Four ways to improve your nonprofit home healthcare agency’s brand image online

By Kyle Schnurbusch, Strategy Director

If you’re a nonprofit home healthcare agency operator, we know you’re busy, and based on population trends in the U.S., your operation will grow significantly in the years ahead.

According to America’s Health Rankings, the population of people 65 and over in the U.S. will increase to 70 million by 2030, a 30% increase from the current senior population. The increase in older Americans is projected to grow the home healthcare service market to $153.19 billion in the same time period. Seniors’ preference to remain at home as they age contributes to the market’s increase as well.

If you’re an independent operator, there’s never been a better time to strengthen your brand, and building your image online can connect your organization to where prospective customers and their adult care influencers are looking for home healthcare services.

Here are four ways you can strengthen your agency’s brand image online:

1. Consistently communicate your points of differentiation in your messaging.

What are your agency’s core strengths? It’s important to evaluate your agency, your market and the perceptions surrounding your organization to develop a brand that’s authentic and has a point of difference based on your strengths. Through your research, establish three to five key points that can direct your online communications and marketing channels⁠—your website content, advertising and social media.

For example, consider “holistic approach” as a key point for your home health agency. You must convey your holistic philosophy consistently in your messaging. Support your message with stories, images and videos that provide additional perspectives for your strengths.

Connect your points to actual results as well. Using the “holistic approach” example, develop a client story that communicates the details of the approach and the results it has influenced for the client’s health⁠—mentally, physically and spiritually. Stories with outcomes allow a client or their loved ones to fully understand your service’s impact and why your differences matter.

2. Incorporate your client testimonials throughout a prospect’s online journey.

Referrals from current and past clients are great for promoting your home health care agency. Testimonials and reviews provide proof of your effectiveness. According to the 2020 Home Care Benchmarking Study, current and past clients are the top sources of new referrals.

Referrals can be used on your website, social media pages and paid advertising campaigns. Additionally, testimonial quotes or videos make for great remarketing content on social platforms and help you remain visible to past visitors from your website. Remarketing has become increasingly important in the last year due to longer decision cycles for home health care services, and testimonials can create trust and a compelling story that solidifies contracts.

3. Ask for and engage with your online reviews.

Trust is essential to developing any relationship, personal or business. For home health agencies, showcasing that your business is trusted by its clients is critical to acquiring more relationships. Online reviews are a great way to display the trust and strong client relationships your organization possesses, and good reviews have a direct return.

Yelp, a popular consumer review site for local businesses, reports that for every one-star increase that a business receives, it sees a 5-9% increase in revenue. Additionally, products and services that receive five-star reviews are 270% more likely to be purchased.

It’s clear that reviews are important to your prospective client’s decision journey. So, you must make the time to respond to the (good and bad) reviews you have acquired across review sites⁠—Facebook, Google, Yelp, A Place for Mom, etc.

It’s important to ask your satisfied clients to leave a review about their positive experiences as well. Most review sites have easy-to-use user portals to share a review quickly. Train your team in the field to use the review portals and ask clients for reviews when face-to-face. In-person requests are the most successful for receiving a review.

4. Be an educational resource to cultivate relationships with prospective clients.

As mentioned earlier, the decision cycle for prospective senior clients and their adult care influencers has gotten longer in recent years, mainly due to safety concerns related to COVID-19. It’s important to remain in front of these prospects, providing information and opportunities to engage as they move through their decision journey.

Educational content and online webinars are effective ways to build value and increase purchase consideration for your home health care agency’s services. Educational content and events can be promoted on your website, through SEO and on social media platforms.

Both open and gated content should be included in your content plan. Gated content might be a webinar, video or whitepaper about matters related to your service, and a visitor must submit their contact information to download or view the material. You can then use that information to reach out, answer questions, schedule a consultation or share more information. This helps them in their decision process.

Investing time in SEO-focused content can help your agency build awareness through search engines. By using key terms or asking common questions related to your services within content, users have a chance to find your business. An easy way to find keywords to use in your content, enter related questions and terms, such as “home health agency” or “caregiver agency,” into search engines to see what auto-populates in the search dropdown and the “people also search for” section.

