ISO certified – why not shout about it!

ISO certification is not easy to achieve, therefore why not shout about it, after all promoting your certification may help to attract more business.

To help you prepare your promotional material (letterheads, emails, websites, LinkedIn page etc) ISO have produced a guide to help you avoid the pitfalls. Although they are officially called guidelines, some of the advice is mandatory . Below is a summary of the guidelines:

• You are not allowed to use, modify or adapt the ISO logo
• If you want to use a logo, you must ask your certification body (CB) for permission to use it
• If your organisation is certified to a standard, use the full designation, e.g. “ISO 9001:2008″- not just “ISO 9001″
• You must use specific terms e.g. “ISO 9001:2008 certification” not the generic term “ISO 9000 certification”
• You can say “certified” or “registered”, “certification” or “registration”. But do not say “accredited”
• You should not use the phrase “ISO certified” or “ISO certification”. You mast use the phrase “ISO 9001:2008 certified” or “ISO 9001:2008 certification”
• Do not display any certification marks of conformity on products, product labels, or product packaging that could be interpreted as denoting product conformity  This was changed when ISO 17021 was updated in June 2015 – the organisation can now add a statement to the product packaging and supporting literature to state that you have a certified management system. Again you cannot imply that the product is certified. For more info on this change please see Changes to ISO 17021
• Do not give the impression that management system certification is a product certification or product guarantee
• If only part of your organisations processes are covered by a certification, or certain sites/locations, you are not allowed to imply or mislead people by giving the impression that the organization has been certified for all its activities and processes, or indeed for all its locations

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Article originally published 4th August 2015, updated July 2015