nurse care manager Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Do You Have a Speakers Bureau for Your Post Holiday Marketing ?

December 9, 2019

Schedule Speaker’s Bureau Now for Post Holiday Barrage of Calls

Your greatest influx of clients calling you is right now over the holidays. This is a good time to schedule speakers’ bureau presentations post-Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas after adult children visit and our concerned or even horrified by the state they find their parents in. Then again after January 1, when there will be heightened awareness, as so many elders become ill and are hospitalized during the height of the flu season.

What is a Speakers Bureau ? Why have one?

There are two marketing groups you have to attract- third parties like elder law attorneys who can refer clients and the individual adult children who are seeking your services in your area served.

The hardest to market to is the adult children and a speakers bureau is a perfect means to find adult children. They are ravenous for solutions to their eldercare problems and finding those answers in community forums from experts with actual answers ( not pills, medical equipment, health plans but actual experts with answers to adult children’s problems – a speakers bureau is the perfect forum for your marketing.)

What do you to prepare for Speaker’s Bureau
A series of hot topics in parent care problems. For example “when Adult Siblings are not doing their share,” When Should an Elder Move from their Home” ” 10 warning signs your parent may need help”
Pre-prepared speeches on a hot topic fully outlined and vetted with user-friendly language
You must create an outline plus handouts with your company contacts plus email contact sheet, so the audience walk away with something you handed them and you can add them to your Constant Contact or Mail chimp database
Start your speech with something interactive so you engage your audience – a pop quiz on aging for example.
Sample -Have you and your aging parents planned for their physical decline?
Do you have resistance when you talk to your aging parents about planning for the losses of aging?
Are you worried about paying for your parents’ care?
What does a speaker’s bureau do for you?

 Promote your agency as an expert in geriatric care management in your area.
 Showcase your GCM aging knowledge of hot aging topics
 Establish your agency as an authority in our field
 Pinpoint your agency as the expert professionals, community potential clients will tum to when they need care
 Give you free publicity- you can advertise for free by sending out news releases ahead and after- through your social media platform

 most important establishes a future bank of clients among the community, the people you speak to by adding their emails to your social media platform
Join me in my new FREE Webinar

FREE Webinar

LEARN HOW TO MARKET LIKE YOUR BUSINESS DEPENDED ON IT

January 23 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm PST

The busiest season for care managers is January & February after as adult children have just visited for the holiday and seeing their elderly parents skating on very thin aging ice

Learn care management marketing so you can:

Capture those desperate clients in January after the festive fright-

Develop a strategic marketing that brings more customers,

Understand branding

Develop a positioning strategy so the caller chooses you

Understand lead generation in care management

Get the best marketing software

Create a 5 Star Marketing Plan for the top 10% of seniors who can afford you.

Click Here To Register

FIND OUT MORE

THIS FREE WEBINAR FROM 2 PM – 3 PM PST January 23, 2020

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Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel Geriatric Care 1

Understand Branding Like Your Business Depended on it!

December 7, 2019

Does Your Company Have a Great Brand?

Branding is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan. Do You understand how to create one for your company? Successful companies like Coca-Cola and Band-Aid have one important thing in common: a strong brand. In fact, their brand names have become generic terms for all similar products in their niche. If you cut yourself, do you ask for a bandage or a Band-Aid? They are the ultimate brands. They have gone into the lexicon.

Geriatric Care Management and Aging Life are not so lucky.
So What is A Brand?

What is a brand? – A brand is made in the mind, not manufactured in a plant” Understanding branding and how it significant it is to your GCM- startup can mean success for your nonprofit’s geriatric care management business. Although often associated with just advertising, branding is essential to everything a company puts in front of current and potential clients: business cards, brochures, web site, trade show booths, letterheads, e-newsletter and so forth.

Branding is about managing people’s image of a company and making sure that image is one that is in line with your company values and the benefits your company provides. By taking the time to manage expectations and build positive gut feelings about your company, you establish yourself as a trusted leader in your market.

Your brand identity is built upon your key messages and position, the unique customer benefits that you provide, and the expectations you set for your target audience.

By consistently delivering the same symbols, messages, design,and logo you are reinforcing those messages, creating a link to your brand, and building an identity for your business that people will remember.

FREE Webinar

LEARN HOW TO MARKET LIKE YOUR BUSINESS DEPENDED ON IT

January 23 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm PST

The busiest season for care managers is January & February after as adult children have just visited for the holiday and seeing their elderly parents skating on very thin aging ice

Learn care management marketing so you can:

Capture those desperate clients in January after the festive fright-

Develop strategic marketing that brings more customers,

Understand branding

Develop a positioning strategy so the caller chooses you

Understand lead generation in care management

Get the best marketing software

Create a 5 Star Marketing Plan for the top 10% of seniors who can afford you.

Click Here To Register

FIND OUT MORE

THIS FREE WEBINAR FROM 2 PM – 3 PM PST January 23, 2020

SIGN UP NOW

15 Alarm Bell for Holiday Visit With Aging Parents

December 6, 2019

ALARM BELLS FOR AGING FAMILY HOLIDAY VISITS

It’s almost Christmas and Hanukka and time for the family visit with older relatives. If you suspect festive cheer with an aging family could devolve into some scary scenes, here are some red flags to put in a checklist and share with your midlife siblings before the holiday celebration.

Perhaps your older parents have piles of junk mail, dirty clothes, unwrapped gifts when Mom used to shine through her color-coordinated presents. All are cause for the sibling 911 alarm- then action.

