Terms &
conditions.

This agreement

These terms are an agreement between you and Focus Media Services, LLC (“Focus Media,” “we,” “us”), of 24 Veterans Square, Media, PA 19063. They apply when you buy something from us, hold a member account, or simply use focusmediaservices.com and beforeitgoesviral.com.

By buying a product or signing in to an account, you accept them. If you are buying on behalf of a school district or agency, you confirm you are authorized to commit that organization to these terms.

Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement. If we have signed a separate written contract with your district — a consulting engagement, a video project, a district enrollment — that contract governs where it differs from these terms.

Who can buy

Our products are sold to adults, and in practice to working professionals in schools and public agencies. You must be at least 18 to hold an account. We sell and ship within the United States.

What we sell

Prices are set in our payment system and shown on each product page. The figures below are current at the effective date of these terms; the course and membership pages always carry the live price, and that price is the one that governs.

• The 30-hour course — an eight-module, self-paced online curriculum. Currently $349 for one seat, with reduced per-seat rates for volume purchases. Includes one year of access.
• Membership — currently $1,599 for one seat for one year, combining the course, the book, the article library, monthly webinars, a quarterly consultation hour, and preferred consulting rates. See Membership benefits.
• The district package — membership across an organization, priced by member count. Arranged with us directly.
• Consulting, training, speaking, and video production — scoped and quoted per engagement. See Consulting & video.
• The book, Before It Goes Viral, is sold on Amazon. That purchase is between you and Amazon under their terms, not ours — except where a book is included in a membership and shipped by us.

We may change prices, and we may add, change, or retire products. A change never affects an order already placed or an access period already running.

Where a page mentions Pennsylvania Act 45 or PIL credits, eligibility and the award of any credit rest with the approving body, not with us. We make no guarantee that any particular credit will be granted.

Your account

Buying the course or a membership creates an account in your name, and we email you a link to set your password. Keep your credentials to yourself and tell us promptly if you believe someone else has them. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

Access runs for one year from purchase. If you renew before your current period ends, the new year is added to the time you have left rather than replacing it. When access lapses, the course, the members’ library, and members’ webinars close; your account and your notebook entries are kept for a period afterward, as set out in our Privacy Policy, so a renewal picks up where you stopped.

Buying the course while you hold an active membership extends your time and never downgrades what you have.

One seat, one person

This is the term we would most like you to actually read.

A seat is licensed to one named individual. It is not a department login. You may not share your credentials, and you may not transfer your seat to someone else without our agreement — though we will usually agree when a role changes hands within a district, so ask.

We enforce this in the mildest way we could think of: we never block a sign-in. When a seat signs in on a new device, the previous device is signed out. Nobody gets locked out of something they paid for; the account simply refuses to be in two places at once. Every sign-in and every displaced session is recorded.

A sustained pattern of sessions displacing one another is how we identify a shared seat. Where we find one, we will contact you first, and we would rather sell your colleagues seats than suspend yours. If sharing continues after we have raised it, we may suspend the account under Suspension and termination.

Districts buying several seats receive one seat per named person. Extra seats can be added at any time at the volume rate.

Payment

Payment is taken at checkout by Stripe. All prices are in US dollars and, as one-time purchases for a year of access, are not subscriptions — nothing auto-renews and nothing recurring is charged to your card. Your access simply runs out at the end of its year, and renewing is a new purchase you choose to make. You can see the date your access runs through at any time in your account.

Prices exclude any sales or use tax that applies; where we are required to collect it, it is added at checkout. Discount codes are applied at checkout, cannot be applied after a purchase, and may carry their own conditions and expiry.

Districts needing to pay by purchase order or invoice should contact us and we will arrange it.

Refunds

We do not publish a blanket refund guarantee. What we do instead is look at each request on its own facts.

If the course, the membership, or anything else you bought from us is not what you expected, write to brad@focusmediaservices.com and tell us what happened. We will consider a full or partial refund taking into account how recent the purchase is, how much of the material has been used, and whether we got something wrong. We would rather resolve a problem than keep money from an unhappy customer, and we decide these individually rather than by formula.

Refund decisions are made at our discretion and are final. Where a refund is granted for a product that included a shipped book, we may deduct its cost if it has already been sent. Where a refund is granted, access ends on the date the refund is issued.

Books bought on Amazon are refunded by Amazon under Amazon’s policy. Consulting and video engagements follow the cancellation terms in their own agreement.

Membership benefits

A membership year includes the course, a copy of the book mailed to you, the full article and video library, a members’ webinar each month, a one-hour one-on-one consultation each quarter, and preferred rates on additional consulting.

