Social Media Marketing Webinar: LinkedIn
In this webinar, RetireLife CEO Megan Shea analyzes the benefits of LinkedIn for aging services professionals who want to reach out to their peers to network and build their brand. LinkedIn, a site that allows individuals and businesses to set up profiles and groups to foster interaction, can help you and your business stay “front of mind” with your peers and broaden the professional referral network for aging services providers. Shea goes into detail about how to use the site, fill your profile with pertinent information, connect with other users, and be proactive in maintaining contact with connections. She also recommends some groups that are geared specifically towards eldercare professionals so you can begin networking right away. Once you have set up profile on LinkedIn, come join the RetireLife – Eldercare Professional Network group!
Mindful Caregiving Thought Tools for Resilience (Part 1)
By Holly Whittelsey Whiteside
Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind. – Bruce Lee
This series of articles will teach you ways to strengthen your resilience by building an internal toolkit that will last you for the rest of your life. Article #1, on building emotional resilience, introduces the powerful tools of managing self-talk and learning from anger.
Future articles will include:
Balancing Your Life (Picking Battles, Fine-tuning Relationships & Commitments)
Vitalizing Your Self-connection (Building Well-being & Boundaries)
Designing Survival Strategies (Managing Obstacles, Knowing Thyself)
Building A Support Team (Family, Community, How to ask for help)
Utilizing Your Emotions: Managing Self-talk and Learning From Anger
The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes but in having new eyes – Marcel Proust
Saying “Yes” to caregiving feels risky, as it contains many unanswerable questions. Acceptance of unknowns is perhaps the first lesson in caregiving.
You are visiting your parents, as you have done many times before, but this time things seems a little different. You can’t quite put your finger on it at first. Maybe things are less tidy than usual, maybe not. Then it happens. Hamburgers are planned for dinner. While casually looking through the icebox for snacks, you see that the hamburger is 2 weeks past its expiration date. It hits you. Your normally meticulous parents are becoming old. Later that night, you think of other signs of decline. It is clear your parents are going to need help, increasingly as time goes on. Your relationship with them has shifted irreversibly, in an instant.
As caregivers, we are characters in a complex play we cannot fully understand and certainly cannot control. Caregiving can feel like concentrated life–life, but with the emotional volume turned up. Even more than in ordinary times we sometimes feel victim to our emotions. Here are a couple of alternatives.
Marketing Using Google Tools: Webinar
This webinar features RetireLife CEO Megan Shea taking an in-depth look at Google Tools that allow aging services businesses to learn more about how their site is performing. The video provides an overview of the different Google Tools available, as well as brief demonstrations on how to analyze where your site stands in Google’s search engine, including which queries the site shows up in, where in the results it appears, where your site is linked from, and common keywords on your site. Once that data has been collected, Shea also discusses how to examine the data to better design and market a site to maximize the return on your investment.
In addition to the marketing aspects of Google Tools, there are also multiple tools that can be used for other aspects of eldercare business. You can keep up with blogs and other RSS feeds with Google Reader so you don’t lose track of what’s new in the industry. Shea demonstrates how to set up alerts, which will send an email to you either immediately, or summarized at an interval that you establish for new content related to your favorite search terms, such as assisted living, home health care, dementia, and more. Check out the video for a quick yet comprehensive introduction to using Google Tools to improve your business!
Home Care Guide: The 8 Questions You MUST Ask When Hiring a Home Health Aide or Agency
Whether you’re considering enlisting the help of a home care services agency or hiring a personal home health aide, ask these questions to choose the best provider for your needs.
6 Questions to consider BEFORE hiring a home health aide to care for your loved one:
1. What are your expectations for the types of services or care that the aide or agency will provide?
Home care services range from skilled clinical health care provided by nurses or therapists to simple household support, such as cleaning, cooking and running errands.
Think about how much support you need and how much care your loved one requires and write down what specific tasks you’ll need the aide/ agency to do and approximately how much time you’ll need each day/ week. Then develop a list of agencies or aides in your area that can provide that. Ask doctors, family and friends which home health aides or agencies they would recommend.
The Risk of CCRCs
A new Government Accountability Office report advises consumers that Continuing-Care Retirement Communities’ (CCRC) high entry cost can also put residents at a high level of financial risk, the Wall Street Journal reports. The average entrance fee for a unit at a CCRC is $249,857, according to the National Investment Center for the Seniors Housing and Care Industry. After this entrance fee, there are also monthly fees that are assessed depending on the level of care a resident needs and the type of contract they have signed. When a resident moves out of a facility or passes away, many contracts will state that they will not be refunded all or part of their entrance fee until after the CCRC has found another tenant.
In addition to the delay in having the entrance fee refunded, patients may find their entrance fee tangled up in bankruptcy proceedings. The Wall Street Journal article links to guides from CARF International (link www.carf.org) and The American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (link www.aahsa.org). They suggest getting a copy of the facility’s audited financial statements and analyze aspects like the facility’s days of cash on hand and their cash-to-debt ratio.
Readers: Have you or a loved one lived at a CCRC that had financial difficulty, or conversely, was very lucrative? Do you work in a facility in either category? What do you notice about the ones that are successful – are there traits that other CCRCs can learn from?
Social Media Marketing Techniques Webinar
When it comes to maximizing the return-on-investment of your advertising dollars, social media outlets can provide a quick, efficient, and affordable way to reach many people at once. RetireLife CEO Megan Shea discusses the importance of using social media outlets, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mail Chimp, to promote aging services businesses. Today, over 50 percent of adult children live in a different state from their aging parents, so utilizing online marketing resources allows for consistent contact with a geographically diverse audience of adult children and their aging parents. In this webinar, Shea summarizes the various social marketing services available, how to use them to position an elder care and aging services business, and how to establish your brand to become a reliable resource both in person and online.