Social Media Policy and Practice Guidance

About this recommendation

The best social media policies in child welfare enable staff to take advantage of its many benefits while protecting the privacy of children, families, and employees.

How to do this

A comprehensive social media policy covers topics like:

• Limiting accounts — Provide official shared work accounts or have staff create  accounts that they only use for work. Don’t allow workers to use their personal accounts for family finding.
• Confidentiality — Don’t share private information through social media messages. Just as you would leave a generic voicemail when trying to identify kin, encourage social media contacts to reach out to you directly for follow-up.
• Respecting family privacy — If a public child welfare account were to “friend” a possible family member, that would publicly reveal that the family member is having an interaction with child welfare. Workers should not update profiles, post public messages, or “friend” other accounts when using official work accounts for family finding.
• Making staffing decisions — Decide if a central team will conduct social media family finding activities, or if all workers will be granted access. There are pros and cons to both approaches.
• Requiring official cause - Using social media should be mandatory when looking for kin and when recruiting more foster families. At the same time, workers should not look up family members purely out of curiosity.
• Handling records management — As a government agency, your social media messages may be subject to things like public records requests. You can use tools to automatically archive all your official social media accounts.
• Unblocking social media sites — Management may have to meet with IT to have certain social media sites unblocked from the network. (Let us know if you need help with this!)

Anticipated costs and benefits

Who's doing this

9 of 54 states and territories have implemented this recommendation.

• Washington DC has a detailed policy guiding employees on how to effectively use social media.
• Oklahoma uses Archive Social to automatically archive all its social media activity in case of a public records request.
• Oklahoma uses Loomly to organize and track its social media posts across various platforms.
• Rhode Island’s family finding team uses “DCYF” in place of worker last names on social media to protect worker privacy.
• Michigan has social media sites listed on their Diligent Search checklist.
• New Mexico encourages workers to create second, separate social media accounts under their name that they use exclusively for work.
• Virginia’s central family-finding social media accounts are called “Virginia Family Finding 1” (and 2, and 3) to protect worker privacy.
• Washington State is updating its policies to allow more workers to use social media.
• Some counties in Ohio and California, but it's not done state-wide at this time.