A few practical points about those:

• The quarterly consultation hour is scheduled by arrangement, subject to reasonable availability. It belongs to the quarter it falls in and does not roll over unused into the next one.
• Webinars are held monthly during your membership year. If you cannot attend live, the recording is available in your account.
• The library grows over the year. We may also retire or revise individual articles.
• Preferred consulting rates apply to work quoted while your membership is active.
• Urgent crisis support is offered where we have the capacity to take it on. We cannot guarantee availability at any given moment, and nothing here is a promise of an on-call service.

Benefits are tied to your seat and end when your access period does.

Shipping

Where your purchase includes a physical book, we ship to the address you give at checkout, within the United States. Please make sure it is right — tell us quickly if it is wrong and we will fix it before the book goes out. Delivery estimates are estimates, not commitments. If a book arrives damaged or does not arrive at all, tell us and we will replace it.

Consulting & video

Consulting, live and virtual training, on-camera coaching, speaking engagements, and video production are scoped to the district and the moment, so each one begins with a conversation and a written proposal covering the work, the fee, the schedule, and the cancellation terms.

That proposal, once accepted, is the agreement for that engagement, and it prevails over these terms wherever the two differ. Nothing on this website is an offer to perform work at a stated price, and no engagement begins until we have both agreed its scope in writing.

Where a video project involves filming on your premises, you are responsible for obtaining the consents and releases needed for the people appearing in it — staff, students, and community members alike. Ownership of finished footage is set out in the project agreement.

Our content, and what you may do with it

The course, its videos, the articles, the webinars, the book, and the site itself are our intellectual property or used by us under licence. Buying a seat buys access, not ownership.

What your seat lets you do: work through the material for your own professional development, and use the downloadable templates, checklists, and frameworks in your own district’s real communications work — adapt them, put your name and logo on them, and use the results however your district needs.

What it does not let you do:

• share, resell, sublicense, or publish the course material, videos, or articles;
• record, download, or re-host the video lessons or webinars;
• use the material to deliver training to people outside your organization, or as the basis of a competing program;
• use it to train an artificial-intelligence model, or feed it to a service that does;
• remove our marks or attribution from anything we supply.

Anything you write in a course reflection or notebook entry stays yours. By sending us feedback about the course or the site, you allow us to use that feedback to improve them, without obligation to you.

The book and the course refer to publicly available news coverage and video for education and commentary. Those clips belong to their copyright holders; we claim no ownership of them.

Acceptable use

Do not attempt to break into, disrupt, or probe the site or the member area; do not scrape it in bulk or automate access to it; do not use our contact form to send spam, malware, or abuse; and do not upload or send us content you have no right to share. Treat the people you meet in a webinar or a consultation the way you would want to be treated.

Training, not legal advice

We teach communications. We are not your lawyers, and nothing in the course, the book, the articles, the webinars, or a consultation is legal advice. Nor is it advice on employment matters, student privacy law, or your obligations under any statute or regulation.

Communications decisions in a crisis are yours to make, in your context, with your counsel. Our frameworks are meant to make those decisions clearer, faster, and better informed — not to make them for you. We cannot and do not promise any particular outcome: not a story that goes away, not coverage that turns, not a community that responds the way you hoped.

Warranties & liability

We provide the site and our products with reasonable care and skill, and we genuinely stand behind the work. Beyond that, and to the fullest extent the law allows, they are provided “as is,” without further warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we may need to take it down for maintenance.

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither party is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential losses, or for lost profits, lost revenue, or reputational harm.

Our total liability arising out of or relating to these terms, whatever the cause of action, is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Suspension and termination

You may stop using the site at any time and ask us to close your account.

We may suspend or close an account that is being shared in breach of One seat, one person, that is being used to attack or abuse the service or the people using it, or where payment has been reversed. Except where the breach is serious or deliberate, we will contact you first and give you a chance to put it right.

The sections on intellectual property, liability, and governing law survive the end of this agreement.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts serving Delaware County, Pennsylvania have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, and we each consent to that venue.

Before filing anything, please write to us. Nearly everything is faster to fix by email.

If any part of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest stands. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it. This agreement, with the Privacy Policy and any engagement contract we have signed with you, is the whole agreement between us.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as what we offer changes. The version in force is the one published here, with its effective date at the top. Changes are not retroactive: the terms that applied when you bought continue to govern that purchase and the access period it bought. For a significant change we will email active members.

How to reach us

Questions about these terms, a purchase, or your seat go to a person, not a queue.