Websites
BrightStar Launches “CareTogether” Online Service
Back in 2010, we featured BrightStar Care’s social media prowess in this interview. It was clear then that BrightStar understood the power of social technology to bring people together. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw this article on Mashable showcasing BrightStars newest social technology venture – an online care tool called “CareTogether” that helps family and friends coordinate the care of a loved one with features like Care Team List, Appointment Calendars, Tasks Lists, and Online Journal.
The brilliance of this tool for BrightStar is that they offer the tool for free to anyone, even if you’re not a BrightStar customer. This puts the BrightStar brand in front of non-customers who may need BrightStar’s services and offers these prospects a powerful tool that provides real value. Customers get the added bonus of being able to integrate the tool into BrightStar’s scheduling system – allowing them to better manage care appointments.
The tool is similar to Lotsa Helping Hands and Cozy, both of which are also free. Here’s a video explaining the tool:
Senior Living Websites and Social Integration
When Will Senior Living Websites Evolve?
Senior living communities are very social places, so it would stand to reason that senior living companies would want to showcase some of the social aspects of their communities on their website.
Many senior living companies use a Facebook Page as an online community for residents, staff, and family members, but most don’t integrate that Facebook Page into their websites. Why not? The standard way senior living companies demonstrate their presence on Facebook is by placing a small Facebook icon on their homepage, but who really ever clicks on those?
Why not entice people to visit your Facebook Page by embedding a small section of the actual page right into your website’s homepage using Facebook Social Plugins instead?
When we sat down recently with the folks at Meadow Ridge, a premier Continuing Care Retirement Community in Connecticut, to develop a strategy for their new website, we made the case for building social integration right into the design.
Meadow Ridge is an amazingly vibrant place with a beautiful campus, state-of-the-art facilities, a talented leadership team, and, most importantly, a lively community of residents, staff, and family members. But their website was an outdated and static digital brochure with no ability for site visitors to get a real sense of the place, a feel for the community, or to engage with the company through modern social channels.
So, among many of the strategic design elements we built into the site, we embedded their Facebook Page right into the homepage.
The plugin gives the page a dynamic social feel and shows that the company has real fans who love them, not stock images of fake seniors spouting canned marketing messages. Check out the site and let us know what you think.
If you’re interested in a new strategic social design for your website, contact us. We’d be glad to help.
Silverado Senior Living and the ROI of 24/7 Chat
I’ve been watching what Silverado Senior Living has been doing with social media for a while now, and I’ve always been a big fan of the company and the services they provide. So when I moderated a round table discussion on Social Media for Senior Living at LTC LINK in Chicago last week, I was excited that Nancy Convertito, Regional Director for Sales & Marketing for Silverado Senior Living, Hospice, and At-Home, was at the table. Nancy shared some interesting stats about Silverado’s innovative 24/7 Chat Line featured on their website. First, let me explain how it works:
When you land on Silverado’s website, a window pops up that asks if you would like to chat with live professional to get answers to your questions right now. Here’s an image of the pop-up…
If you click “yes,” you are immediately connected to a person who can answer your questions, even at 2AM when you can’t sleep because you’re trying to figure out what to do with your mother who is unsafely living at home with moderate-stage dementia. If you click “no,” the pop-up disappears and you are free to navigate the company’s website. You can also call call a toll-free number to chat with a Silverado representative about your issues 24/7.
Now, I’m not a big fan of pop-ups on any website, but this one is pretty benign, not obnoxious, and gives site visitors the ability to quickly get rid of it if they don’t want to use it. Plus, the value proposition to a site visitor is pretty compelling: find exactly what I need right now with the help of a real human being vs. spend 20 minutes looking around a website with no guarantee I’ll find what I’m looking for.
But here’s the most compelling part: Nancy shared that the Chat Line paid for itself in 7 months. Since January 2011, 350 inquiries have come through the Chat Line and 10% of those inquiries converted.
So why are so many people who visit Silverado’s website using the Chat Line? It’s because many family caregivers who are looking for the type of services Silverado offers don’t have time to futz around on a big company website. They need answers, and they need them now. They need solutions to their problems, and they want them yesterday. The Chat Line gives site visitors this option. And it’s clearly paying off for Silverado.
But this story illuminates another very important issue for the vast majority of senior living, long-term care, homecare and hospice providers (detailed in this 2009 post): your websites are obsolete, outdated, and totally ineffective. The Silverado Chat Line story shows that if you provide your site visitors with a more human experience, easy access to the information they need, and resources designed to help them make informed decisions, you will gain customers.
Your website should be strategically designed to do 4 things:
- Attract new visitors
- Inform site visitors
- Engage site visitors
- Create business value by converting site visitors to customers
The 24/7 Chat Line is helping Silverado do all of the above. Kudos to Nancy and the Silverado crew for innovating “next practices” and sharing their results with us.
To learn more about how CareNetworks call help your organization create an amazing online presence, contact us. We design and build websites and provide social media strategy and solutions to senior living, LTC, homecare, and hospice providers.
CareNetworks Is Now On WordPress (And So Can You!)
Okay, the title was inspired by Steven Colbert’s book. Anyway, for the past two years, the CareNetworks website was running on the HubSpot platform. Well, times have changed. Thanks to our WordPress Development Wizard, Colby Wright, the site is now operating on WordPress, the most popular open source content management system (CMS) and blogging platform in the world. We’ve been setting up our clients on WordPress and they love it, so why would we not use it ourselves? Colby did an amazing job migrating the site and all of it’s contents over to WordPress and the site looks just as good, if not better, than before. Plus, we have 10 times the functionality.
WordPress is an amazingly powerful publishing platform and can handle websites for any size enterprise. Best part, it’s free. Yes, free. You still have to pay for design, development and hosting, but the platform itself is free (unlike HubSpot which was costing us $3K per year). WordPress is also very easy to use, is great for SEO, and allows you to manage all of your site’s content on your own. It’s really a no-brainer.
If you’re interested in migrating your existing site like we did, or you’re due for a new site all together, drop us a line. We can help.