You can use this list to assess your parents or older family members during the holidays and compare notes on a post-holiday conference call. If all midlife siblings have the same criteria, it makes easier to agree on what to do and what to flag as family New Year’s resolutions.

Below is a list of red flags. If you saw any of these problems on Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or face them on Christmas- now is the time to do something about it. Use this is a checklist.

Alarm Bells List for Visiting Aging Long Distance Relatives During the Holidays

Unpaid bills
Missed appointments
Clutter in a home that was once always neat .
Refusing to go to medical providers
Not taking care of activities of daily living: cooking, bathing, dressing, housekeeping, etc.
Entering contests, credit card maxed out on shopping channels
Recent fall

POST-HOLIDAY EMERGENCY PLAN

When midlife adult children return from the holidays, the family can have a family meeting alone or with an aging professional and look at the problems on everyone’s list, agree on the top red flags and start helping the long-distance family.

Don’t wait till you and your midlife siblings are shocked out of sleep by late-night calls from brothers and sisters, frantically telling them of a crisis with aging Mom or Dad. Don’t force yourself and the other adult children to book last minute, high-cost flights, and gather in scary, sterile hospital rooms with brothers and sisters they have not really communicated in years.

Call an aging life or geriatric care manager for help

4 Reasons Dysfunctional Family Fuels Mayhem on Holiday

December 5, 2019

The normal family is the hand grenade compared to the nuclear bomb of the dysfunctional family

When both are faced with a filial crisis of aging parents being dependent and the adult child needs to take over they cower or explode.

How Do You Know a Dysfunctional Family

1. They lack the ability to resolve conflicts

They have frequent psycho-social blockages that prevent the family from growing emotionally. They fail miserably at moving through all family stages and orchestrating family rituals.

2. They Cannot make Life transitions

Most life transitions in the family, like birth, adolescence, and marriage have been very difficult to make, marked by a lack of support from the parents. Every holiday might have been drunkenly ruined. The parental figures are usually not in charge, nurturing or able to establish establishes clear rules. They have never created an excel spreadsheet on tasks to do to orchestrate a holiday. Like a disease spreading down generations, they never knew how themselves, as their parents wrecked the holidays too.

3. There are murky roles in the family

The chief role of the parent characterized by a lack of leadership of the family and the ability to nurture the children. Mom rarely became the high priestess on Hanukkah or Christmas, the family members generally do not believe the parent is there for them and can be depended upon. The dysfunctional family is colored by bloody strained relationships and unresolved conflicts and drunken ruined Christmas memories

4. They inspire great literature

The family is the inspiration for great literature. O’Neil’s wrenching plays A Long Day’s Journey into Night” portrays the most miserable of dysfunctional families. Alcohol, secrets that have been kept by all for generations splatter the pages of this great play like it does in all the ruined holidays’ children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. Prince of Tides a tale of a southern dysfunctional family gives us a timelier glimpse of a family whose center can never hold together and whose blood oozes all over everyone from one generation to the next. Award-winning plays and films, like Tracey Letts August in Osage County about a ruined ritual funeral from hell when Julia Roberts tries to beat up drug-addled, drunk presiding mother Meryl Streep.

Rituals Bring Out the Worst in this family

When Mom does not make the very small things she was able to pull off like the Latkes or the Christmas cookies she always made every Hanukkah and Christmas, someone has got to be the cook and resentments skyrocket – tempers flare – and the torch just might never get passed.

The family is again thrown into crisis. That means someone just has to take over and the dysfunctional family has no model or spreadsheet on pulling off holidays and caring for a parent who did not care for them.

Learn more about how to work with the dysfunctional family in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition

Can Blue Blue Christmas and Hanukkah Come From The Aging Brain Losing Power ?

December 3, 2019

As Elvis Predicted

Many families have a Blue Blue Christmas-or Hanukkah. Why does an aging crisis occur so often during the holidays? How can so many desperate adult children get care managers on the phone and howl about Mom or Dad in December? There are a million bad reasons, – too much alcohol, too many folks who do not get along and drink that alcohol. But the physical basis for all of this misery in an elder is often a loss of executive function and IADL’s and ADL’s

Why ADL’s and IADL’s.

It takes IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) shopping for gifts, cooking ritual meals and ADL’s walking to shop,decorate serve a ritual meal, climbing ( getting all those decorations out of the attic), grooming ( Mom can be found – in a “messy ensemble” at the feast) by the older person in charge of the holiday to pull it off. Then add depression to the aging stew – widowhood, loneliness and you have the challenges to an elder, usually the woman in the family, in managing this entire titanic ritual.

Crash of Executive Skills

The holidays in aging families can be a disaster for another neurological reason. Mom or Dad’s Executive Skills have crashed just like a computer.

Executive functioning involves the ability to organize, plan and carry out a set of tasks in an efficient manner. It also includes the ability to self-monitor and control our behaviors and multiple other cognitive functions and to perform the goal-directed behavior. It can be described as high-level thinking skills that control and direct lower levels of cognitive functioning.

Planning for the holidays takes those high level thinking skills -to execute and carrying out 25 different major tasks according to a study in the UK- Just think, planning a specific holiday ritual menu,( brisket and latkes or popovers and beef prime rib )- then shopping for it cooking it, planning the ritual items in the celebration – a menorah and

Hanukkah bush, Christmas tree, and creche buying them or getting them out of storage on and on.

Why we may end up with burned brisket or turkey.

This is a massive task event/ planning job taken on by one woman usually and as executive functioning power down in her brain- the computer-, which is our aging brain starts to crash- the result- the family freaks out because Mom forgot the ritual steps.

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