Back-up Doulas, Workshop ‘Best Practices,’ and Getting Testimonials From Your Doula Clients
Do you have a plan for if (more like when…) you miss a birth? Have you been wondering about how to sell a workshop passively? What about the best way to “harvest” testimonials as a doula?
If you said yes to any of those, then get out a pen and paper, this blog post is for you!
The 3 questions we answer in today’s blog:
"What do I do if I can't find a backup doula and I end up missing my doula client's birth?"
"I'm hosting a live birth prep workshop and I want to continue selling it after the live workshop is over. Can I just sell the recording or do I have to rerecord it?"
“When is the best time to ask an in-person doula client for a testimonial? And do you have any certain questions that you ask?”
Every Friday, I answer your biggest questions right here on the Birthworker Blog AND the Birthworker Podcast.
To submit a question for next week’s podcast, click here.
Question 1: "What do I do if I can't find a backup doula and I end up missing my doula client's birth?" -Lexi
It completely depends on your contract. Most doula contracts have specific clauses about the particular reasons that they might miss a birth and what happens if they do miss the birth. It's never happened to me, but it happens to a lot of doulas. For instance, you might miss a birth because you're attending another birth, or there was a natural disaster. If you live near me, we have hurricanes, and with that comes power outages, road blockages, etc. If you live in other parts of the world, maybe it's tornadoes, monsoons, or snowstorms that might cause you to miss a birth.
Even events like a car accident, sickness, your phone dying, sleeping through the phone calls in the middle of the night, or your client didn't call you because the birth was too fast, are all common reasons to miss a birth. The biggest takeaway here is making sure you have something in your contract that specifies what happens in scenarios like these.
Even if you've been a doula for a while and you’ve never missed a birth, it's still quintessential to have these conversations with your clients before both of you sign the contract. So make sure to get crystal clear about your personal boundaries and put the systems in place so it's easy for you to respect your own boundaries.
In my business, at this point, I'm taking on at most two clients per month in person. I have the capacity to customize everybody's contract, which takes a little bit of extra time, but I have that time since I'm not taking on a ton of clients. What that looks like in action is simply having conversations with my clients and asking them what they're looking for.
Sometimes I don't have a backup doula, and I usually don’t offer refunds if I miss someone’s birth, but there are exceptions. For instance, for the birth I have coming up, I'm going to be on vacation until her due date, but she didn't want me to set up a backup doula because if I'm not there, she doesn't want another doula there. Which is totally justified. So if she ends up having her baby while I'm on vacation, we decided on a partial refund for her. And that works for me.
Despite this, I rarely recommend doing any type of refund for missed births, especially if you're at your monthly capacity and declined your services to other women because you were "booked out." Giving out refunds doesn’t make sense when you could have said yes to those other clients.
I typically don't ever recommend doing refunds, but let's go into reasons why I personally would or would not refund a client.
I would only ever consider a partial refund because I do a lot of work upfront. My clients get access to my childbirth education programs, we have prenatal appointments, I'm doing phone calls and text support. So a reason that I would do a partial refund is if I simply did not answer my phone. Maybe my phone died or I didn't hear it ring in the middle of the night. Or if I promised to have a backup doula, but something happened and she didn’t show up, that's another reason I would partially refund a client.
Here are the reasons I would not consider refunding a client. One is that they didn't call me. I do not do refunds if you do not call me to come to your birth. That is a boundary that I am very secure in and will happily enforce. Another nonrefundable scenario for my business is if the birth happened too fast for me to get there in time. One of the clauses I have in my contracts is that I will get to their birth within two hours of them asking me to come to the birth. If that baby is born within those two hours and I don't get there in time, I'm not going to do a refund for that client.
I would also not partially refund a client if I am at another birth. This is just part of my contract. Another one is natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and snowstorms that we talked about. And even in events like power outages, car accidents, and potentially even sickness, I would probably not do a refund.
So to answer the question, if you can't find a backup doula and end up missing your client's birth, do whatever is written in your contract.
PS– If this is something that you're interested in, I cover this extensively inside Birthworker Academy, which is my doula training program. But if you want access to just my contracts, DM me on Instagram. If enough people are interested, then we will put together a contract package for you guys so you can purchase our contracts and just use those so you don't have to even worry about stuff like this.
Question 2: "I'm hosting a live birth prep workshop and I want to continue selling it after the live workshop is over. Can I just sell the recording or do I have to rerecord it?" -Nicole
Honestly, either way can work, but I would sell the exact recording of the live workshop if the workshop was very straight to the point with little to no distractions, and if the Q&A was fully relevant. I would also only sell the recording of the live workshop if there was no time-sensitive pitch at the end. Sometimes at the end of a live workshop, I’ll say something like, "Join my program for a discount this weekend only." That wouldn't make sense in the recording if I was going to continue to sell the workshop all the time, which we also call selling on evergreen.
