4 Tips for Growing Your Doula Business
Starting your career as a birth worker is super exciting! Once you finish your initial training and you’re ready to start working with clients, though, it can sometimes take a while to build some momentum.
If you’ve recently trained as a doula and you’re putting together your next steps for booking your initial clients, then this article is for you. I’ll cover ways to get your name out there and advertise your services; how to make it easy for clients to hire you; and one of the most important pieces of all- building your birth community.
1.Connect With Fellow Birth Workers
When you’re first starting out as a birth worker, it’s important for expectant families to know who you are. That said, you may be surprised to learn that a really impactful way to build your career is to network with other birth professionals. This might feel counterintuitive at first, but over time building connections with other professionals in your field is super important.
As a doula, you’ll need to have a strong network of diverse birth professionals to refer your future clients to for services they might need, such as childbirth education, prenatal massage, chiropractic care, lactation services, physical therapy and more. In addition to building relationships with providers as referrals for your future clients, it’s great for other birth professionals to know about you and your work.
It’s also pretty common for doulas to refer clients they might not be available to work with to other doulas they know and respect. This is a great way to build a doula practice long term.
2. Create An Online Presence
In addition to networking with other birth professionals in your community, a great way to make yourself visible to expecting families is through your online presence. One of the best ways to reach expectant clients is through your personal website and search engine optimization, also known as SEO.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving website traffic to a website from search engines. In order to do this, you need to have a good sense of what words someone might put into Google when they are looking for your services. For example, if you live in St Louis, and offer childbirth education and birth doula services, you’ll want to work on your website SEO for keywords such as your location: St Louis, and the services that you offer: childbirth education and birth doula services. That way, when people in your area are looking for the services that you offer- your website will be at the top of the list in Google. Or at least that’s the goal!
Another way to meet prospective clients and boost SEO, is to get your services and website listed on online directories. If you trained with BADT, there is the directory you can list your services in! Perhaps there is a local birth service provider directory you can join in your area as well. Any online directory you can link your website in will help with your SEO and help get your services in front of the expectant people you’re looking to connect with.
3. Craft Your Process
In addition to getting your name out there through networking and having a web presence, the next thing you can do to get started as a birth worker is to make it easy for people to hire you. Some things to consider include: the interview process, your service offerings, and the client onboarding process.
In the beginning when you’re starting out as a birth worker, it’s all a numbers game to get those first few clients. You want to be setting up as many interviews as possible. This is good because it gives you many opportunities to practice your client interview skills. The initial client meet and greet is a time for both you and the client to see if it would be a good fit to work together. It’s also an opportunity for you to show clients that you’re able to guide people through an experience.
Practice guiding friends through your interview process, and have some canned responses ready to go for common question like:
What inspired you to become a doula?
What is your background and training to be a doula?
What is your approach or how do you work with clients as a doula?
Another way to make it easy for clients to hire you is to have a really clear document or website page detailing your service offerings and rates. You want expectant parents, who might be hiring a doula for the first time, to easily understand the services that you offer. This can be a fairly simple document listing out when you’re available to clients, how many meetings you’ll have together, and what the on-call period looks like.
Once you do get hired by a client, first off, congrats! Now it’s time to shine and make a super smooth client onboarding experience. I recommend having client agreements available to sign easily online through a system like docu-sign or hello sign. You also want to make it easy for people to pay you, whether that’s through a bank transfer or credit/debit card processing.
After all the logistics are taken care of, consider kicking off your package together with a client welcome packet, or even a 30 minute welcome meeting. These are opportunities to manage client expectations and make a plan for the months or weeks working together.
4. Build Community
In addition to getting your name out there, and making it easy for clients to hire you, the other way I recommend getting started as a birth worker is to build your community. Being a birth worker is hard- there’s no way around that. It’s incredibly important and rewarding work, but we all need our support systems.
Start networking and meeting with like-minded doulas either in real lif, or online. You’ll start to make your doula friends who will be valuable supports as you continue to do birth work. Perhaps there are local meet-ups for birth workers in your area already that you can join. And if there aren’t you might like to organize a meet and greet event for local birth workers to connect and meet each other.
Another way to build community is to start meeting doulas who can be your back-ups. Like I mentioned earlier, being able to confidently refer to other doulas or work as back-ups is key! Finding doulas that you love working with is so important because if there is a situation where you need to send a backup doula to work with one of your clients, you’ll want to feel really comfortable with this person.
Lastly, another way to build community as a birth worker is to get involved with local birth causes. Birth work is political. There is so much work we need to do in the reproductive justice space that there are plenty of opportunities to volunteer and get involved. This is a great way to meet like minded birth workers, and also make a difference for birthing people.
Stick With It
I hope these tips are helpful to you as you get started with your career as a birth worker. It can take some time to build momentum as a doula, but once you start picking up momentum you’ll be busier than you ever imagined.
Just keep at it, and get your services in front of as many people as you can, book as many interviews as possible, and eventually you’ll have a booked practice.
Jennifer Mayer is the founder of Baby Caravan and Fully Funded based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s a financial counselor who works with self-employed folks who want to develop a better understanding with their money, or who are setting up a parental leave from their business. She’s been a birth doula for 16 years, and has been mentoring doulas since 2013.