Partnering With Gallup

Scott Wright, Gallup Licensing and Permissions Expert, was our guest on a recent Called to Coach. In order to partner with Gallup, coaches need to familiarize themselves with the rules regarding the use of Gallup's intellectual property -- including copyrights and trademarks, licensing and permissions, and what constitutes public versus private use of Gallup's property -- as well as what to do when their circumstances are unique. Scott discussed all of these areas on the webcast, and he is available to answer any questions coaches -- and anyone else interested in using Gallup's intellectual property -- may have on this important topic. You can contact him at scott_wright@gallup.com.

Gallup Called to Coach Webcast Series -- Season 9, Episode 21.

We actually want our coaches and others to help us advance our science. So we want you to be able to use it; we just want to ensure that you're doing it the correct way.

Scott Wright, 19:47

If you're just looking to cite some sort of Gallup data or use a chart or something, you can do a lot of that through Copyright Clearance Center.

Scott Wright, 24:14

Content licensing is using our trademarks or our copyrights in the form of some sort of public-facing media.

Scott Wright, 27:35

Jim Collison 0:00

I am Jim Collison, and live from our virtual studios around the world -- although today, here just in Omaha, Nebraska -- this is Gallup's Called to Coach, recorded on April 30, 2021.

Jim Collison 0:22

Called to Coach is a resource for those who want to help others discover and use their strengths. We have Gallup experts and independent strengths coaches share tactics, insights and strategies to help coaches maximize the talent of individuals, teams and organizations around the world. If you're listening live, love to have you join us in our chat room. There's just a link right above me there, and you can sign into YouTube. Or if you're listening after the fact -- and many of you listen to this as a podcast -- and you have questions, you can send us an email: coaching@gallup.com. Scott, I get a lot of emails about this topic via that email address, so it'd be very important today as we talk about that. Don't forget to subscribe there on YouTube. If you're listening right now over in the corner there underneath Gallup, it says "Subscribe." You'll get notified whenever we publish a new video. And if you want to listen to us as a podcast and never miss it that way, you can subscribe on any podcast platform. Scott Wright is my guest today. He's a Gallup Licensing and Permissions Expert. A good friend of mine. We've known each other for a lot of years here at Gallup. Scott, I'm super glad you're in this role and this job now.

Scott Wright 1:19

Thank you.

Jim Collison 1:20

Welcome to Called to Coach!

Scott Wright 1:21

Thank you! Thank you very much, Jim. Glad to be here.

Jim Collison 1:24

Glad to have you. Like I said, you and I have been doing this together for a long time. I didn't, I never imagined we'd be working this closely together in this licensing role. Why don't we do a little Focus on You about you? Who are you? Where'd you come from? You know, those kinds of things?

Scott Wright 1:42

Sure.

Jim Collison 1:42

Including, including your Top 5, by the way. They'll want to know.

Scott Wright 1:45

Yes. So I joined Gallup about 24 years ago, just a little over 24 years ago. My background prior to that, I graduated from the University of Nebraska and went on to go to law school. I moved to Los Angeles, went to law school out there for about 3 years. Moved back to Lincoln at the time here in Nebraska, and started as an attorney with the state of Nebraska. And just decided after doing that for about a year that, you know, being a state government attorney wasn't exactly for me. So my wife, Heather Wright, who some of you are familiar with also; she's been on Called to Coach before and done that. But she's a Senior Learning and Development Consultant here at Gallup. She kind of said, Hey, I think maybe there might be some stuff at Gallup you'd really like to do. And so about 24 years ago, I came on board.

Scott Wright 2:36

Throughout my time at Gallup, I've kind of had 3 sort of major roles that I've worked in during that time. But each one of them, sort of one of my side gigs of working at Gallup was always to help protect and, and ensure the proper use of Gallup's intellectual property. And so it's always been kind of something I've, I've been doing a little bit of, but now it's kind of more of a full-time role for me and getting into that.

Scott Wright 3:03

So I have a little bit of experience with Called to Coach. Jim probably remembers many, many years ago with Curt Liesvield, I was the Adaptability video. And so we did a Called to Coach about Adaptability. And I was on that one. Adaptability, obviously, is is one of my Top 5 strengths, the others being Harmony, Communication, Responsibility and Arranger. And so those are kind of the Top 5 that I lead with. But the current role that I'm in right now is to manage all of the aspects of Gallup's licensing and permissions for people to use our intellectual property in ways outside of Gallup. And so those people who want to take primarily our CliftonStrengths content and put it into their own works, and then be able to use it. We encourage it, but we also have to do it a correct way. And so that's where I come in to help negotiate all those.

Jim Collison 4:07

Yeah, lots of, lots of rules and lots of details around that. That's why it's important that we do this. Sally Peters had been in this role before; I interviewed Sally last year, and we did this and Jessica before that. And so Scott, you're, you're coming in, I think in what's a very important role, and, and a partner of mine because I see this happening. It's, you know, I see the both the freeways running smooth and the horrific accidents -- you know, all at the same time; that's going on in the community. As people really grapple with what, what intellectual property is, how can they use that? What are trademarks? What are copyrights? What does that mean kind of thing? I've seen all those disasters. Let's talk a little bit -- can you kind of provide, just for those listening, an overview, a brief overview of intellectual property?

Scott Wright 4:55

Yeah, absolutely. So, intellectual property is an area which is, is a very complicated In confusing area that is, a lot of times people maybe get wrong, and they don't, they don't understand it completely. But the things that are most important to our coaches and others who want to use Gallup's content, there's two main areas, the first being trademarks. Trademarks, just as a short definition, a trademark is anything -- a word, a symbol, a phrase or any other design that identifies someone or something. So I actually printed off a little visual here. So Gallup, the name "Gallup" is a trademark.

Scott Wright 5:33

But there's actually a couple different Gallup trademarks. The first would be just a normal word, Gallup. And that should, it's a registered trademark, so it should have the circle and the "R" behind it. But then also, we have, you've probably seen our logo, the Gallup logo. It also is a trademark and so it should also have the registered trademark symbol whenever it's used. And so you'll always see, when you see our logo especially, you will always see it used with this, with this trademark in it, notation in it.

