Choosing the right channels for your foster carer recruitment campaign

The focus in the initial part of your campaign will be to raise awareness of becoming a foster carer with your organisation, and this stage is all about making your subject matter to your audience. The primary goal here is putting yourself in front of the right audience and this can be achieved through targeted advertising, as well as through useful contacts and partner organisations within your existing network. Possible channels to consider for this stage include radio, digital ad exchange (DAX), out-of-home (OOH), community events and social media advertising.

If you’re looking to recruit potential foster carers within a particular geographical area, you’ll need to bear in mind that you’re speaking to a finite audience. So the more campaigns you do, the harder it will be to recruit as you’ll have converted any warm prospects through early campaigns. For this reason, you need to also think about stimulating demand through early engagement type activity to create warm prospects for future lead generation campaigns. It’s also important to learn from any previous successes and failures.

During the consideration phase, your audience will be weighing up their options. So providing them with as much information as possible to guide them through the decision-making process is essential to this stage. Creating quality content should be your main focus here.  

This content could take various forms, including everything from blog articles and case studies to downloadable resources like brochures and toolkits. Authentic video content is particularly powerful, so it’s a great idea to include vlogs and video case studies if you have them (or can create them). When it comes to getting your information out there in the right places, regional and community events can be a great way to get your message to a relevant local audience.  

Information events (both virtual and in-person) are also a great space for nurturing your leads through the consideration stage, and will give them the opportunity to have their questions answers. We’ve created some guidance around hosting a virtual event here.  

For the final phase of encouraging your audience to take action, you’ll need to remind them of everything they’ve now learned about becoming a foster carer within your organisation and give them clear instructions on what they need to do next. 

The key channels for achieving this will be retargeting those people that have already been exposed to ads and email marketing (using automation where you can to nurture your prospects). These communications should link directly to your website or landing page, and most importantly must give your audience a very clear and easy call-to-action. As part of the foster carer recruitment campaign we implemented for Wiltshire Council, we created a landing page for our client with a very clear call-to-action for the audience, which was to fill in a form in order to download a copy of their online information brochure. This gave our client a helpful way of tracking who was interested in applying for the role and enabled them to follow up with these contacts over the phone or through email.

If you’re preparing to launch a foster carer recruitment strategy and would like to discuss working with us on some or all the elements of your campaign, get in touch with a member of our team today and we’ll be more than happy to help.