Information Institute (45 CFR 46.111)
- OHRP guidance on trial websites and when posted information becomes part of consent — hhs.gov/ohrp (clinical trial websites guidance)
GCU revises its templates and its portal instructions. Where anything on this page departs from GCU's current doctoral handbook or IRB portal, GCU's own material is what counts. This practice is independent of Grand Canyon University.