Project
Fostering recruitment strategy
Purpose
To increase the number of foster carers
Funding
£384,000 a year over five years from the overall council budget
Background
With more children coming into care, like many authorities Kirklees Council was facing a shortage of foster carers, increasingly relying on fostering agencies. This not only meant children being placed further from their homes, but cost a lot more. In light of this, the council decided to overhaul its fostering recruitment strategy.
Action
The council decided to invest in a "spend-to-save" initiative involving the creation of a dedicated fostering recruitment team. Previously, recruitment was handled by the main fostering team, with social workers juggling assessments of carers with other pressing issues, meaning assessments were often delayed.
The team did not have marketing expertise, so the approach to advertising was ad hoc, with no way of assessing how effective campaigns had been.
Senior communications officer Karen Jones, who came into post in July 2011, set about devising a new strategic marketing approach.
"There was a push to start running campaigns - we need to increase numbers now - and I had to be quite firm that we needed to do research to understand where we were at," she explains.
In fact, data analysis and the use of sophisticated marketing tools have played a key role in informing the team's approach, helping them reach out to potential foster carers. "Profiling helps you work out their jobs, where they shop, education level and values, and target advertising," explains Jones.
The strategy also involved a thorough audit of media and advertising opportunities to see what actually worked. "If you put a sign on a roundabout, people stop noticing it. We needed to keep things fresh," says Jones. So the focus is now on shorter campaigns using eye-catching colours and images. These are focused around key periods when people are more likely to think about fostering such as New Year.
Meanwhile, the team has taken a more pro-active approach to working with the media, with foster carers taking part in campaigns. "Before, people were worried about putting foster carers in front of a journalist," says Jones. "They were nervous the carer might say something that would identify a child, and journalists would always try and pick out something negative."
The team consists of a team manager and five full-time equivalent social workers. Each aim to get 10 to 12 carers approved per year. Their approach has included better communication with existing carers including raising awareness of an incentive scheme that means they are entitled to a £250 "golden handshake" payment if they recommend someone who goes on to be approved as a foster carer.
They have also looked at the experiences of people who enquire about fostering and the information available to them. By improving the website, they have managed to substantially increase the amount of time people spend looking at it. They have made the most of social media using tools such as "promoted posts" on Facebook.
In January, one post alone was seen by 364,416 people, with 939 likes and shared by 162 people with 110 comments. The immediacy of social networking means the team can instantly address issues or bust myths. Monitoring this can be time-consuming and this kind of direct communication can be a bit of a risk, but it is "a risk worth taking", says Jones.
Having a dedicated recruitment team has made a huge difference and looking at things differently has had an impact on the whole service resulting in changes in core policy. For example, before people who had suffered from depression could only foster if they had been "medication free" for a year, but now they can foster if they are on anti-depressants subject to medical advice.
Social workers are invigorated and enthused, says Jones. "They're coming up with new ideas and saying: 'Why don't we try this? Let's do things differently and see how it works'."
Outcome
Kirklees Council has significantly reduced its reliance on agency foster placements. In April 2011, 48 per cent of fostered children were agency placements, but that was down to 35 per cent in February this year, with 65 per cent of placements arranged in-house. The council estimates the changes have resulted in annual savings of £438,000.
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