Module 3 - Unit 4: Building Your Referral Network
Referrals & Resources
Part I: Client Referrals
What clients or other agencies might want to know about you:
- Location
- Cost
- Average length of stay
- House size (# of beds)
- Number of staff
- Recovery philosophy
What do you offer?
- What level Recovery Residence are you?
- What can clients expect?
Who are you?
- What is your home’s story? Why does recovery matter to you?
Who do you serve?
- Where are you located?
- How do you make clients feel welcome in your home?
What makes you unique?
- What do you want to highlight for potential clients?
Referral Sources
“Formal” Referrals
- Substance use treatment providers
- MOUD providers
- Medical and behavioral health providers
- Criminal legal system:
- mental health or drug courts
- probation officers
- ADCRR
- law enforcement
- Emergency departments or first responders
- Peer support and recovery organizations
- AZ Department of Child Safety
- Referral organizations (e.g., United Way)
Take time to build relationships to facilitate referrals or “warm hand offs.”
Referral Sources
“Informal” Referrals:
- Self-referrals
- Peers, including current clients
- Family and friends
- Community coalitions
- Faith communities
- Harm reduction and other grassroots organizations
- Community resource fairs
- Advertising through social media
Marketing & Advertising
The following cover strategies for marketing and advertising.
This can be a creative process full of trial and error.
Most importantly, NARR’s Code of Ethics (2016) state that recovery home owners are expected to:
“Promote the residence with marketing or advertising that is supported by accurate, open and honest claims.”
https://myazrha.org/sober-living-code-of-ethics/
Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool for advertising. It can also be tricky and time consuming.
On the next few slides we provide a few tips, tricks, and resources to get you started.
Social Media Marketing
This 5 minute video covers tools at your disposal to get the word out about your recovery home.
- Post content as often as possible – To keep up social media appearances, make sure to be engaging with followers at least once a day. This will help build up a following and help promote your service. With daily posts, it can also be helpful to make use of the “stories” feature on Facebook and Instagram, for quick and easy engagement.
- Establish set goals – In order to keep up a consistent theme for your brand, make sure to have clear goals on what you want to accomplish through social media. Examples: give resources to followers, show new research studies, inform the public on team endeavors, ect.
- Keep your target audience in mind – When creating posts/content, think about what age demographic and group of people you are trying to reach. Would this group find this post interesting? Think about how you word your content, what images you use, what hashtags you promote, what time of day should you post.
- Use images – Whenever possible, use images to capture the attention of followers. The use of a visual aid will generally always gather more engagement on posts. The service “Canva” is a great tool in creating infographics and pictures for social media, and it’s also free. https://www.canva.com/
- Use Casual wording and phrases – When you’re creating posts, speak in words/lingo that everyone can understand. Social media content does not need to be formal. Keep things shorter and easier to read.
Instagram:
- The main focus of Instagram is pictures/photos. You can caption your photo, but people will mostly be looking at the image. Instagram tends to have a younger influence.
Twitter:
- Twitter uses short snappy captions to deliver recent updates and information. There is a character limit so it is not the best platform to convey lengthy information.
Facebook:
- Facebook is a platform that uses both pictures and words for posts. It is the largest social media platform, and is generally what most businesses use.
TikTok
Example Marketing Video
This marketing video was created by a sober living home in California.
- What did you like about this video?
- What stands out?
- What would you change to tailor a video for your own recovery home?
*Shared with permission from this recovery home – documented in email exchange between Isaac and home owner.
Clients may need referrals to resources that will support their recovery journey.
Part II: Referrals to Resources
Recovery Capital + Client Resources
Recovery Capital
