I am developing a marketing plan for a psychology clinic and given
that my background is psychology and not marketing, I could use some
help.  This office is a training clinic aligned with a doctoral
clinical psychology program.  Essentially, this means that the
therapists and examiners are unlicensed upper-level graduate students
who are supervised by licensed psychologists and working there as part
of their training (similar to how med students work in hospitals and
supervised by MD's there).  The services we provide include:
*Adult, child, couples, and family counseling
*Psychological Assessments for learning disabilities, IQ, ADHD, and
personality assesments for both adults and children

What makes our clinic different/better than other clinics:
*We don't accept insurance
*Cash pay clients are on a sliding scale based on income (fees range
from $10-75/hour)
*We also have agency contracts with Division of Family Service, the
state disability office, and several school district.
*We have a fast turnaround time on our evaluations (i.e., most
psychological evaluations take 4 weeks, ours are completed in 2
weeks).
*We usually do not have a client waiting list.  Therapy clients can
ususally be seen within 1 week and assessments scheduled within 2
weeks.

Current marketing efforts include:
*Ad in the yellow pages
*Monthly thank you letters to our agencies/people that make referrals
to our clinic
*Periodic ads in newspapers
*Periodic mass mailings to schools, physicians, DFS caseworkers, etc.

SO NOW TO MY QUESTION...
My question is essentially in two parts.
#1 - I would appreciate any ideas about how to increase the "buy-in"
or current examiners and therapists to increase their desire to
"network" and market the clinic.  All therapists and examiners are
essentially unpaid because this is part of their training so monetary
incentives won't work.  The current attitude among staff essentially
that they don't have any responsibility for brining in clients, but we
would like to increase their awareness of everyday marketing
opportunities (e.g., telling other professionals they work with about
our services, etc.) and more formalized marketing (e.g., something
like having to post flyers/distrubte brochures around the city).  Even
general ideas are appreciated, for example, we are thinking about
changing our business cards to have the standard contact info on the
front and a few bullet points on the back describing our services and
fees.

#2 I would also appreciate ideas for more formal marketing to the
community.  Any thoughts about where or to whom to market to,
different marketing modalities, etc.  Keep in mind that we are a small
clinic and that while we do have a marketing budget, thing like
television/radio ads and even frequent newspaper ads our out of our
budget.

If you need any further clarification or would like any further
background information, I would be happy to reply.
Thanks for your assistance.

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Request for Question Clarification by acorn-ga on 24 Apr 2003 20:52 PDT

Hi,

Several questions - 

Where is the clinic located? How many clients on average do you have a
week and what do you want to increase it to?  Do you not provide free
services (your sliding scale starts at $10) and if not, why not?

Thanks.

acorn-ga

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Clarification of Question by needsomeinfo-ga on 24 Apr 2003 21:39 PDT

The clinic is located in a large metropolitan city (pop. around 1
million) in the mid-west.  As far as how many clients are seen a week,
it really varies.  Typically we have 12-20 assessments appointments
available per week.  For therapy clients, we have 20 therapists each
carrying a caseload of 2 to 15 clients.

You asked the question, what do we want to increase our client base
to...  Well, we don't really have a specific number of clients we want
to increase to.  In fact, it is a balancing act.  Each therapist can
only take on some many clients (there are only so many hours in a
day).  Too few clients, and therapists have openings in their
schedules, too many clients and we have a client waiting list where
they can't get in to see a therapist for a week or two.  Neither
option is good.

We offer sliding scale services down to $10 because, in addition to
providing services to people of all socieoeconomic statuses, we are
also a training clinic.  Meaning that because our therapists are in
graduate school, we are willing to take a loss on some cases.  We
cannot provide free services, because, while we are non-profit, we do
have overhead of staff, supplies, computers, liability insurance,
etc., etc., etc.  If we provided free services, we wouldn't be able to
stay in business.  Hence the marketing to improve and ultimately be
able to continue our business.

Let me know if you need any additional clarification.