The members of the PLMEC consistently have conversations with various pregnancy centers across the US who are struggling to know if there are women who are missing them. In our findings, one striking observation we discovered was the massive discrepancy in the number of new clients a given center intakes each month.
Some center directors were overjoyed at the prospect of having more than one “At Risk” client in a given week, while others have so many clients that they’re actually having to turn some away.
Is the center that receives only one client per week underperforming? What about the center that has more clients than it can handle? Is it overperforming? The answer is not so simple.
In addition, we were often asked by center directors how their center compares with others and what a proper marketing budget looks like. In this short blog, we’ll reveal our findings.
A Tale of Two Cities: Determining Your Effective Reach
How many clients your center should be getting every month is determined by a variety of factors:
● What is the population of the area your center serves?
● Is your focus only on abortion-determined, or do you provide free services to anyone?
● How many people can reach your center within walking/short driving distance?
● What is the legality of abortion in your state?
● What is your center’s marketing budget?
Depending on how you answer, you may be overperforming even if your center only has a handful of clients each month or underperforming if your facilities and staff are at capacity.
How can you determine the recommendations you should make to your board of directors and what priorities you should ask your donors to support?
The Unplanned Pregnancy Estimator
So, how many clients should your center have per month? This number can be estimated by what we call your “Effective Reach,” a calculation made using simple statistical data.
Here’s how it works:
Take the population of your service area and utilize publicly available data to estimate how many unplanned pregnancies occur each month in your service area. Then, look at the number of new clients you intake monthly and run an Effective Reach estimation.
Data from approximately 150 pregnancy centers indicate that, on average, high-performing centers can reach a new client intake equal to 30 percent or more of all unplanned pregnancies within their service area, giving them an Effective Reach score of 30 or more.
If that math is too hard to do in your head, 828Collective offers a handy unplanned pregnancy calculator tool for you to use. You can access it here. Many boards and center directors are surprised to learn how significant the need is.
Your Budget. Your Reach.
Generally speaking, pregnancy centers fall into four tiers regarding their Effective Reach:
● High-Opportunity Centers: Centers that reach less than 10 percent of the unplanned pregnancies in their service area. With an optimized marketing spend and community focus, they may double or even triple their monthly new client intake.
● Strong-Opportunity Centers: Centers with an Effective Reach score of 10-19 can often almost double their new client intake.
● Solid-Performing Centers: Centers that have an Effective Reach score of 20 to 29 and may be able to increase new client intake by a significant 25-50 percent.
● Outstanding Performers: Centers with an effective reach of 30 percent or more are centers from which we can learn and whose insights will strengthen us all.
For centers in the High and Strong Opportunity tiers, your Effective Reach can almost always be improved by implementing some marketing best practices — e.g., better SEO, a new website, more/better-paid ads, adding a live nurse chat feature, etc.
For Solid Performers looking to increase their Effective Reach, depending on what you’re currently doing, performance can be improved through a combination of improved marketing and focusing your budget on what you’re doing that’s already performing well.
For Outstanding Performers, it’s all about scale. What you’re doing is truly working, so now is the task of mobilizing your volunteers and securing more funding. Additionally, you have the knowledge you can provide to the CPC community so others can benefit from your success. Depending on your geographic location, you may strategically decide to start referring non-at-risk women to other local support organizations.
Extending Your Effective Reach
Understanding your Effective Reach and the number of unplanned pregnancies you should be impacting is vital to improving your center.
With this data, you can more effectively evaluate your current efforts and help your support teams, board, and donors understand the task ahead of you. This helps you set realistic goals and secure more funding.
But be patient and plan to improve your Effective Reach over a 12- to 18-month period. Increasing new client intake (especially at-risk clients) may require better staff training, improved facilities, and more staff and volunteers. Increasing your center’s capacities will require a balanced approach across all your resources.
This blog was written by 828Collective – a digital marketing agency for pregnancy centers. We provide pregnancy centers with industry-leading websites and marketing services at a price that is affordable for even the smallest centers. We devote ourselves to enabling pregnancy centers to expand and improve their effective reach.
Visit us online or schedule a time to chat with us about your center’s marketing strategy, Her Journey, or any other questions you may have. You can also reach out to other pro-life marketing companies and approved members of the PLMEC that provide effective and ethical search engine marketing and SEO services.
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