Scott Wright 6:04

So those are trademarks, and those are all over your, your everyday life. You're going to be able to see those everywhere, and once you, once you know that little "R" with the circle around it is, is a registered trademark symbol, you start noticing it everywhere. You start seeing it in, in everything you you do and interact with. You drink a soda, and you'll see that the, the can of soda has the registered trademark of the company that, that distributed it. But, so that's, that's kind of trademarks. They're words or phrases that are important to the branding of an organization or something like that.

Jim Collison 6:36

Scott, we have a whole list of those on our website, right. So if you go to our --

Scott Wright 6:40

Absolutely right.

Jim Collison 6:40

If you, if you go search "Gallup permissions," you can see our page; we have a trademark page you can go to. And you can see all of those with their trademarks, correct?

Scott Wright 6:49

The actual best way to find it is to go to any Gallup webpage, scroll all the way to the bottom, and you're going to have a link to what we call Legal. And you click on that link, and you'll come up with a page that will show you sublinks to other pages, and trademarks is one of those. And so you can click on there, and you can see all of our trademarks listed out that we have on that page. So it's very, very simple and easy to find. So you are correct.

Jim Collison 7:13

Can they just copy that, copy and -- if they wanted to use the trademark, because it's not easy. Like I don't know where to find, like, that symbol on my keyboard. If I copy that and paste it, that's OK to, if I'm going to use it in that way to make sure that it comes --

Scott Wright 7:26

It is. It is. Now that assumes that you have the permission to use it, which we're going to talk about in a little while. So --

Jim Collison 7:32

Yeah, let's not get the cart before the horse. So that's trademarks.

Scott Wright 7:36

Correct. Now, copyrights is a little bit different. Now, a copyright is based on a work of authorship. So -- now, when I say something's a work of authorship, that doesn't just mean a literary authorship. You could be the author of a photograph; you could be the author of a piece of artwork, a sculpture. When, when copyright law talks about authorship, they're talking about whoever created that; whoever is the first person to create that, that work. Music is another big one. Copyright law is huge with music. All the songs that you hear on the radio or on your Pandora or, or Sirius XM, whatever listening service you have, those are all works of authorship. And there are copyrights that attach to all those.

Scott Wright 8:25

So for Gallup, if we want to put it into our terms, we have trademarks on let's say the CliftonStrengths brand name. We have trademark on the Gallup name. We have trademarks on all of the 34 theme names. But we also have a copyright on all of the short and long descriptions for each of the themes. We also have copyrights on all of our materials that we put into our coaching courses and different courses that you can take from Gallup; there's copyrights that Gallup owns on all of those. So it's a little bit hard. Sometimes people get trademarks and copyrights a little confused. But if you could just kind of think, a trademark is more a word or a phrase that is, has something maybe to do with branding, where a copyright is the actual work itself of what you have. Then it kind of makes it a little clearer that way.

Jim Collison 9:15

Scott, how can we -- Justin asks this question in the chat. How can we take a word like "Communication" and trademark it? It's a, like it's a word everybody uses.

Scott Wright 9:23

Exactly.

Jim Collison 9:24

How do you do that?

Scott Wright 9:25

So this gets really in the weeds, and I'm not going to dive way down deep in there. But we've copyrighted -- or excuse me, we've trademarked (see, sometimes even I get confused!), we've trademarked that term for the use in certain areas of work or, or certain areas of business maybe is a better way to say it. So for instance, in this particular world of consulting and, and, you know, those types of things, the word "Communication," as it applies to the theme of Communication within CliftonStrengths, is trademarked by us. So if you're talking about CliftonStrengths, it's our trademark, or Communication within CliftonStrengths, it's our trademark. We can't stop someone from, we can't stop another company who's talking about maybe some other type of communication, you know, in some other realm of using the word

Jim Collison 10:24

Telecommunications.

Scott Wright 10:25

Telecommunications -- we can't stop someone from using that word. It only applies to our specific use and within our, the world of what we're talking about and what we're doing.

Jim Collison 10:37

Yeah, no, and we won't spend too much time on it; that is a whole, that's a whole other world. We could go a whole hour just on thinking about that. But I think if we, it's kind of, and Justin says it's, it's kind of context-sensitive? In other words, what was the intent? What were you trying to do with that? And so, Scott, so as we think about, you know, folks finding works that are copyrighted, right, we, things, we've produced -- those short, long descriptions type of things. If I just copy and paste that but include the copyright information to the internet, is that OK? I mean, can I -- because I'm including the copyright information, right? So tell us a little bit about how that works.

Scott Wright 11:16

Yep. So, so I'll start by talking a little bit about public domain. Because I do get this question a lot when people talk to me about, "Well, I found it on your internet, on your webpage. And so that's on the internet, which is public, so I can use this freely." Well, I have a little analogy that I sometimes use with people and, and I think it's fairly simple to understand. But we have all gone shopping before. We've, we've driven our car down to a store or a shopping mall, maybe the grocery store, whatever. We've parked our car in a public street or a public parking lot. We've gone into the store; we've bought our stuff. We go back out, get in our car and drive away. Well, just because we park our car, in that public street or in that public parking lot does not mean that the public has access to our car and can take it and drive it away for their own use. It's still our car. It's, you know, when I when I go to a store and park, it's still my car. I make sure I lock my car. I take the key with me so that it's, you know, not open and easy to steal.

Scott Wright 12:16

But even if I had left it unlocked, even if I had led, left the keys in it and the car running, it's still my car. And if someone were to take it, they would be stealing my car. The fact that we have parked it somewhere that's open to the public doesn't mean that my car is now open to the public. It's the same thing with intellectual property. Just because something is on the internet, a parking lot for that content, doesn't mean that that content is now open to anyone in the world to use whenever they feel like it.

