Seventy-six direct selling executives successfully completed DSA’s Direct Selling Compliance Certification Program (DSCP-CP) on April 28, 2022, bringing the total number of certificate holders to more than 300 since the program was launched in January 2021.
The DSCP-CP program helps industry professionals sharpen their understanding of critical compliance principles. Individuals gain the necessary tools to develop effective compliance programs, including insights from outside counsel, industry experts, and respected peers. The program curriculum brought to executives in conjunction with the law firms Baker & McKenzie and Kelley Drye & Warren focuses on three main areas:
- Claims: Gaining a thorough understanding of what is required to ensure all product, earnings, and lifestyle claims are truthful, accurate, and not misleading. Because direct selling companies are responsible not only for the claims they make but also for the product and earnings claims made by their salesforce members, direct selling companies must invest significant time and resources towards training their members to ensure that they understand what claims they can and cannot make. That training should be mandatory and updated periodically to account for changes in the law or regulatory environment.
- Monitoring: Having a system in place to monitor and audit the claims that are being made by salesforce members about the product benefits and business opportunities to ensure that the claims are truthful, accurate, and properly substantiated and that unsupported claims are quickly removed.
- Enforcement: Developing appropriate enforcement mechanisms and ensuring that those mechanisms are applied fairly and consistently in order to deter future violations. Having a compliance program that looks great on paper but is then ignored might be worse than having no compliance program at all.
Attendees who pass the online evaluation given after the program receive a certification, good for two years, showing that they have successfully completed the training.
Modules for the program are:
- Claims Substantiation and Disclosures
- Income and Lifestyle Claims
- Product Claims
- Monitoring and Removal of Claims from SocialMedia Platforms
- The Role of Compliance in Your Organization
- Conveying the Right Marketing Message
Pricing for the program is $299 for DSA members and $599 for non-DSA members.
DSA offers the program twice a year. The next one will be scheduled for the fall.