Purpose of the Toolbox
The Toolbox is intended to help government
agencies, unions, social service agencies, schools, and nonprofit
organizations educate their colleagues, constituents, clients, and
members about telemarketing fraud and to promote public awareness about
the assistance that they provide in that regard. The Toolbox cannot be
used to promote commercial products or services.
How to Use Toolbox Materials
Components of the Toolbox can be used in multiple formats. For example, the telemarketing fraud tips can be posted on an organization’s Web site, printed and used as handouts, excerpted for use in calendars or fillers in newsletters, etc. NCL encourages creative ideas for using the materials.
Most of the public education materials in the Toolbox are offered in both English and Spanish. These options are presented side-by-side for each of the materials.
Customizing Toolbox Materials
Feel free to customize the Toolbox materials to fit your own educational needs. Most of the materials are provided in both PDF and HTML form, but some are offered in only one form. HTML materials can be copied and pasted into a word-processing program and then altered to fit your needs. Materials that are in PDF form cannot be altered. To view a PDF you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free program downloadable from www.adobe.com.
You can customize the information to fit your needs in many ways. You can add information specific to your area. For example, users can add information about their state’s “Do Not Call” list, list local resources for consumers concerning telemarketing fraud, add the agency’s organization’s name and contact information, or include a case description to illustrate a point.
Text can also be deleted. For instance, a user may wish to shorten a speech or PowerPoint presentation, or substitute specific information about state laws relating to telemarketing for references to federal law.
You can also add the quarterly statistics from NFIC as a resource
for your educational work. Please attribute all NFIC statistics to
the “
Toolbox materials may be “co-branded” with the name of your organization and NCL, or NCL’s name may be removed entirely. When text is changed and NCL’s name will be retained, you are asked to notify NCL in advance for purposes of ensuring the accuracy of the information.
Another way you can customize materials is to enhance it with different fonts, colors, and graphics. You can also translate the materials into additional languages.
All of the public education materials in the Toolbox can be copied onto disks, burned onto CDs, etc.
The Toolbox's No Link Policy
Because use of the toolbox is restricted, you can’t link to the materials from your Web site, but it’s easy to put them directly on your Web site. To make the PDFs available, just copy the document and save it to your hard drive, a disk, or a CD. Your Web master can then upload it to your Web site. For HTML documents, you will need to copy and paste text into a word-processing program and save it as text for your Web person to use to lay out new pages for your site. Talk to your Web site specialists about the best way to handle the process. They may want to copy the HTML code directly into a new Web page.