Improving Communications with Senior Living Families
Senior care facilities are expansive operations, with many covering acres and acres of ground, multiple buildings spread across multiple cities and regions. Being able to reach one family member for one resident is simple enough, but with tight budgets and limited staff, expanding your reach to multiple family members is difficult at best - until now.
The family communication challenges faced by senior care administrators are not very different than those of school superintendents, HR departments, customer care centers and many other types of organizations with large employee and constituent bases. How are these varied operations improving communications to many? They're doing it with broadcast phone, email and text communication solutions.
And, it's not just improving communications with family members that is at issue. With many more options available to them, more and more seniors are choosing independent living arrangements to take advantage of centralized services and to have access to a continuum of care for later stages in life. Independent residents can be quite active and on the go, and reaching them with timely updates regarding facilities, programs, etc., is a growing challenge. When the elevator stops working just hours before dinner time, how can seniors living in detached units be effectively reached? A phone broadcast solution is the answer!
Over 80% of public schools in the US now use a broadcast phone solution to reach parents with timely notices for everything from school cancellations to student absentee alerts. The same process can be leveraged by senior care centers to reach residents, families and staff. Solutions like GroupCast offer three powerful solutions in one easy-to-use web-based service:
Phone Broadcast - provides the ability for an administrator to record a personal message and send it to a list of recipients. For example, reaching independent residents in their homes regarding a critical facility repair, or reaching out to all the family members of skilled nursing residents on the eve of Mother's Day, Easter or other holidays with plans for parking or special services.
New polling services allow your phone broadcast to collect a response from the called party, for example asking if families will be attending your July 4th picnic or asking independent residents if their Cable TV is back on.
Email Broadcast- provides the ability to send mass emails and newsletters to staff and family members. There may be some independent residents who are email savvy, but email broadcast would be most suited for reaching staff and family members. Services like GroupCast offer robust targeting capabilities allowing emails to be sent to segments of your population. Sure, Outlook® can be used for email purposes, but digging a hole with a shovel is easier than with a spoon. The right tool makes the job much easier and using a broadcast email solution to reach large numbers of staff or families, is far easier than using traditional email methods.
Text Broadcast - we are a generation away from having our seniors addicted to their mobile phones, but their children and your staffers are probably connected to their phones 24/7. Broadcast text messaging is an ideal way to send information to large groups. Text messages are seen as less intrusive than voice phone calls, and they offer a means to store information and provide links to additional information, so they are a versatile communication method. Broadcast text messaging leverages the power of texting, with the power of the Internet. Through one site many members can be managed and messaged all at once.
Leveraging broadcast phone, email and text messaging within senior care operations is a sure way to increase communication and engagement with residents, families and staff. Requiring no hardware, software phone lines, and limited training and expense, solutions like GroupCast can help you achieve your communications improvement goals.
Learn more here.