Scott Wright 12:49

One of the things that a lot of people -- and I'm not trying to make light of anyone who, or make anyone feel bad, but -- a lot of people will go out to Google; they want a picture for something. So they go out to Google and they Google, you know, whatever the topic is that they want a picture of. And then they go oh, there's a perfect picture that I want to put into my, my PowerPoint presentation or whatever, or my video that I'm creating. So they copy it, paste it into their video or their PowerPoint, and they use it. Well, that picture has a copyright on it. And whoever owns that copyright is probably not going to be too happy that you're using it without somehow giving them payment for using their content. S

Scott Wright 13:33

o again, it's one of those things that it's, just because it appears in somewhere that is open to the public doesn't mean that our property rights in that cease to exist once it appears there. So all of the content, all of the trademarks, everything that we have, even though you can find them on the internet, are still private; they are still ours. They are owned by us; it is our property. And we have gone to great lengths to develop and design and make sure that the science is correct and everything. So we do take a very, you know, high-level approach to protecting it and making sure that it's used the correct way.

Jim Collison 14:13

Scott, when we think about -- this is a question from, from Richard in chat. When we think about our kits and the materials, how do we know the difference for Certified Coaches that are allowed to do with the materials that are included in there? How do they know what they can and can't use publicly?

Scott Wright 14:32

So there are -- and it's been a while since I've looked at the digital kits, for instance from the Gallup Global Strengths Coach course -- but the digital kits, I believe, last time I saw it, kind of clearly delineate which pieces of content in there we allow and, and actually expect you to reprint for yourself and use over and over and over again. And so if it's one of those pieces of content, by all means, copy it, print it, do all of that that you want to.

Scott Wright 15:05

Now, as I say that, and we can kind of get into this a little bit later on too, it depends on how you're going to use it. Now, if you're going to take that piece of content and go out on the open market and try and sell it, that's gonna be a problem. If you're using it in your one-on-one coaching, and if you're using it in your coaching business -- whether it's with a team or, you know, an individual, if you're using it for the purpose of coaching someone, even though you're getting paid as the coach, that's OK, because that's what we intend you to do with it. If you want to take it and then try and sell it on the, on the internet or do something like that, that's where we get a little bit, because now you're in competition with us and selling one of our products.

Jim Collison 15:47

Well, it's a term I think it's misunderstood that we use is called "for private use." And it's a misunderstood term. In other words, it's used for your private coaching practice. It'd be like if I had a physical piece of paper, and I was giving it to someone else. Well, the difference is, is maybe taking -- we'll use like the Individual Development Plan form, it's PDF, it's available for private use. You can email that, send that to someone, post it in a secure area where they can get access to it. What you can't do is post that publicly on your website to make it available for all the world, regardless, to get. That is now public use, not private use.

Jim Collison 16:27

We, we went through this a little bit when we kind of began to lock down a little bit of our statistics to the Certified Coaches. And we said, We make these available to you for your private use; we did not want necessarily you posting them publicly, right, in those forms. So there was a little bit of confusion between that -- this idea when we say "for private use," so those PDFs out of the kit (and really, anything -- there's a whole list of downloadable resources inside the kits that are available there).

Jim Collison 16:56

Richard's second kind of question was that, Is there any difference on the usage of those for non-Certified versus Certified Coaches? And non-Certified Coaches can buy our kits and use them. We make that available. Same rules apply used "for private use" in their, in their coaching. Richard knows this pretty well because he is, and we'll talk about this later, he's a licensed provider of some of those things that he makes available to his, to the folks that are his customers. And so we'll spend some time. Anything else on that that you want to you want to cover, Scott?

Scott Wright 17:29

No, I mean, just to follow up, I always like analogies, and I like to draw things out of common life that help explain something. So to your point, what you just explained, imagine, take your favorite song from a, you know, a current artist or something, your favorite song. You downloaded that from iTunes or from some other music service, Spotify, whatever. It's for your own listening and for your own enjoyment. You can imagine that the artist who recorded that song is going to be pretty upset if you go out and start posting that song everywhere on the internet, or start in, you know, even worse, trying to sell it to people all over the world.

Scott Wright 18:06

So there's, there's actually a couple of organizations, ASCAP and BMI, who actually handle the music rights for all music, you know, around the world. And they make a very good living, because there are organizations, when you walk into a building, and you hear music playing in a building, most oftentimes, that organization is paying for the rights to play that music for the public. And so that's kind of one of those things that businesses do. It's very expensive to do. But in order to be able to play music to the public, you have to pay for those rights.

Jim Collison 18:39

Broadcast, a broadcast license. If you have ever done anything in the last couple of years on YouTube, and you've had music playing in the background, I've actually had a television on that had the NFL, an NFL -- no sound, just the, the game was on, the, the physical representation of that, YouTube will pull those down. So I think, Scott, this is an area I think a lot of people have gotten more savvy on because, you know, the Napster problem from 15 years ago -- was that 15 or 20 years ago?

Scott Wright 19:08

It was even longer than that, Jim. We're aging ourselves!

Jim Collison 19:11

Yikes. But that really led to people, I think, really kind of understanding what I can and can't use. And yeah, and in the case of music, you can't play that publicly, much like some of our documents are not intended to be posted on your site publicly. Let's talk a little bit about Gallup's licensing philosophy. I think that'll help kind of explain some things as well.

Scott Wright 19:32

So generally speaking, the thing that we always want people to understand is we're not trying to be the, you know, the horrible big bully on the street that says, "Nobody can use our stuff, you know, without paying us. We want -- " you know, that's not what we're about. We actually want our coaches and others to help us advance our science. So we want you to be able to use it; we just want to ensure that you're doing it the correct way. And it's, it's one of those things -- we always have to build and retain the trust in the science, the, the science of CliftonStrengths. If we start saying, "Oh, anybody can use this any way they want, however they want," all of a sudden the science is going to get more and more diminished, because people will be using it in an inappropriate way. And it just dilutes the whole thing. So we're always looking out for helping to keep the science top-of-mind, but allowing people to use it in ways that help advance that science.

