What an ABA clinic can post when it cannot show its clients

Post about everything around the session, not the session

An ABA clinic can post about the people who work there, the questions families ask before they start, the steps of getting in the door, the space, the community it belongs to, and the jobs it is hiring for. None of those needs a client in the frame, and together they cover most of what a parent, a pediatrician's front desk, or a future RBT wants to learn from a clinic's feed.

The work itself does not photograph, and the clinic could not post it if it did. That leaves less raw material than a restaurant or a retailer has, with more rules around what does go out. The answer is a set of categories that never needed a client in the first place.

The six categories

1. Parent questions, answered in plain words. What happens at the first visit, who the family will meet, what the paperwork asks for, how scheduling works. Intake staff answer these on the phone every week, so write them down the way the parent asked them. Keep it on the process side. A post that tells a parent what to do at home, or what progress should look like, is clinical guidance aimed at a child nobody behind the post has assessed.

2. Myth versus fact. One common misconception and a short, accurate correction, as a designed card. Insurance, waitlists, what a BCBA does versus what an RBT does, and what intake means at your clinic are all fair game. Any clinical term on the card should be one your BCBA would sign off on exactly as written. A misused term costs more trust with this audience than a quiet week does.

3. The team. Introductions of RBTs, BCBAs, and front-desk and intake staff: their role, how long they have been with the clinic, what they like about the job. Staff consent comes first, in writing, and a staff member who declines should not have to explain why.

4. How intake works. The steps between a first call and a first session, in the order the family will meet them. A referrer who knows what the clinic needs from them (a diagnosis document, a prescription, a call back) can send a cleaner referral.

5. The space and the community. An empty therapy room before the day starts, the waiting area, a booth at a local resource fair, a donation drive, a talk for a parent group. Shoot these when no clients are present, and check the frame for whiteboards, cubbies, artwork with names on it, and schedules on the wall.

6. Hiring. What an RBT's week looks like, how supervision works at the clinic, what training a new hire gets, the credential path. A job board reaches people already searching. A clinic's own feed also reaches people who were not.

Where consent and privacy come first

To be clear, nothing here is legal advice, and whether a particular post is permissible is a question for your counsel and your own privacy policy. What follows describes what the federal Privacy Rule's text says, so you know what to ask about.

The rule requires a covered entity to obtain an individual's authorization for any use or disclosure of protected health information for marketing, with two narrow exceptions: a face-to-face communication, and a promotional gift of nominal value.^[1] It defines marketing, subject to listed exceptions, as a communication about a product or service that encourages recipients to purchase or use it.^[2] Whether your clinic is a covered entity, and whether a given post counts as marketing, are the questions counsel answers.

Read the rule's de-identification standard too, because it shows how little it takes to identify someone. Its list of identifiers includes names, geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, the elements of dates other than the year, and full-face photographs and comparable images.^[3] A post with no photo can still carry a first name, a town, and a birthday month.

In practice that suggests one operational rule: if a post would involve a client, a client's family, or anything a family could recognize as theirs, it stops until written authorization is in hand and the clinic's own privacy review has signed off. The six categories exist so that almost nothing on the calendar ever reaches that point.

Making it a calendar instead of a scramble

Six categories is a rotation. Give each week two or three posts from different categories, and do not run the same category twice in a row. A month planned in one afternoon survives a sick day. A post planned the morning it is due does not.

Keep a short review step. One person drafts, someone senior reads it before it goes anywhere, and anything with a clinical term goes past the BCBA. That review catches the post that drifted from process into advice, and the staff photo with a client schedule in the background.

Where Virida fits

Grain of salt, I built Virida. It is social media autopilot for ABA clinics, built around the problem in this post: no client photos, by design. You pick a focus (parent education, myth versus fact, awareness, recruiting), and it writes, designs, and schedules a batch of posts as finished graphics rather than photos of anyone. The clinical terms it draws from come from a vocabulary our BCBA co-founder wrote and approved.

It will not publish anything on its own. Every post waits for you or a teammate to approve it, and you can edit or drop any of them first. It does not make a clinic compliant either. It makes the review easy and publishing without one impossible. The trial is two months with no credit card. Whether that fits your clinic better than a shared calendar and one afternoon a month is your call.