Strategic Recruitment ™
The number of children in placed in foster care is projected to exceed 500,000 in 2009, and state agencies face a crisis in recruiting and retaining resource parents for these children. CSF is helping to turn the tide with Strategic Recruitment ™, our proprietary outreach model that helps foster care and adoption family recruiters find the best families for children in care, including children with special needs (sibling groups, older youth and teens, children with medical and behavioral issues, etc.). Our experience in recruitment over the past ten years has taught us many things about people, their motivations, and their capacity for change. But perhaps the most important lesson we’ve learned is "don’t focus on what you have to say, but on what your audience needs to hear." Strategic Recruitment is an audience segmentation process that enables us to identify families living in specific neighborhoods in your jurisdiction, and to determine the key influences on those families decision making processes that will motivate them to foster or adopt. Taking sample data on successful foster or adoptive parents from an agency, we then use that data to identify specific geographic locations in which we will find similar families. Once these households are located, we can then access a series of powerful national databases that tell us all about the families we want to recruit: from occupation types, income levels, and education, to media habits, leisure activities, and faith-community participation. The result of our analysis is a series of Family Portraits: comprehensive narrative reports on families targeted for recruitment. We use Family Portraits to design every message and all outreach material generated for the recruitment effort, from print materials, to public service announcements, to the way agencies talk to families and community members about foster care or adoption. The Family Portraits become an invaluable tool to guide the overall design of the recruitment and outreach initiatives.