How to Offer Scholarships for Your Doula Services
Are you looking for a sustainable way to give your clients scholarships for your doula services and childbirth education programs?
If you’ve been wondering how to serve women who might not be able to afford a birth doula, purchase childbirth education, or invest in any of your other doula services, then get out a pen and paper, this blog post is for you.
The 3 questions we answer in today’s blog:
What is your favorite type of long-form doula content from a creator's standpoint versus a consumer's standpoint?
What do you do to get back on track in your doula business when you get totally derailed with life? What tips do you have for resetting and refocusing?
I feel really led to provide scholarships for my birth doula services, but how do I make it work?
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 is your favorite type of long-form doula content from a creator's standpoint versus a consumer's standpoint?" -Shae
Note: I've done an entire episode and blog post on long-form content that you can find here.
Long-form content is the content you're making week after week that is longer than a Tik Tok, Instagram reel or grid post, etc. For example, a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, or potentially an Instagram live.
My favorite type of long-form content from a consumer's standpoint, meaning what I personally like to consume, is podcasts by far. That's one of the reasons I chose to host a podcast myself. When I am home, I am listening to podcasts every single day. I have probably about 7 podcasts that I listen to every single episode they release. Also, I'm obsessed with business. That's why I'm here. I listen to podcasts about marketing, growing your business, messaging, branding, and anything else business related.
My favorite type of long-form content from a consumer's perspective is super subjective. I'm not saying that podcasts are for everyone. I was just talking to Lillian, my new executive assistant, and I asked her, "Do you listen to podcasts?" and she's like, "Nope, I am not a podcast type of person." So that just goes to show that not everyone reads blogs. Not everyone listens to podcasts, and not everyone watches YouTube.
My favorite type of long-form content from a creator's standpoint is podcasts too. Again, this isn't saying that this is exactly what you should do. The reason that I love creating podcasts is that I can do it at any time throughout the day. With YouTube, you have to have great lighting and be presentable. Sometimes people are creating more vlog-style YouTube content, but I don't think I could see myself doing that.
I don't want to do a teaching-style YouTube channel because sometimes I'm only able to make podcast content very quickly, without any prep, without setting up anything, without putting on makeup or doing my hair, or even putting on clothes. Sometimes I only have time to make content at night, so there's not any good lighting at all.
In my business, we create the podcast, but we also turn the podcast into a blog. (Which you’re reading right now!) It's not just the transcription, it’s an in-depth, readable blog. That's another reason I love podcasting, creating the blog is way easier when we create it from an audio recording. If we were only creating a blog, that would just be one type of content that we create every week, but we are creating a podcast which means we're very easily creating both a podcast episode and a blog post. We're doubling up on our long-form content.
That's why I love podcasting. It's fun and easy for me. I'm able to produce two episodes per week in only a couple of hours. We've really streamlined the backend of the podcasting which is something that I promise I'm going to teach you guys soon. Part of hiring Lillian, my executive assistant, is increasing our capacity to deliver amazing courses, content, and workshops for you, our podcast listeners and blog readers. One of the workshops we're going to create is podcasting 101. We'll give you all my templates and everything I use in the backend to streamline the process. I'm super excited. Stay tuned!
Question 2: "What do you do to get back on track when you get totally derailed with life? Family stuff came up, and now I'm behind on literally everything in my doula business that I had planned for last week and the week before that. So, what tips do you have for resetting and refocusing?" -Christine
This happens to everyone. We all have these weeks where either we are burnt out so we don't do anything, or something comes up. Maybe you have to get surgery, or you give birth, or maybe you have a bunch of birth clients in-person back to back and you can't do any of the online business tasks that you wanted to do that week.
What I do when I am off track and want to get back into the groove is create a huge to-do list. I’ll throw out all of the old, unfinished to-do lists and create a new one from scratch. I’ll brain dump everything on my mind into one list, which can get a little overwhelming at first, but stick with me. Next, put them into categories. For instance, I put them into categories of what makes me money and what doesn't make me money but still needs to be done.
