Staying Organized With Your Doula Interviews
The pandemic baby boom has hit and your inbox is flooded with inquiries!! HOORAY!
EVERYONE is looking for a doula and if you’re like many of us, you’re equally excited and overwhelmed.
Staying organized when you have countless inquiries coming in and all the pregnant people looking to schedule interviews can be tough, but we’re here to offer our expert advice on staying organized as a birth professional!
Our three top pieces of advice to stay organized with your inquiries & interviews:
1) Create a workflow that helps you keep track of who you’ve contacted and where they’re at in the interview/hiring process.
2) Have canned emails you can use to easily & quickly reply to all your doula inquiries.
3) Use some type of online scheduler that keeps your interview schedule & availability up-to-date.
Workflows For Your Doula Interviews
One way to utilize a workflow is through a CRM. We wrote about CRMs and your birth/postpartum business a few months ago and you can read about that here. Workflows are a series of actions you can take to keep your prospective and active clients organized and to make your life as a doula SO much easier!
You can also use our FREE Doula Interview Checklist to create your own custom workflow either in your CRM program or Google Drive or whatever other setup works for you. For a super low-cost option, just print out a copy of the checklist for each inquiry you receive, put their name on top and check off the items once completed. Keep all the copies in a folder and review them weekly to stay on top of your task list.
Canned Emails For Doula Interviews
Using canned emails is a HUGE time saver. Basically you create a series of emails for each process of your workflow. For example you have an email for when you receive an inquiry, one that confirms their interview appointment, and one that you send when following up. When using a CRM you can trigger your canned emails to send automatically. Without a CRM all you have to do is copy and paste the pre-written response, customize the email with the inquiries name and any personal details they mentioned that you want to address and voila! Some people think canned emails are impersonal, but you can make them as personal as you want by adding to the emails at any time! If you’re looking to save even more time in getting organized in your business, check out our email templates!
Online Schedulers for Doula Interviews
Having a scheduler that you send to prospective clients is another huge time saver and something that helps streamline your life. We recommend finding one that can sync with your Apple or Google calendars for ease. This way any events you add to your Apple or Google calendars will automatically be blocked and prospective clients won’t be able to schedule an interview for those times.
A few of our favorite schedulers are:
Dubsado (use code nbco to get 20% off your first month or first year subscription)
Each have their pros and cons. Dubsado is also a CRM so you can keep your workflows, contracts, invoices, and scheduler all in one place. Square allows you to book other services and send invoices. Calendly is user friendly and syncs with Paypal and Stripe to accept payments of invoices and Acuity syncs with Squarespace so if they’re you’re website host, that’s a good and easy option.
Whatever option you choose, find a booking calendar or scheduler that not only allows people to schedule doula interviews and syncs to your calendar, but one that also sends out reminder texts or emails for you!
In our experience, time savers like workflows, canned emails, and booking calendars make running the business side of your doula business SO much easier! While it may take some time to set everything up, the time you save in the long run is worth it! For more ways to streamline your birth and postpartum doula business visit our DOULA BLOG and our DOULA SHOP.