Jim Collison 20:34

OK. Yeah. And, and one of the things as we think about why it's important to us, Scott, to protect that, that property, because if we don't, and someone infringes on it, to take it, to take it, we won't have, we won't have any ground to stand on. Right? That's really at the end of the day. And so we have to do that. I think, I've gotten some feedback early on, like, Oh, you know, why are you guys so mean? or Why are you being so picky about it? Well, for you Certified Coaches who've made a significant investment in the brand name, you want us to protect that. You want us to be out there doing that. And so that's not a, we're not coming after you for it. But we, if you're doing it, we have to enforce that.

Scott Wright 21:17

That's right.

Jim Collison 21:17

And we've got to say it. So I think a good -- anything else you want to add to the philosophy part?

Scott Wright 21:21

No, I think that's it. I mean, it's just that we do want to be here to help you. We're not here to throw up roadblocks. But we do occasionally have to ensure that you're doing it correctly, which means that we may have to sign a licensing or permissions agreement with you. And we may, in some, some instances, we may need to charge you for for that use, especially if it's a use that you are going to be financially compensated for. There's a portion of that that that we do deserve to get, because part of what you're being paid for is the content that we've allowed you to use. So, and I'll talk about that here in a little while, too. But that's, that's mainly it; we just want to ensure that people are doing it correctly.

Jim Collison 22:06

OK, awesome. And I will say, folks, you're throwing questions in the chat. Some of this we're going to handle as we move along. So don't panic. We'll get to it here in just a second. "Don't miss my question!" Let's talk about the types of licensing and permissions that are available to individuals and organizations.

Scott Wright 22:25

There you are.

Jim Collison 22:26

OK.

Scott Wright 22:27

You're back now.

Jim Collison 22:27

We're back. All right, let's talk about the 3 kinds of licensing and permissions that are available to individuals and organizations.

Scott Wright 22:35

So the very first one, which is a fairly simplistic one, is permissions. And that is where someone wants to use or cite something of Gallup's. The area where this comes in most is, is when someone is, for instance, writing a textbook for a college course or something like that. And they want to include a Gallup data point or maybe a chart from one of our Gallup poll articles or, you know, anything like that. There's, you know, generally things where it would kind of require a citation, where you have to cite, Oh, this is the source for my information.

Scott Wright 23:13

So generally speaking, for those types of permissions, we have an alliance that we have with the Copyright Clearance Center -- CCC for short -- Copyright Clearance Center. You can find the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com. It's a very simple, easy website to remind, remember: copyright.com. And so we have put some of our content -- not, not all of it, but some of our content -- out on copyright.com, where you can just go online, and with a few clicks of telling what type of use you're going to use, is it academic? Or, you know, is it for profit? You know, something like that -- you can put all this information in. There's questions they'll ask you. And at the end, then it pops up and it says, OK, you have permission to use this. In some cases, your, your permission to use it will be free. In some cases, there will be a fee for it. Some cases, the fee will be very small. In some cases, the fee might be a little larger.

Scott Wright 24:13

But Copyright Clearance Center, if you're just looking to cite some sort of Gallup data or use a chart or something, you can do a lot of that through Copyright Clearance Center. And then there's some approvals where, if Copyright Clearance Center just doesn't feel like they can make that call, I get an email, and I log into our account and I see your request, and then I can choose to approve or deny it through there, and set pricing on it and everything like that.

Scott Wright 24:39

So the Copyright Clearance Center is a good sort of starting point for using citations. I will say, Copyright Clearance Center, we do not have any of our CliftonStrengths content out there, so nothing related to CliftonStrengths is available through the Copyright Clearance Center. It more has to do with Gallup's polling work that is out there. Also some minor content from some of our books that we've written, some of our publications -- not all our publications, but some of them -- you can pull some small amounts of text out of those and use those, all again, through the Copyright Clearance Center. You're actually still signing a permissions agreement and a licensing agreement; you're just doing it through Copyright Clearance Center instead of through me or through Gallup.

Jim Collison 25:20

So Scott, if someone wanted to quote one of our strengths stats of some kind, what, give, what should they think through? How should they start thinking about this in terms of contact us, not contact us? What do they need to do? What, what kind of recommendation would you give?

Scott Wright 25:38

I would say, probably start with the Copyright Clearance Center. Again, you know, we don't have -- when I say we don't have the CliftonStrengths content out there, I'm talking the theme names; I'm talking the descriptions; I'm talking the course material. You know, those things are not included in the Copyright Clearance Center. And so it's more like if you were reading a Gallup poll article or, or something -- maybe, you know, wellbeing is a big one that's coming up here soon. And you're gonna see a lot of data that Gallup is releasing regarding wellbeing. If it's a, if it's a data point or something like that -- it could even be a data point about CliftonStrengths -- that's probably your starting point is to go to Copyright Clearance Center.

Scott Wright 26:18

If it's anything else having to do with the actual content of CliftonStrengths, that's where you probably need to go to the next 2 spots where we're at, in our, in our sort of 3 types of licensing and permissions. So the second type is product licensing. And that is where we have, we have many product licensees, and some of them, I'm guessing you're on the phone, or on the webcast here watching too. But these are individuals who have, as part of their business, they are doing things such as coffee mugs with your Top 5 on them, maybe T-shirts printed with your Top 5, or something like that. So it's a product that, our content is being put on a product, and that product is being resold.

Scott Wright 27:06

We have some who make jewelry. We have, we have a somebody who makes socks with your Top 5 themes on, on the pair of socks. So there's, there's things like that, but it's product-based. So you're buying a product that has our content in it. So we have some licensing with with those individuals.

Scott Wright 27:23

Then the third type is content licensing. And this is probably the biggest area and the one that our listeners here today are probably most concerned about or thinking about. Content licensing is using our trademarks or our copyrights in the form of some sort of public-facing media. So whether it's on your social media, on a website, maybe you're producing a video, maybe you're writing a book, and you want to put some of our information in a book. Maybe you're interested in developing a platform of some type. I, Richard's on with us and, you know, he has, he has a product that he does that, that is, is in this area. So this content licensing.

