This policy provides guidance on the procedures that will support and underpin the use of social media and communicating with children in our athletics club.
The purpose of this policy is:
- To protect all children and young people attending the club and who make use of technology (such as mobile phones, hand held devices and the internet) to interact with the club.
- To provide staff and volunteers with policy and procedure information regarding communicating with children.
Brothers Pearse A.C. operates a number of social media sites for providing information and communicating with the membership in a general way such as the Club Website and Club Facebook Pages. These tools will only ever be used for enabling communication with the membership as a whole.
The following Rules apply to Club Coaches and officials when communicating with juvenile athletes:
- Do use a club group text or email system for communicating with parents/guardians of athletes.
- Do not communicate individually by text or email or via social media sites with individual juvenile athletes.
- Do not engage in communications with underage athletes via personal social network sites.
- Always use official club group text or social media sites to communicate with juvenile athletes.
- Do not place yourself in a compromising position by texting or communicating via social media sites with children. All such communications should be sent via approved club channels to the parents or guardians of the athlete.
- All club Facebook pages must be a group, organization and community or sports page.
- A personal page should not be used by a club to communicate with children.
- All group, organisation and community or sports Facebook pages restrict members to share information in an open space and does not require members to friend each other in order to access information. They simply ‘like’ the page to follow posts.
For further information on setting up your social media page please see page 22-24 in the Code of Ethics & Good Practice for Children's Athletics.