Florida Big Bend CBC Foster Care Recruiting
The Community-Based Care (CBC) authority of Florida’s Big Bend region has always put a strong emphasis on recruitment of foster families, but after years of using traditional media-driven outreach, they decided that it was time to invest in an approach that could show clear and direct outcomes of their efforts. So the big bend CBC contacted CSF to design a series of targeted outreach events and conduct recruitment training with three private agencies responsible for recruitment of foster families in the thirteen-county region of Big Bend. CSF worked with the staff of the three agencies to determine recruitment needs, history and goals. Using neighborhood segmentation, we identified twelve target family types to work with children that had specific special needs (older children, sibling groups, etc.) across the Florida panhandle. We wrote in-depth descriptions and targeting outreach strategies for these populations to help recruiters understand how to cultivate new foster families in their regions. Additionally, CSF conducted a series of recruitment workshops for the recruitment, licensing and management staff of the CBC and the three private agencies, teaching the mechanisms of designing Strategic Recruitment activities and using targeting recruitment techniques. The three agencies have identified concrete goals for increasing resource families using our Strategic Recruitment model. CSF has worked with these agencies to help them establish a plan for designing activities and recording outcomes. CSF designed a tailored Big Bend FosterWare party as a recruitment tool and Strategic Recruitment activity for the entire region. CSF continues to work with these agencies to offer support as Strategic Recruitment activities are designed and executed.
