📎Marketing to schools using the pre-school screening
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Marketing with preschool screening services
My therapy group uses the Preschool screenings to market occupational therapy contracts with private preschools (including church preschools and daycares), state funded preschools, and government funded preschools (such as Headstart).
Private preschools are often looking for OT groups to provide services for children, yet, they often focus on those few kids that really, really need OT. To have a successful therapy practice, it makes little sense to have therapists drive from location to location and seeing only one or two kids per location. Building relationships with a few preschools is often worthwhile as the therapist can build a caseload and stay in place often a full day. Using the Preschool screening tool is a great way to market your services and to help teachers understand that there are often wayyy more children on site that need O.T. then they first imagine.
The way I would market to them is first find out if they have an OTP partner that they are working with. If not, I would send them a BRIEF email to introduce yourself and tell them that you have some availability and looking for a school that would like to partner with an OTP/OT group. The content of the email would be based on what you can provide, if you accept/file insurance, and details such as that. One of my emails that I sent to a YWCA afterschool site was :
Hello Mr. James! Thank you for taking my call today. As promised, I am following up with the information I mentioned. I am attaching a PDF that explains all about what we do. Learning Charms Foundation is based right here in Charlotte and our mission is to continue working with agencies that provide educational and caregiving support to children who are at risk or low income. We are a group of occupational therapists and we provide support to your students at no cost to your organization or to the families. For school aged children, we mainly help with developmental weaknesses that hold them back from making adequate academic growth, such as attention skills, handwriting skills, fine motor skills, sensory processing skills, emotional control, and visual perceptual skills (reading). Normally, in a classroom of 24 typically developing children that are low income, we find that up to 50% are qualifying for some level of support from us.
We have been extremely busy as we are seeing that children continue to qualify for OT at a high rate. We do have some availability and therefore I am reaching out to you. I would be interested in talking to you if you feel that our services could be of value to your students, teachers and families. Having an occupational therapist on site doesn't cost the school money but increases the value for the families.
I followed up with this PDF (below) that I've made this so that you can create a copy in CANVA and edit as you would like.
My warning is to cut your losses. If the director and/or teachers seem hostile about having OT in the building, move along and don't spin your wheels there. There are PLENTY of preschools that want you there and will appreciate you! Sometimes there are directors and or teachers that don't see our value and they therefore will speak negatively to the parents about working with OT and may try to block you from getting a consent.
Cost
Your cost for a preschool screening will also depend on who you are marketing to. At private preschools, I find that the going rate is between $20-$50 dollars per screening. This would include the time with the student (about 10 minutes) and to send home the screening report via email to the parent. The screening is often the way to get your foot in the door however, sometimes parents know what OT is and are ready to get started with an OT Evaluation
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