Scott Wright 28:08

And so most of the time, like we've already talked about, the content that, that we've provided to you in the form of those kits, digital or physical kits, whichever one you work from, that content, like we've talked about, is for that personal, private use; that one-on-one use or that team use where you're doing it as part of your business, and you're helping an individual or a team that you are directly coaching with. Those documents are not meant to be posted to the internet or to be put on your social media or something like that. And so that's where we will, in certain instances, if, if it's the correct thing for us to approve, we will allow that. But we have to have a licensing or a permissions agreement to do so.

Scott Wright 28:56

And so that's where this content licensing generally is a conversation you're going to have with me or with someone else connected to our, you know, our group for licensing and permissions. And so a good rule of thumb, if it's public-facing and/or you're going to charge directly for the thing, you probably want to call us and talk to us and kick it off on the right foot with us, as opposed to me having to contact you later on and saying, "Hey, that thing you're doing right now, we need you to stop doing it until we can, you know, do a review and get this squared away."

Jim Collison 29:35

Yeah, and giving it away for free is public-facing. That's what that means. I think I've heard some folks say, "But I'm not charging for it." Well, that's still, it's, you're still, it's publicly available.

Scott Wright 29:47

A case in point -- and this hasn't happened for a long time, but, but -- many years ago, we had someone write a book, and they put our 34 theme names plus our short and long descriptions in the book. They wrote the book, published the book, and they said, "I'm going to not sell this book. I'm going to give it away free as part of my coaching that I do with people." So obviously, we can all tell how this worked. The price of the coaching had the book price built into it. But they were, so they were charging for their coaching, which included the book. We still deserve a proportion of that payment to us. And in that case, we followed our, sort of our general format, which is a license fee up front, and then a percentage of book sales. And somebody says, "Well, I didn't sell any books; I gave them all away for free." And it's like, OK, yes. And if you look at our licensing agreement, those who have had book licensing agreements, which is what -- there, there are many of them -- we do say in there, it's, whether you give it away, donate it, whether you sell it, it's whatever is the appropriate retail value for a book of that type, you're going to owe us a percentage of that to use our content.

Jim Collison 30:59

It's getting published in that sense. Let me, and let me clarify, there was a question in there about we provide a PowerPoint in the kits that's available for -- yeah, hold on, let me back up a little bit -- "Start With Talent; Finish With Strength" (for some reason I was getting that backwards in my head, been a long week). And we provide that PowerPoint for you to use, again, in the sense of in your private use. So for you to use that, we actually allow you to modify it; that's one of the few things you can modify. We don't ask you, we don't want you to modify the forms that we have out there and those things, but that PowerPoint, we allow you to modify. And, but that also contains like, you could do that in a public setting where you're talking to people, that's what its intended use. Or if you were wanting to show it as part of a Zoom session, recorded or not, if you're doing that, if you record it, we don't want you posting that to YouTube, we don't want those public presentations becoming YouTube videos, right. That now is public.

Jim Collison 32:00

So if you keep that in there, in the private setting, that's kind of what it's intended for. I'm also getting some questions about individual licensing fees. And that's a whole long, like, it's very specific to what you're trying to do, Scott. So for individuals who are hearing this, and they're thinking, "Ooh, I've got some ideas!" what's the best way for them to go about kind of engaging with us in this conversation?

Scott Wright 32:22

Probably reach out and explain, you know, send, send me an email, explain the use that you're contemplating. It is very unique situations; every single one is is a little bit different. There's broad categories that I'll probably put each request into, but to -- it's hard to say you know, black-and-white of, "OK, this request is going to cost this much; this request is going to cost this much," because there's such variability.

Scott Wright 32:56

We've had people write books that contain only our theme names; no theme descriptions, just our theme names. OK, that's going to be one type of licensing discussion with a certain price, probably lower, a lower price attached to that one. We've had someone, we've had many people who want to write entire books where the whole book is is about CliftonStrengths. Well that's going to probably be a little higher-value one that you're going to need to pay a little bit more for. So it is very unique; it's, it's, it's driven by this, the situation. And so reaching out, talking, you know, to me, I can, I can help, you know, kind of navigate us through that and then to an offer of, if you would like to use this, we'd be more than happy to, but here's what the, you know, the sort of the agreement's going to be, if you want to use that.

Jim Collison 33:47

And what's the best way, like just contact via email? What's the --

Scott Wright 33:51

Yeah, I think email's the best: scott_wright@gallup.com. s-c-o-t-t_w-r-i-g-h-t @gallup.com. I'll, I'll endeavor to answer you quickly. You know, I try to get back to everybody within 24 hours. But as email gets more and more use, sometimes it slides a little, but --

Jim Collison 34:13

You're gonna get a ton of email this weekend!

Scott Wright 34:16

Yes, I understand. I understand. But --

Jim Collison 34:18

This weekend and when we publish this. So just be ready. Yeah. Scott, a little pop quiz for you. Is social media public or private, when it comes to -- when we think about these standards, what would you consider social media to be, public or private?

Scott Wright 34:34

I would consider social media to be public. And that's because pretty much anybody can search out your theme. Now, there are ways within social media to make your account private and some of those things, but generally speaking, social media accounts, if I were to go in and search on a social media platform for a certain word, like, you know, "Gallup" or "CliftonStrengths" or maybe one of the theme names, I could find it on different private accounts or different accounts. It will pop up and show me those results. So I would consider social media to be a public-facing media.

Jim Collison 35:16

If I'm, if I'm having a discussion with someone, and I use the word "Communication" in that, referring to, you know, in the context of our work, is that is that a problem?

Scott Wright 35:28

If it's, you know, again, that one-on-one conversation that, that you're doing privately between someone else, that's probably not a, not not an issue for, for us. It's, it's really that when you're sort of broadcasting it out, I think that that whole idea of whether anyone else can see that conversation is sort of the key determining factor. If it's, if it's truly a private conversation you're having, we're not going to have a problem with that.

Jim Collison 35:58

Yeah. And Lisa makes a good point. And this, like it's super gray in this space. When we think about Instagram, and I take a, I make a picture and I use the word "Communication" in the picture. And now I've just published that on Instagram and using the trademark symbol that's on it. Is that OK?