Next, I put everything in the order I want to complete it, and then start with the list that makes me money, because this is a business, and we're not going to continue doing this if we are not making money.This could look like posting on Instagram (because social media drives clients to our website), or creating sales pages on your website.
In the list that doesn't make you money, you could be checking your email, updating pages on your website that aren't direct money-makers, like an “about me” page, or it could be updating a freebie with your new brand colors.
Get really clear on what your next tasks are going to be, and then focus on the tasks that will make you money first. Then you’ll be right back on track within the week!
Question 3: "I feel really led to provide scholarships for my birth doula services, but how do I make it work? Do we use outside sponsors like they do for college scholarships? Do we just take the brunt and provide the service for free? What do we do?"
There are multiple ways to offer scholarships. One of the ways would be to create a nonprofit section of your business so you could have scholarship sponsors, similar to college scholarships. It's a tax write-off for them, and you could use that money to provide doula support for no charge.
I didn't want to go through all of that, so I told myself, "I want to make enough money to give things away for free, and it’s still sustainable for me. To still be able to pay my bills while giving out scholarships because I’ll make enough money."
For example, every time I launched one of my childbirth education courses, 25% of my sales would be dedicated to the scholarship fund. If I had 8 people join the program, I would let 2 more people in for free on a scholarship. Or if I made $8,000, I would put $2,000 into the scholarship fund.
Disclaimer: Sometimes when people receive a scholarship, they don’t go all in. They're not going to show up like someone who has paid thousands of dollars. This isn't always the case though. Some of my best students from Birthworker Academy are the students who have received partial scholarships. So, it's not always true, but if I am looking at a big overview of all my students who have ever received scholarships, there are a lot of people who didn’t even log into the course platform at all. I'm not saying this to discourage offering scholarships, but you should set some boundaries about when, where, and why you offer scholarships.
A simple way to do scholarships is to keep a link to an Airtable form at the bottom of your sales pages. Airtable is like Google Sheets on steroids. It's phenomenal. Go to birthworker.com/airtable and get your free account. We use it for everything in our business. Create a scholarship application form on Airtable, and have them enter their name, email, phone number, which offer they're hoping to get a scholarship for, and then questions like why do you need this scholarship, do you need a full scholarship or do you need a partial scholarship, and how much of a scholarship would let allow you to actually join this program.
That last question is one of my favorites. Most of the time, students do not need a 100% scholarship. Let's say I have a program that costs $2,000. Maybe someone says they just needs a $1,000 dollar scholarship to join. That question allows me to give people the scholarships that they actually need so that I still have more money in my scholarship fund to give to more people.
I love being able to support those women who need that extra financial support because that was me at one point too. There's no reason I shouldn’t use the privilege I have from my successful business to help other women achieve the same thing. It's something I'm really proud of doing and really happy to offer for the majority of our programs.
If you have any questions about setting up your scholarships, getting back on track when you've been derailed, or questions about long-form content, I would absolutely love to see you inside the Birthworker Membership. You’ll get access to me in live coaching sessions on Zoom. You’ll have a community where you can ask questions. You can even tag me in the group and I’ll answer your question answered there. It's a really fun space filled with other Birthworkers who want to take their business full-time, make a full-time income, stay home with their kids, and who want to potentially retire their partners. So, if that is you, then you belong in the Birthworker Membership.
We also have a higher-level option, which is the VIP Mastermind. Not only do you get access to everything inside the membership, but you get weekly small-group coaching sessions with me. We currently have two spots open for the VIP Mastermind. It is a 12-month program at just $250 per month. Right now we're capping it at 10 members.
If you are 100% ready to take this business full-time, you're already making some money from in-person clients, and you really want to get your online stuff set up, if you want to optimize your website and your freebies, and if you want to create passive online courses, then our VIP Mastermind is absolutely the place for you.
If you're interested in joining the Birthworker Membership or the VIP Mastermind, shoot me a DM on Instagram, and we can chat a little bit about what success might look like for you inside of our programs!
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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.