If I was going to continue to sell the workshop on evergreen from my website, but I don't really want it to be a key component in my online business, I would just sell the live recording. If I'm not going to run ads for it or have this offer as the offer at the end of my welcome sequence, no big deal, I’ll sell the original recording. It's okay if there are mistakes in it and it's not 100% relevant. I will just make it very clear on the sales page that this is the recording of the live workshop and there's a Q&A included.
On the contrary, I would recommend re-recording the workshop if you want it to be a key piece in your big-picture funnel. You will be able to edit out your mistakes and make sure it's A+ quality, which is a good idea if you want people to first buy the workshop and then continue on to buy your higher ticket offers.
I do want to address that this slightly contradicts my last blog post where I claimed that the quality of the course doesn't matter a lot of times, and what's more important is the transformation you take people through. I actually think it's a little different when we're talking about low-ticket offers like workshops. We want someone to buy this workshop and say, "Oh my God, if this is what she gives for just $25, I'm going to go spend $1,000 with her because I know that it is going to be 100% worth it."
I would also recommend re-recording if you got off-topic a lot during the live workshop. If it was a very chit-chat style workshop where you asked people to maybe unmute themselves and come talk, that's fantastic for a live workshop, but when someone's watching the recording, it can make them feel out of touch, or FOMO. Don’t leave them feeling like they missed out.
And the last reason that I would recommend re-recording the workshop altogether is if you're just not happy with the outcome and the way that it flowed. Going back to Episode 41, the transformation that the client gets is way more important than the delivery, but that is to an extent. If your baby is crying the entire time, there's a chance it will be hard for those students to focus, and so we don't want that to happen. So if for any reason you're unhappy with the outcome of the workshop, go ahead and just rerecord it, and edit it to your liking.
I will say that almost always I use my live workshops to “practice" and see which parts of the workshop get the most engagement, to see what kind of questions were asked during the Q&A, and to see what kind of things people are posting in the chat. Then I will take all of that information and rerecord a new workshop with no audience. I'll often rearrange things, get rid of certain sections, and add new sections into the workshop that I missed before, all based on the feedback from that live workshop.
I love doing live workshops, but most of the time, I will re-record it if I want to sell it passively from my website.
Question 3: “When is the best time to ask an in-person doula client for a testimonial? And do you have any certain questions that you ask?”
There are a few kinds of testimonials you can collect from your in-person doula clients. One of my favorites is a screenshot of a DM or text message. If they send you a message during their pregnancy or even following their birth, something like, "Oh my God, Kyleigh, that support was so amazing." Or it could even be from the father texting you. I always get amazing texts from the dads.
Make sure to always screenshot those and keep them organized in something like Airtable. Airtable is the organizational software we use in my company to keep everything squared away. If you don't have an Airtable account yet, head to birthworker.com/Airtable and sign up because it’s totally free and it's going to change your life.
The second kind of testimonial is one that really gives you the most bang for your buck, and it's usually really easy for your client too. This is a video testimonial. So you would jump on Zoom for a really quick 15-minute chat, record the whole thing so you can go back later and edit it perfectly, and then you can put that video on your website if you want.
You could also take the transcript from that video and use that as a testimonial for your website or social media. These video testimonials on Zoom are a really authentic way to have a normal conversation about the support that they received from you.
The third way that I love doing testimonial “harvesting” is to send them a survey form to fill out on their own time. Sometime after the birth, you can use Airtable to send them a quick feedback survey form. These are super easy, but honestly, the answers from surveys are nowhere near as in-depth as live Zoom calls with your clients.
So with that being said, a few great questions to ask on either the Zoom call or survey form are:
What was your goal going into your birth?
How would you describe your birth experience?
Were our prenatal appointments adequate in helping prepare for labor, birth, and postpartum?
Was there anything that you found particularly helpful or unhelpful?
In what specific ways did you love the support that I provided?
If you could change anything about the support you received from me, what would you change?
We want to paint a really good picture of their entire journey. Where were they when they started? What was their goal? What did it look like for them to prepare to achieve their goal? How did you help them achieve that goal? How did the entire process unfold? Even if their birth didn't actually go as planned or as they had hoped, all of those things are really amazing things that you could take and curate into an amazing testimonial for your website, social media, or wherever you want to post this testimonial.
Thank you so much for being here today. If you were reading this blog post and thinking, "Kyleigh, can I just ask you questions like these every single day?" Maybe you don't want to wait until next Friday's episode, or you want your business to grow fast and you have questions literally right now. If that sounds like you, shoot me a DM on Instagram with the word “sustainable,” and let's chat about how I can help you grow a super sustainable doula business a whole lot faster and with a lot more fun. I cannot wait to hear about your goals and to help you absolutely crush them.
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.