Gaining Confidence as a New Doula, Email Tech, and Memberships
Do you struggle with confidence as a new doula, fumble with email tech, or feel flustered about your offer logistics?
If you’ve been wondering how to get yourself together and start feeling GOOD about your birth business, then get out a pen and paper, this post is for you.
The 3 questions we answer in today’s blog:
“How do I gain confidence in my doula skills? I often feel like I don't know enough or I haven't had enough experience.”
“I'm starting an email list for my doula business. Is there a downside to using Squarespace's built-in email services as opposed to a separate one like MailerLite?”
“When I'm accepting new members into my pregnancy and birth membership, should I keep the doors open anytime?”
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 blog, click here.
Question #1: "How do I gain confidence in my doula skills? I often feel like I don't know enough or I haven't had enough experience. It's a hurdle I cannot seem to get over."
All right, buckle up everyone, this is going to be a rant. She doesn't really have confidence in her doula skills because she feels like she doesn't know enough and she doesn't have enough experience. So let's talk about those two things.
I want to ask Dana, why do you think knowledge and experience are what make a good doula? In my opinion, that is absolutely not the case. It couldn't be further from the truth. The most knowledgeable doula in the world can still easily sabotage a birth with her assumptions. And maybe even more so than a new doula because maybe the most knowledgeable doula in the world comes to the birth with her hero cape on, with her doula hat on, trying to fix everything. That is definitely not the doula that I would be looking for. Or the doula who's attended 40,000 births could also easily sabotage birth with her assumptions because the more births you go to, the more biases you collect, and the more assumptions you collect in your doula bag. You need to really work to let that go, and a lot of people don't understand that they need to be actively working on that.
Just because someone is “knowledgeable,” or just because someone has attended 40,000 births, does not inherently make them a good doula or even a better doula than someone who's just starting out and hasn't even attended a birth yet. A doula with all the experience and knowledge can still rip away a woman's power. They can still coerce a mom into a corner, and they can still stand by and watch as a woman is assaulted by her medical team.
Being a good doula has way more to do with who you are as a person and how you show up in the world. And yes, I can teach you some of that, but most of that has to come from you. Most of that is literally who you are as a person. And that is the foundation of my doula training program: self-mastery. I even tell my students that if you nail the self-mastery stuff, you're already a great doula. Even if you don't know the first thing about birth, even if you have zero experience, if you can nail that self-mastery, you're already a good doula. If you can show up in a room and be aware of your triggers and aware of your biases, but also be able to set them aside to fully support the woman who's giving birth without trying to fix her, without trying to use all your experience to save her, if you can do that, you're already a good doula.
So instead of telling ourselves, "I need more experience before I'm good," I want you to ask yourself, "What human qualities do I already have that make me a good doula?" (If you're new to Birthworker.com and you want to hear the longer version of this rant, just go back a couple of blogs, to Episode 22, “What Makes a Good Doula These Days”)
So hold on to that idea and just watch how true it is. The more births you attend, you're going to say to yourself, "Oh yeah, I already have what it takes within me. I don't need to go to hundreds of births per year to be worthy. I don't need to be the most knowledgeable person in the world to be worthy." You are already worthy of finding clients, of being an amazing doula, and of being proud of yourself and proud of the work that you do.
Question #2: “I'm starting an email list for my doula business. Is there a downside to using Squarespace's built-in email services as opposed to a separate one like MailerLite?”
I have a free resource called the Tech Stack, and it has all of my tech/software recommendations. In there is a mailing software called MailerLite. I love MailerLite and I would totally use it over something like Squarespace's built-in email software. The reason is that there is really no such thing as an “all-in-one platform” that actually does a killer job in all of the different areas. Squarespace through and through is a website platform. So their mailing software is really not that good. Their selling software is really not that good. Their analytics software is really not that good. We want to go to other places so we can get the best of the best. That doesn't necessarily mean we have to pay a ton of money either, because actually, Squarespace's email services cost money, whereas MailerLite is free for your first thousand subscribers.
