The Results

AI-assisted research suggests less than 20% of Assisted Living communities in the United States have an identifiable program. Of those, almost 70% are hard to find, and less than 12% received an Excellent user-friendliness score.

The Purpose

We were curious how well our assumptions about Referral Marketing in Aging Care would hold up against real data - data that we knew would not be readily available without specific research. So, we used AI to help us research 1,000 organizations in the United States, across multiple sectors including Independent Living, Assisted Living, Memory Care, Skilled Nursing, and Home Health. We created a random sample that remained true to norms. We then “human verified” any results that were flagged for review. Satisfied with the outcome, we separately followed-up that research with an examination of 500 Assisted Living communities. Why Assisted Living? As assumed, it was the most active in the first sample across disciplines. Please note that some communities had more than one identified program when promoting resident referrals separately from staff referrals.

Things We Looked For

• An identifiable referral program, i.e., a Refer-A-Friend web page.
• How easily the program could be found by a potential ambassador.
• Whether the program was intended to refer residents or staff candidates.
• The type of ambassador being asked to make referrals, i.e., an existing resident or family member, a physician or other health network partner, or existing employees.
• The implementation for obtaining the referral from the ambassador, i.e., a web form, print out, call in, etc.
• How easy the AI found the referral process to be and its justification for thinking so.
• Whether or not the program was incentivized.
• The types of rewards offered for incentivized programs, both for ambassadors and their referred friends, family, and colleagues.
• A vendor, if identifiable, who captures and processes the referrals for the organization.
• Common terms and conditions when provided.
• And, if part of a timed promotion, the expiration date.

The Cliff Notes

• Assisted Living was the most likely sector to have an identifiable referral program online. Yet, adoption was measured at only 17.3%.
• Of identified referral programs in Assisted Living, 61.8% were incentivized in some way. Those operating in more densely populated areas were nearly twice as likely to incentivize their programs as those operating in less populated areas.
• 16.8% of identified programs sought to capture referrals to grow staff in Assisted Living, contrasting with 40.9% seeking staff referrals across Aging Care as a whole. In other words, most identified programs in Assisted Living seemed to focus on increasing occupancy rather than maintaining staff levels.
• Similarly, 17.4% of identifiable programs in Assisted Living seemed to target “employees” to be their main ambassadors, with 57.6% seeking to make residents/families their ambassadors, and 25.0% seeking to capture referrals from partners. In the wider sample across Aging Care sectors, we saw greater emphasis on employee and partner ambassadors than in Assisted Living exclusively.
• Among programs identified in Assisted Living, 66.7% had a “Medium” discoverability rating. This means that they were not found directly on the website within a single page view. They were discovered somewhere in the sitemap, or by Internet search in the first 5 search results. 32.3% were given a “Good” discoverability rating as they were one-click away for a user visiting a community’s homepage. Roughly 1% were given a “Poor” discoverability rating as they could only be located in search results, but not within the top 5.
• For types of implementations, 41.1% were accomplished with a web form, 28.4% with a “contact us” or “see our staff for details”, and the remainder via a combination of images, downloads, and mail-in forms. Subsequently, the non-electronic implementations that required the most work to complete were given the lowest usability scores by AI.
• As for user-friendliness, we gave our AI assistant criteria to gauge a good user experience. That criteria included an assessment of how much work an ambassador would need to do in order to provide a referral or recommendation, and how well-explained the process seemed to be for the ambassador. In Assisted Living, 11.5% received an “Excellent” rating, 71.9% received a “Good” rating, 12.5% received a “Fair” rating, and 4.2% received a “Poor” rating.

Other Observations

Most closely aligned to Assisted Living was - not surprisingly - Independent Living. In organizations where Private Pay is the norm, we see more examples of identifiable referral programs; particularly those that are incentivized. Of Skilled Nursing communities, 7.7% had an identifiable program, but only 14.3% of those seemed to offer some incentive for referrals. Home Health had a higher percentage of identified programs at 15.4%, but only 11.8% of those seemed to reward referrals and recommendations.

Are you surprised by the low number of “identifiable” referral programs in Assisted Living? We find that many organizations that offer some type of referral program do so inconsistently and in a manner that is not well promoted, and thus poorly “identifiable” and “actionable.” This is what LeadTrust® wants to change so that organizations can consistently promote, capture, and reward free referrals.