Over the past year, in conversations with various pregnancy centers, one striking observation was the massive discrepancy in the number of clients centers receive each month.
I’ve talked to some center directors who are overjoyed at the prospect of having more than one client in a given week and others who have so many clients they’re having to turn some away.
Is the center only receiving one client per week underperforming? What about the center with more clients than they can handle? Are they overperforming? The answer is not so simple.
A Tale of Two Cities: Determining Your Effective Reach
How many clients your center should be getting on a monthly basis is determined by a variety of factors:
- What is the population of the area your center is in?
- How many people can reach your center within walking/short driving distance?
- What is the legality of abortion in your state?
- What is your center’s budget?
Depending on how you answer, you may actually be overperforming even if your center only has a handful of clients each month or underperforming if your facilities are constantly full.
For example, a rural pregnancy center that gets around 10 clients a month is probably performing much better than an inner-city clinic that gets around 30.
The Unplanned Pregnancy Calculator
So, how many clients should your center have per month? This number – what we call your “Effective Reach” – can be determined by simple math.
Here’s how it works:
Take the population of your service area. Compare that with public data on monthly unplanned pregnancies within that area. On average, a high-performing center can reach 30 percent of all unplanned pregnancies within its service area.
If that math is hard to do in your head or you don’t have data on the population of your service area, 828Collective offers a handy unplanned pregnancy calculator tool for you to use. You can access it here.
Extending Your Effective Reach
Understanding your Effective Reach and the number of unplanned pregnancies you should be impacting is vital to improving your center.
By having this data, you can more effectively evaluate your current efforts and help your support teams and board understand the task ahead of you. This helps you set realistic goals and secure more funding.
Once you understand your effective reach, you can determine a plan of action.
For centers that are at capacity but under their Effective Reach target, that means more fundraising to scale services to reach the community better.
For centers that are underperforming, this might mean re-evaluating how they market themselves, including a website refresh.
And for centers that are overperforming, this is a chance to share with the pro-life community what you’re doing so that others can emulate your success.
This blog was written by 828Collective – a digital marketing agency for pregnancy centers. We provide pregnancy centers with industry-leading websites and marketing services at a price that is affordable for even the smallest centers. We devote ourselves to understanding Her Journey so you can more effectively reach her at every stage of it.
Visit us online or schedule a time to chat with us about your center’s marketing strategy, Her Journey, or any other questions you may have.