Benefits from Your Affiliation with the Council

Benefits from Embracing the Principles of Long Term Care Planning  

Benefits from Your Affiliation with the Council  

1.  You have the privilege of identifying yourself as a member of the National Care Planning Council. Your affiliation with the Council is intended to help you find more people who need your services.  

2.  You will receive a listing for your services in one category of service and in one state on the following three web sites.  

•  Long Term Care Link Web Site

•  National Care Planning Council Web Site

•  "Guide to Long Term Care Planning" Web Site  

Your listing also links to a personal profile web page with a photograph, biography, contact information and a personal online form for direct requests from the public. Click here to see an example of a personal profile web page.

Providers who listed a full 12 months with us for the previous year received on average 931 visits to their personal web pages. The most popular web page had 1,780 visits and the least popular had 604. Total visits to these 21 provider web pages increased 2 1/2 times over the 12 month period. Click here to see a graph.

Through promotional activities for the year 2006, we expect web site traffic to triple and the number of hits per personal web page to triple as a result. We are already number one or in the top 10 listings in a number of search categories on popular search engines. We hope our ongoing efforts at promotion will result in a net web traffic increase from month to month.

Our search rankings on Google are great!!  In a recent survey for three listing categories, we came up #1 in 10% to 40% of the cases depending on the category and we were in the top 10 in 80% to 90% of the searches. This is typically out of millions of searches for that word string.  Click here for the survey.

You may purchase additional category listings and listing states for an added fee.  

3.  You will have access to an online monthly report showing the traffic to your personal web page.  Click here to see the traffic report.

4.  As a member, you have our permission to reproduce and distribute material copied from our web sites. You may use this for commercial purposes relating to the promotion and support of long term care planning. You must give the National Care Planning Council and the author (if applicable) copyright credit in writing and in plain view on any reproductions you distribute. Since it is our intent to make this information freely available to the public, you may not profit from the sale of any reproductions of our site material. We do not give you permission to publish any of this material in book form or as a pamphlet. We are currently working on the publication of books for you for this purpose. 

5.  You have the opportunity to participate in press releases from the Council. As we have issued past press releases, we have had some reporters and editors call us to find someone to interview in their local area about the importance of planning for long term care. As we issue press releases in the future we will provide newspapers with our list of providers to call for interviews.  

6.  Your participation in the National Care Planning Council will enhance your prestige. The council promotes itself through periodic news releases, through collaboration with other like-minded organizations and through efforts to dovetail with government services.  

7.  You will participate in marketing support through the member-sharing of marketing and promotional ideas, posting of member articles on the web site and personal use of generic articles furnished by the Council.  

8.  You will receive a discount on future services from the National Care Planning Council.  

Benefits from Embracing the Principles of Long Term Care Planning

9.   Despite a tangible immediate benefit of listing services on our web sites and promoting care planning to gain new clients, we believe, eventually, the most important benefit in membership lies in the relationship of Council members with each other. By collaborating and referring services to each other, members of the professional eldercare community stand to benefit by networking together, assisting a larger number of clients and providing better service.

Over the past two years, we have been experimenting with a collaborative effort between financial planners, care managers and attorneys in our local area. In addition each of these advisor functions works with complementary providers such as assisted living, hospice, nursing homes, mediation services, reverse mortgage specialists and long term insurance specialists.

We have seen this effort result in benefits to our participating providers and to our clients, but there are still problems that have to be worked out overcoming mindsets of people working in diverse practices. We believe these problems can be solved and members of the eldercare services community will learn how to work together towards a common goal of long term care planning. We will continue to test relationship designs and perhaps can report back within the next year that we have found the ultimate solution.

There is evidence that diverse groups of care service providers are already working together in clusters around the country. We hope that some of you who join our group have learned how to achieve collaboration. And it is our hope, as people with this experience join us, they will share with us ways to make the cooperation work. This input will assist the National Care Planning Council in making care planning more effective for its members.

We believe a key element in bringing together providers with diverse practices and backgrounds is education. Oftentimes an attorney or financial planner has no concept of what a care manager does. And oftentimes care managers don't regularly recommend financial planning or legal help because those practitioners seem like outsiders or foreigners. The care manager is often so wrapped up in his or her profession that there is little time to consider working with these other providers. All of these practitioners need to understand what the others do and what their practice consists of. We intend for the Council to bridge this knowledge gap with educational support in order to help these practitioners achieve closer collaboration.