How to create a core claims document to speed up promotional review

CCDs provide clarity
If you don’t currently use a CCD, your team or agency partners may be making the same mistakes across their promotional materials, leading to extra review time to resolve issues. Your team may also be resolving issues differently, which creates inconsistencies across materials. A CCD solves this problem by making it easy to check how a claim should be worded and what references to use. In other words, a CCD provides clarity, and clarity lessens the likelihood of mistakes, increases consistency, and helps maintain compliance.

CCDs help onboard new team members
The centralized location of CCDs also makes knowledge transfer easier when your team changes. For example, if you’re onboarding a new reviewer or agency partner, you can use a CCD as a resource to provide education around the claims you use, along with rules and reasoning for your decisions.

CCDs make reviews faster
The biggest benefit is that CCDs can significantly reduce review time. When copywriters have a CCD to reference, they don’t have to write new claims copy or dig for references for every promotional piece, which makes preparing for review faster. Also, by creating a CCD, your team members agree to the claims you can make ahead of time, which simplifies and speeds up approval times.

Despite these benefits, CCDs need dedicated time–both to develop a first version and update it over time. Keep this in mind as we walk through the steps on how to create one.

How to create a core claims document

1. Set up a team
Decide who will create and review the first version of a CCD. This may be similar to the review team you’d use for a specific product’s promotional pieces. Also, decide who will be responsible for maintaining the CCD long term. This role is critical to making sure the CCD continues to be your one source of truth.

2. Decide on a format
Decide how you will organize the information. Usually, companies will have one CCD per product. But do you also need to consider region-specific CCDs? For example, will you create one CCD for global use, and separate region-specific CCDs? Or will one document, maybe with countries specified for each claim, suffice? Similarly, how will you specify which audience a claim is approved for?

3. Create your CCD
Gather the claims you plan to use, along with references. You can start this process from scratch, but if you have a product that’s already launched, you can use the claims in an existing promotional piece as your starting point.

In addition to the claim and its references, include any rules on how the claim should be used. You can also consider including notes on how decisions were made around claim usage, which may be useful when you re-review a CCD in the future.

Include wording variations of a claim to support all types of content. For example, you may want to use a shorter or longer-worded claim depending on whether you’re creating an advertisement or a web page.

4. Review and approve your CCD
Have your team review the CCD. Gather feedback, make revisions, and finalize the document. Then let everyone know it’s ready to use. Moving forward, content creators can leverage your CCD to expedite their approval process and get content to market faster. 

5. Set a schedule for ongoing maintenance
Decide how frequently your team should review and update the CCD. Review frequency will vary depending on how long your product has been around. If your product was recently launched, available references are likely still growing and changing, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to refine your CCD. However, if your product is mature, you may already have a set of established references. 

Assign one person to lead the re-review process and schedule. Remember, a CCD is only useful if the team can trust that it’s up to date.

And that’s it—you’ve set your team up for success with your first CCD.