Social media, specifically Facebook, can help your business build category authority as well. Share your educational content on your page along with other posts that shape your brand’s image, like client stories, organizational news, organizational culture highlights, caregiver tips or information about the issues your home health agency helps solve.

For 2023, use these tips within the first four months of the year to set your home health care agency up for success for years to come. Results don’t happen overnight, but your setting up a winning digital foundation that will produce real leads in the long term.

Questions? Reach out to us.

Deepen your curiosity when planning your Giving Tuesday campaign this year.

By Kyle Schnurbusch, OrgStory Strategy Director

Giving Tuesday is November 29th this year (yes, less than a month away). It’s the start of the end-of-year giving season, and it’s a great opportunity for your organization to incite giving among donors, especially low and mid-level ones.

As you’ve probably experienced in your past campaigns, Giving Tuesday can be quite burdensome and frustrating if you don’t plan ahead. I hope you’ve begun your planning process for this year, but regardless of your plan’s status, I encourage you to deepen your curiosity within your planning process to inspire a campaign that truly stands out to your donors amid the magnitude of asks.

Here are three ways you can push your curiosity within your campaign planning to have a more successful Giving Tuesday:

1. Gain insights from your donors to inspire your campaign message.

Insights from your key donors are crucial when planning any campaign. For Giving Tuesday, I recommend focusing on obtaining insights from donors that engage online frequently (email or social media) and have volunteered or given at least once within the last eighteen months (maybe the last Giving Tuesday). If your organization is using Giving Tuesday to raise money for a specific program or need, identify donors that have given toward that initiative.

Once you’ve generated a report on these donors, take time to analyze it to identify commonalities among these donors (occupation, family make-up, interests, etc.). It’s best to establish two to four donor types based on the data.

Next, you’ll want to get to know those donor types beyond the data. You can do this by asking these questions for each audience type:

• What interests them about your mission?
• What makes them most proud to be associated with your mission?
• How does your organization’s work make them feel?
• What are their expectations of your organization?
• What communication channels do they prefer?

After you’ve completed your insight gathering, combine the data and responses to create donor personas. Then, develop specific messages that align with the interests and motivations of each. Your curiosity in shaping each persona and crafting unique messages will help your campaign’s success.

2. Determine how to best communicate your organization’s outcomes against broader data points.

In your Giving Tuesday campaign, I recommend using outcome data to complement the messages and stories you share. However, your data should be shared within the context of a greater point to make it more impactful. Research relevant data to share alongside your outcomes that clearly define your success. For example: how many children in your area face the same challenges your clients do? How do your outcomes compare to regional or national outcomes?

Additionally, It’s important to share how your organization’s results directly impact your donors as well. For example: if you continue to evaluate outcomes, will your community operate differently in five years? Will a breakthrough happen if outcomes are sustained?

As mentioned above, data should complement your message and stories for your Giving Tuesday campaign. By combining great results with your stories and the benefits donors receive from your work, campaign success will follow.

3. Leverage donor data to determine how to best spend your time marketing your campaign.

Asking your donors about their communication preferences is important when developing your campaign’s strategy and marketing plan. However, sometimes what people say is not what they do. That’s why I recommend pushing your curiosity about your donor’s communication preferences by analyzing analytics associated with your website, social platforms and email campaigns.

• Where do donors engage most often?
• When do donors tend to engage with your content?
• Do donors tend to give through social media? Email? Website?

Analytics also can uncover the types of content that lead to higher engagement and/or giving behaviors:

• What pages on your website are visited before the donation page is visited?
• What stories have received the highest engagement? Where does a user go after they engage with the story?

Gathering analytics shouldn’t be an alternative to talking to your donors, as suggested in #1. Each step is important when informing your campaign’s strategy, messaging and distribution methods.

Good luck on Giving Tuesday! If you use these ideas, I know you’ll create a campaign that will excite and deliver results.

Reach out: Feel free to email Kyle Schnurbusch to share ways your organization is planning for Giving Tuesday.