Scott Wright 36:18

It's such a gray area that --

Jim Collison 36:20

It really is.

Scott Wright 36:21

And it can get out of hand very quickly. And, and especially because we can't police every single post that someone puts up. You know, there's recently, 25 million people have learned their, their CliftonStrengths. And so we can't follow every single account and all of that. I just think is, just always remember, is this something that you're putting out there to publicly share for purposes that, you know, are your own, not publicly sharing for purposes of advancing the science and the belief? You probably want to talk to us first. But, again, social media presents a whole big gray area. We've had individuals in the past recently who have taken extreme liberties with what they are posting to social media. And so those have led to some conversations that we've got to talk to them. You know, a hashtag or something like that, if, if it's being used, it, it's hard for us to keep that from happening. But just don't overdo it.

Jim Collison 37:44

Yeah, and this all really goes back to this whole idea of defending the intellectual property. And as Certified Coaches, when you took the course, Antonio was asking earlier about, is there a "cheat sheet"? And no, there's never a "cheat sheet" with legal stuff. It's hard!

Scott Wright 38:01

Attorneys like us would never, you wouldn't don't need us anymore if there were cheat sheets!

Jim Collison 38:05

It's intentionally hard. It's intentionally vague. Like, this is how the system works. We do have, like I said before, if you search "Gallup permissions," we have a whole Legal page and a Permissions page. There, there's a Terms of Service, there's a Trademarks page, there is spelled out for you what you can and can't do.

Scott Wright 38:22

Correct. And there is, I will say just -- sorry to interrupt there, Jim -- it's very important at the time that you, if you, if you went through coaching and got certified, you have a Coaches Certification Agreement that you signed. You also, if you bought a kit, if you took CliftonStrengths, if you any way, shape or form interacted with Gallup and purchased anything from us, you're actually, through that purchase, like you are on any other website, or anything, you're agreeing to Terms of Use. And those are those little check boxes where it says, "Click here" that you agree to our Terms of Use. But nobody ever reads the Terms of Use; they just click on it because they want to get to the payment stage or whatever. You did agree to some Terms of Use.

Scott Wright 39:07

Now I will say our Terms of Use are written very, they're not intending to, to hide anything or anything like that. We're very up front about our Terms of Use. There are some very specific things in those Terms of Use, though, that do talk about what you can and can't do with our content. And so I encourage people to go out and read those; I don't want to go through a whole litany right here of, you know, reading legalese or anything like that. It's written very well so that you can all understand it. You don't have to be an attorney to understand it, but it does tell you how to do those things.

Scott Wright 39:41

Now, it also shows you -- and this is one big one -- when people do use, when -- there's people who want to create maybe some of their own content that they use in coaching situations. That's perfectly fine. And you can use our themes and our, you know, any of the other documents or anything like that that you're allowed to use in those coaching conversations. But if you're adding anything to it, or if you're changing it somehow and putting your own sort of thoughts or beliefs in there, there's a section of the Terms of Use and your Coaches Agreement that says you've got to put a little disclaimer on there and say, OK, these are the trademarks of Gallup. That's No. 1. And that the non-Gallup information that you're presenting -- and I'm paraphrasing this a little bit, but the non-Gallup information that you're receiving as a participant in this coaching -- are the views of me, whoever the coach is, not of Gallup.

Scott Wright 40:40

And so it's a little short blurb. Many of our coaches are very familiar with it, because they do it all the time. And they put that little disclaimer on there. But there are a couple of things there that you want to probably go in and look at those Terms of Use, and, specifically for CliftonStrengths, and your, your Coaches Agreement, just to make sure that you're kind of following the letter of the law, so to speak, as it comes to those agreements.

Jim Collison 41:05

There had been a comment, and this is what I, in the 8 years, 9 years I've been doing this, I would encourage you, anything we share, you can, you can reshare. That's the intent of -- we provide tons of materials that are out there, as far as graphics and logos and images from a, from a strengths standpoint. We put those on LinkedIn and Instagram. We ask you to share those in whole, in other words, share the link to them, share that, go back to it. Don't re-, don't download it and then reupload it as your own image. This is really where it gets, where a lot of folks get in trouble, especially in social media; reshare that, give credit back to it. That's kind of the easiest way to kind of stay in compliance with that.

Jim Collison 41:48

As far as, Scott, there's a question about individual, individual websites, and there is no way we're going to put a blanket statement out today that says what you can and can't do, because there's a million different ways to do this. So what I'd encourage individuals to do, if you think like this would be a good review for you anyways, go back and review the terms that we have available, go look, and then take a hard look at your website and say, OK, are there any areas in here that are questionable, based on the terms? And, and if there are, reach out to us for clarification on that. And, and, you know, nobody's gonna -- yeah, go ahead.

Scott Wright 42:25

As attorney, when I was in law school, you're taught to make strong arguments but also to, to make that strong argument, you've got to understand the arguments your opponent is going to make. And so -- not that this is an adversarial relationship. But be, be, be honest with yourself. When you read through those terms, you can sense what we're trying to protect against, and be honest with yourself as you look at your own website to say, Am I really kind of going against that? Or am, you know, would Gallup think I'm going against that? Or would they, you know, and, and if there's some question in your mind, reach out and talk, and we can, we can we can look at it and see.

Jim Collison 43:02

Any different for academic use? Jennifer's asking, are there some exceptions there, or is it the same?

Scott Wright 43:08

There's not really exceptions to what we're saying for academic use. However, for academic use, we do have a little bit different approach as far as the licensing and permissions and any sort of payment that might be involved. That, you know, we do take a little bit different view of academic world, than, than we do, you know, business, for-profit-type uses. You still, within an academic world, need to comply with the trademark and the copyright rules and all those things. But there's, there is a little bit, a different point of view that we do take for those. We do encourage, you know, for instance, the use of Gallup, you know, stuff in, especially from like the Gallup poll, in textbooks and, you know, things like that. We want to encourage that use. And so that's, that's one area that, in the academic world, we're a little more open to things like that.

Jim Collison 44:08

OK. And I think the rule is always if you, if it's in question, contact us.

