The days of managing website archives with printouts or screenshots are long gone since modern sites contain thousands of complex pages for a single enterprise. However, even with such a large data burden, regulatory compliance still must be maintained through meticulous recordkeeping and website archiving.
Here are six challenges corporate marketing teams might face when ensuring their websites, digital assets, and communications are compliant with federal and state regulations.
Three Regulatory Challenges for Corporate Marketing Teams
1. Truth in Advertising
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) notes that under Truth in Advertising laws, advertisements “must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence,” regardless of where they appear. Should there be an audit, the FTC would request to review ads from a wide variety of media including websites, Facebook, direct mail, and newspapers. Advertisers that violate the rule may be required to pay civil penalties.
2. Accessibility to Those with Disabilities
Your website may need to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act as a public accommodation. Could a visually impaired visitor meaningfully access your site? How about a hearing-impaired visitor? While many sites incorporate accessibility features, it’s easy for a newly added page to inadvertently exclude them, cutting off a segment of the customer base and introducing a compliance issue.
3. Data Privacy Protections
Your organization may be subject to any of a number of laws governing data privacy, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the various state comprehensive privacy laws passed in the US: California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA); the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA); the Colorado Privacy Act (CPA); the Connecticut Act Concerning Personal Data Privacy and Online Monitoring; and the Utah Consumer Privacy Act (UCPA). Other privacy laws in the US are in the process of being passed, so it’s an ever-changing compliance landscape that requires website compliance as well as an audit trail to prove compliance.
Three Website Archiving Challenges for Corporate Marketing Teams
1. Dynamic Content
Screen capture methods, whether they generate PDFs or image files, create static representations of dynamic websites, rendering all of the dynamic elements that make modern websites so user-friendly and nonfunctional. These still images miss out on interactive elements like drop-down menus, toggles, fillable forms, calculators, and other complex tools.
2. Personalized Customer Journeys
Advanced CMSs allow variations in web pages based on an individual user’s cookies or log-in credentials. Traditional archiving methods would only be able to capture the singular static instance, but when websites are highly customizable depending on who is browsing them, a single static archive isn’t good enough for compliance. Instead, each possible customer journey must be archived.
3. Ongoing Site Map Maintenance
Most traditional archiving solutions require the site administrator to provide an up-to-date site map, so the archivist knows which pages to capture. Providing a site map requires keeping track of and listing every single page that should be captured. This requires ongoing site map maintenance every time a page is added. With advanced CMSs, web pages or page versions may be added on a daily basis, making site map upkeep overly burdensome and prone to human error.
Enterprise Archiving Solutions
Proving regulatory compliance requires meticulous record keeping, including records of a company’s website and social media. Even if you follow each regulation carefully, without an immutable archive and corresponding audit trail, there is no way to confirm it to regulating bodies.
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