Joining Guide

Your guide to joining the Council Advertising Network

If you’re ready to start generating income from advertising on your website, here’s a step-by-step guide to what needs to be put in place to join CAN’s Council Advertising Network

There are resources – templates, action-specific guides and required forms – in our ‘joining files’ to support this ten-point plan. Once you have a log-in, all these joining files will be available to download from the ‘My CAN’ partners’ area.

If you haven’t yet contacted the CAN team about joining the network, or had an estimate from us of the annual income you could make, you’ll need to get in touch first. You could run a trial version of the network on your website. 

You can also contact the team at any point during the joining process for help. 

You’re likely to need to present the idea of joining the Council Advertising Network to senior colleagues to get the go-ahead.

We’ve created a ‘Management Team Presentation’ template that lists the main points to make, and you can tailor it to your council by adding the estimated income figures we supply. You can also direct people to myth-busting answers to some frequently asked questions

These teams will need to support us to add our simple technology to your existing website, so it can run advertising. The ‘CAN Technology, Security and Implementation Guide’ provides full details on how the Council Advertising Network operates, how it’s implemented and the security controls in place.

You will need to sign CAN’s standard ‘Terms and Conditions’ document

You also need to sign the ‘Order Form’ and ‘Call-Off Terms’ with CAN, and the CAN ‘Code of Conduct’.

Some council policies might still need updating to incorporate web advertising. Our ‘Sample Advertising Policy’, based on the policies of several CAN partners, could be used for this.

It is also good practice to have a “Why am I seeing this advert?” link on your website, under or to the side of the frame where the adverts will appear, to link to a form of words like the ‘Sample Advertising Statement’ included in our resources.

Some councils will want to get formal approval from cabinet to proceed. You can tailor our ‘Cabinet Report’ template to meet your requirements.

The implementation phase should be straightforward. We’ll arrange a call to talk you through the ‘Onboarding Guide’ and answer questions from you and your colleagues.

The ‘Onboarding Guide’ covers: choosing the type and position of adverts to appear on your website, technical implementation, privacy policy and reporting, and support while you’re on the network.

When no paid advertising is available, you can choose the sort of default ads that will appear instead.

We provide you with the standard Category Approval List used by most of our network partners for this, but you can add to or take away from it to suit your council business.

The technical implementation involves placing CAN tags into the website’s coding and configuring firewalls to accept CAN domains. Both are explained in the ‘CAN Technology, Security and Implementation Guide’ which your web and IT teams will already have seen.

After we’ve tested the technology, it’s ‘go live’ for advertising on your website. We’ll monitor it closely in the first few weeks to make sure everything is working well.

Once you’re up and running, you can log in to the ‘My Can’ area to check your income earnings on your live dashboard each month.