Scott Wright 44:13

If in doubt, check it out.

Jim Collison 44:14

I'm sorry about that, Scott, but your life will get crazy. It'll settle down.

Scott Wright 44:18

It will.

Jim Collison 44:18

We have one more group of kind of licensees that we work with who deliver some of our training. Can you talk about that?

Scott Wright 44:25

And this is this is a group that has, has been around for 2 or 3, 4 years already, but it's starting to grow a little bit. And so I just wanted to make people aware of it, in case they see it out in the world. So this group, we basically call them official licensees, and these licensees are people who are outside of the United States, in basically countries and territories where Gallup does not have a presence for marketing and, and for delivery of services. And -- so all three of these things -- and in a language that Gallup is not able to do a lot in.

Scott Wright 45:04

And so, one, in one particular example, we have about 6 or 7 what we call the, you know, official licensees who can sell and deliver our Gallup Global Strengths Coach course. They are not Gallup companies; they are separate companies. But we have trained them. And we have put together a business plan with them where they pay a licensing fee to us. And then we have a percentage agreement on each seat that they sell in a course that they teach. And so they are allowed to do that. Some people have reached out to us and said, Hey, this person in some foreign, non-, non-American country is going and selling Gallup Global Strengths Coach courses. Yes, they're allowed to because we have a partnership with them or, you know, have an agreement with them. So that is one area; you'll probably start seeing a few more of these. But again, it's, it's outside the U.S. It's where we don't have a large presence, and it's in a language that we don't have a large presence in.

Jim Collison 46:08

Yeah, and I work with a few of those, with those, with those organizations, Ynner being one of them, and do a podcast with them. And so they are very valuable to us and provide a great service in markets where we're not currently in. Anything else you'd add to that, Scott?

Scott Wright 46:26

No, I mean, that is a, it is a business that, that we are continuing to grow. And so I would, you know, we have a page out on our gallup.com, actually, that talks about licensed partners. And so if you are, have a knowledge of any company that is looking for something like that, they can go to that webpage, and they can actually read a lot about our licensed partners from that page. And then they can also, there's a contact form on there where if you're interested, you can send in a request and someone will get back and talk to you about it.

Jim Collison 47:00

Going back to the trademark and the use of those, and you mentioned the disclaimer; anytime you're using those, there should be a disclaimer saying that these trademarks. Where's the example of that? Where would I find that?

Scott Wright 47:13

There's, there's an example in the Site Terms of Use. So, or in, sorry, in the Product Terms of Use. And so when you go out to gallup.com, scroll all the way to the bottom, hit that Legal link that's at the very bottom of the page. That'll open up, and there will be, I believe it's the second panel in the top row, I can't remember for sure. But there's a Terms of Use, Product Terms of Use. And you can open that up. And there's, the, the very first one is actually the CliftonStrengths. There's one for CliftonStrengths. There's one for our employee engagement Q12 world and there's one for Courses. But in the very top one, for CliftonStrengths, if you just scroll through there, you will find that the sort of trademark statement is in there. And so you can, you can just copy and paste that in. If, if you are in a spot where you are allowed to use them, we want that in there as well.

Jim Collison 48:07

Yeah, and pretty good discipline; you should do that with anybody, by the way. I'll tell on myself just for a second. Back in the day, when I first started blogging, about 15 years ago, I blogged around technology. And I actually lifted, I copy and pasted some content from an Oracle site. And I thought I was being helpful to Oracle. Like, I was like, this, this was important information. It needed to be put out there. People were struggling with it. So I I had great intentions. I was just wanting to share it with my followers to kind of help them. And it took 30 minutes, Scott. Now this was 15 years ago! It took 30 minutes before I got a phone call from, from -- and the, the guy I got a phone call from, I knew. But he was like, "Ah, Jim, yeah, you can't copy and paste our content and just put it on your own website." And I was mortified. I was like, "Oh, yeah." It was, you know, it was a rookie mistake, early days of blogging, those kinds of things. And I immediately took it down and then put a link back to where it was found. Right?

Scott Wright 49:07

They weren't happy with that.

Jim Collison 49:08

Yeah, one of the things, too, like, when we think about theme definitions, when we think about some of those things, they're really, those are really all available publicly. And so even though they're public on our site, send them, bring them back to our site for those. Like, let them, don't, I know it's more convenient for you to copy and paste those and bring them in, but don't, but don't do that. Bring them back. Access now I can do a ton of things around that to bring them in, bring them back to their Strengths Dashboard. Bring them in where all those resources are available. We encourage you to do that as well. Scott, what about if they're in, in like private Facebook groups and some of those kinds of things, LinkedIn, where it isn't necessarily public. Maybe it's 25 people in a group. These things aren't shown -- is that public? Is that private? I know it depends, but -- how do we feel about that?

Scott Wright 49:57

It depends, and that's some of the gray area because I, you know, you could say, Well, I have, I have, you know, 2,000 people on my LinkedIn that I'm friends with. So I'm just gonna post it there. Well, that's, what's the, what's the qualifications to become a friend in LinkedIn or, or Instagram or Facebook? If it's kind of one of those where it's, you know, not a very high bar to get over to befriend you on, on those social media sites, it's gonna probably be a little closer to that area where you need some, some licensing or permissions work for it.

Scott Wright 50:07

So it is, I hate to, I hate to leave everybody with such, you know, non-bright-line answers here, because this is such a gray area. I mean, nobody will probably ever do this except a goofball like me. But if you go out and actually read the copyright law, the copyright law is written in such a way that they use terms like "may." So something may be a violation, could be a, you know, they use very non-bright-line terms, because of the fact it's all completely 100% based on situation. And so, in one way, which to a, to a person who doesn't know copyright law or anything, they could look the same. But there are some important distinctions between those two that make the two different scenarios work out, that one has one answer, and the other has another answer. So it's, it's a very gray area. It's, so it's hard to provide specific, strict answers.

Jim Collison 51:48

Yeah, no, this is, it's super frustrating.