In MailerLite, you can schedule emails, you can organize your audience into specific groups and tags based on what freebie they downloaded, based on their due date, or based on if they're a paying customer of one of your programs. You are able to send emails to specific people based on which group they're in. For example, I send emails to my students every week, and then I also send other emails to my entire email list every week. Some emails I actually don't want going to my students. If I'm sending a sales email about the membership, then I'm not going to send that to people who are already in the membership. These are all things that you cannot really track when you're using a low-end email service like Squarespace.
Something else that MailerLite can do is set up really, really in-depth automations for free. This is something that actually Mailchimp doesn't even do on their basic plans. In MailerLite, for instance, someone could get on your email list by getting a freebie. You can automate as many as a hundred emails on the back end of that. I tell my students to do five emails in a welcome sequence, completely automated in MailerLite. So cool.
Also, MailerLite tracks the open rates, click rates– it tracks everything. You can add gifs to emails. You can completely customize emails. It's just absolutely phenomenal. There's really no reason to not switch to MailerLite, especially when it’s free for your first thousand subscribers.
Question #3: "When I'm accepting new members into my pregnancy and birth membership, should I keep the doors open anytime? Should I open them once each quarter, or maybe once a month for a few days?"
I know Erica, and I love Erica. She hosts a membership called the Mother Club. This is such a great question. My answer is that it really depends on the nature of the membership. If this is a group of pregnant women and you want it to be a really small group and you want everyone to be really close-knit, you might want to actually just open it every quarter and then have it be a three-month-long membership that people join. So they just join for three months, and they're with that same group of people for three months. New people aren’t coming in all the time.
But that being said, you could also look at it and think, okay, this is a membership for pregnant people, which means nobody wants to wait three months to join. If someone misses the cutoff, you don't want to have to say sorry, it's going to be three months until you can join again, because this woman's pregnant. She's giving birth in the next couple of months. It's either now or never for her. So do you want to turn that person away when they would have joined? That's a hard decision. And it really depends on the nature of the membership, what kind of group you're actually trying to create.
I'll take my membership, for instance. The Birthworker Membership is a business membership for all Birthworkers, so doulas, midwives, breastfeeding pros, and childbirth educators. I decided to keep the membership open for women to join whenever. That's called Evergreen. And the reason I did that is that I don't want to have to launch it. I don't want to have to go through seasons where it's one month I'm launching it, and then the next three months I have no sales because the doors are closed. I actually wanted this to be something that people can join every single day. My goal at the end of this year is to have about 20 new members join every single month. And that wouldn't be possible if it was on a launch schedule where I opened the doors just once per quarter.
The other thing that I'll say that’s worth mentioning is that I don't think anyone should create a product on Evergreen from the beginning, especially if it's more of a high-ticket product, above a hundred dollars or so. You should live-launch it first. But with a membership, and I know Erica already live launched her membership, but I would've told Erica to live launch her membership. Do a founding member's launch, then do another live launch, and then take what worked and then make it Evergreen.
If you want to learn more about that and what I think about live launching vs Evergreen, just head back to Episode 23 because I went pretty in-depth in that episode, and I think you'll love that.
If you love these 3-in-15 episodes where I get to answer your questions on the podcast and on the blog, you should check out the Birthworker Membership. Inside the Birthworker Membership, not only do you get access to my comprehensive business course (made specifically for birthworkers) to help you take your doula business and grow an online legacy, but you also get me as your coach. You get a community where you can ask me questions every single day. We hop on Zoom every week, either with me or a guest speaker or just with the community. You can ask questions and get live feedback, and you’ll have an entire hype team cheering you on every step of the way.
When you join the Birthworker Membership, you can work through the 10-module business course and completely transform your doula business, whether you're just starting or maybe you're already burning out from having way too many in-person clients. You can ask me your questions every single step of the way, and get coached by me and the other amazing guest speakers that we have every single month. Click here to join, or send me a DM on Instagram with the word “SUSTAINABLE” and we will chat to see if the membership is right for you!
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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.