Scott Wright 51:50

I had a, I had a professor -- I'll tell just one real quick story -- I had a professor in law school, and this one always sticks out to me. His, he had, he had a lot of really small taglines that he would always throw out. And they were really good taglines, Professor Bazyler. And he used to say, you know, people would question, we, in law school, it's the Socratic method, so you read a case and then you talk about that case and argue different sides of that case to, to learn the law. And Professor Bazyler would always say, "If you take the facts, and I take the law, and I'm gonna argue the law, and you're gonna argue the facts, you will always win, because you can change the facts; I can't change the law. And so every little tweak to the facts could make something legal or illegal. And so then, you know, or, you know, you know, someone's responsibility level kicks in at a certain point, but it doesn't right, but you know, if you change the facts, you're gonna win. So that's where I can't provide those bright-line answers on this, because it's all based on the situation.

Jim Collison 52:53

Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, some folks, Antonia maybe being one of them, came today, hoping to get this incredible clarification, and probably walks away a little more confused. And, and that's like, welcome to my world, you know, and in dealing with this and watching what you guys, Certified and non-Certified Coaches, are doing. I see this all the time. You know, George asks a question about, OK, what about our Gallup-Certified Facebook group that's in there? I keep it locked down to just the certified. And 9 out of 10 times, I'm going to delete if you're posting content in there that has, that's copyright or is our stuff, I'm probably going to delete it out of there. Even in the certified group.

Jim Collison 53:39

Now could, could we find things in there that are? Yeah, probably, because practically speaking, you know, to your point, this is a really hard thing to do. I think everybody wants black and white, and guys, black and white does not, this is an area where black and white does not exist. It's one of those areas where -- so, if you're thinking at this point, you've got questions, by the way, if you ask them today, it's August 30. I mean, I'm sorry, April 30. It's April 30 and you send us an email, it's probably gonna take a little bit of time for us to get back to you because we're gonna get this flood. Let me give some advice. One, Don't panic at this point, right. I think a lot of people are like, ah, we do this. The reason we do this is to get you thinking about what you're doing. There may be some of you who, who need to panic. You've done some things like, Oh, I didn't know; I didn't intend it. It's OK. Review what you've done. And if you have questions, let us know. If you know, just take it down. Like it's, it's, it's that simple. If you've done some of those kinds of things, take them down; begin to pull things back, whatever.

Jim Collison 53:40

For others of you. You're just kind of thinking, Oh, I could have done that? Like I didn't know, I didn't know I could do that. I'm available for you, I'm out there every day. I'm available for you for some simple questions. And many of you hit me with those. For specific questions, and many of you continue to post very specific questions in the chat at this point; we can't answer those here. If you've got some specific questions along those lines, you can reach back out to either Scott or myself. And we can kind of answer those. We're going to want to see some examples, you know. In other words, if you want pricing, we're going to need to see some examples of what you're looking for.

Jim Collison 55:24

By the way, that'll always be, that'll always be Scott, and not me, on those. But some basic questions we can kind of ask as well. Really, Scott, I really appreciate your time in doing this today. We went, I thought we could do this in 30 minutes; not a chance! I should have known better. I should have known better. We, listen, we really appreciate the discussion that we have here. And we want to continue it with you. So if you have questions, let us know. Ask Scott. We would love -- actually, I need to do this, hold on, on the video. I need to do this so this works. Because I keep pointing in this direction. Ask Scott, for those questions. Scott, any final words you want to say before we wrap this up?

Scott Wright 56:05

No, I just, again, I reiterate, we don't want to be a roadblock. We don't want to be the bully that says, You can't do anything. We want to help you. But we also have to make sure it's done correctly. It's, I've had a lot of people ask me, Oh, I'm writing a book. But I want to put, I don't want to use any of your content; I just want to say, Go take the CliftonStrengths assessment in my book, and I want to, and I want to do that. Well, CliftonStrengths is one of our trademarks. So I do have some care about how you're using that. I still am going to need to review your book, because I want to make sure that the book you're putting it into correctly is, is a book that we want our stuff to be associated.

Scott Wright 56:51

So sometimes somebody will say -- now, for a use like that, I'm probably not going to charge like a percentage of sales or anything like that. But I've had some people say, you know, like, Why, why do I have to pay a licensing fee? Well, that's because somebody at Gallup's gonna have to sit down and look at your book or your content or whatever, to review it to make sure it's something we want our brand connected with. Most often, 99% of the time, sure, it is. But there's a few cases where maybe you're, you're publishing a book that we don't really want our brand name associated with -- very small percentage of time. But we, that's why we have to do those reviews. And those reviews cost money. And that's why we have to charge a licensing fee.

Jim Collison 57:33

And at the end of the day, you want us doing that. You've attached, you've hooked your wagon to this brand. And you want that. You want us, you know, someone in the chat earlier said, What about, you know, some non-Certified Coaches that are doing some things or saying some things? Yeah, you want us to protect that brand. And so those, all those things are important as well.

Jim Collison 57:57

OK, with that, we'll remind everyone to take full advantage of all the resources we have available. It all really starts at gallup.com. And if you want to go to the strengths side of things put in /cliftonstrengths [gallup.com/cliftonstrengths]. Go all the way to the bottom; the, all the Legal links and help links are down there for you. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to me on how to find those things. I'll help you do that as well. For coaching, master coaching, and you want to become a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach or have any questions and you can't remember Scott's email address, send us an email: coaching@gallup.com. That's pretty easy to remember, Scott. We'd love for folks to join us for the, the, the 2021 CliftonStrengths Summit. And you know, what May 15 is approaching quickly. That's the cutoff to get the virtual box. It's not virtual, it's a real box. We're gonna send you the new wellbeing book, Wellbeing at Work, as well as some pretty cool swag. And so May 15 is the cutoff. If you're listening to this now live and you're not registered for the summit, you better do it soon. Because I think our recorded folks are going to miss it going forward. I think I probably won't get this out in time. Join us on any social platform by searching "CliftonStrengths." Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next week back on Called to Coach. With that, we'll say, Goodbye, everybody.

Scott Wright's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are Arranger, Responsibility, Adaptability, Harmony and Communication.