The $0 New Patient Solution: How to Incorporate Cause-Related Strategies into Your Marketing [VIDEO]

Dove, Target, and Newman’s Own – wanna know what all these successful brands have in common?

They do good, charitable work in their communities.

But working to benefit a cause isn’t just a good thing to do – it’s also an incredibly effective, low-cost way to attract patients, build cohesion in your team, and generate word-of-mouth marketing.

Join Angela as she talks with Stuart and Steven Anderson from the Smiles for Life Foundation … Opens in a new window to Smiles for Life’s website… on how you can harness the power of cause-related marketing in your practice to:

• Attract more patients at no extra cost
• Harness the goodwill of your patients to increase reviews and referrals
• Improve the perception of your brand and patient loyalty
• Strengthen your team by improving employee engagement and attracting top talent
• Create more positive word-of-mouth marketing

Watch the video above or read the transcript below:

Angela: So I just want to thank everyone for joining us today. We are so happy and privileged to be co-hosting this webinar with our wonderful presenter and host today.

For any of you who have not met him yet, you have a privileged day ahead of you.  This is Steven Anderson, and he is the founder of Total Patient Service Institute … Opens in a new window to Total Patient Service Institute’s website…, Crown Council … Opens in a new window to Crown Council’s website…, and the Smiles for Life Foundation.

And he really has so much to provide, so much to offer to you guys today. He has worked with professionals around the world to transform their practices, their businesses, and really their teams to the highest level of performance and ingenuity, and really help patients say yes to treatment – isn’t that what we all want?

He’s worked with some of the biggest names in dentistry to build their practices by transforming practices and the people in them, which is part of what he’s going to talk about today. He’s been named Businessman of the Year for excellence in dentistry and well, I’m so proud of him for raising nearly 50 million dollars for dental and children’s charitable projects around the world.

So as one of the most prolific entrepreneurs, philanthropists, authors, and really presenters in today’s dentistry, we are so proud to be hosting this webinar.

Please, take it away and tell us how we can all do good.

Steven: You got it. Thank you, Angela. And great to be with everybody today. And, Angela, that was just exactly the way my mother wrote that introduction.

So, with me today, I want to introduce Stuart Anderson, who is one of my business partners and a key part of the Crown Council, which I’ll explain in just a moment, and the Smiles for Life Foundation. Stuart and I are going to co-present today and share with you what we have billed as the No-Cost New Patient Solution.

And we’re going to share with you some secrets today of how to attract great new patients at no cost, as well as how to add a dimension to your home marketing strategy that will attract new patients – the kind of patients that you want.

And if you want to, we’ll give you a lot of tools today.

I’d suggest that you have your cell phone handy because there are going to be some resources that will be easy to grab if you have your cell phone as we go along.

So, first, we’re going to walk through, a strategy, i.e. an overall philosophy and strategy that can be incorporated into your marketing strategy. And that’s why we’re working with Roadside Marketing today because this is all about a business strategy that works with your overall marketing strategy for your practice.

And then we’re going to give you some specific examples of some things that other practices have done that you might choose to adopt that will make a big difference in your own practice. So, with that, Stuart’s going to share a great example from a brand that you will recognize that’ll introduce our overall strategy today.

Stuart: Yeah, very famously back in 1983, a project was created to restore the Statue of Liberty.

So, the Statue of Liberty was dilapidated, needed some work, and needed restoration to take care of it. And so along came American Express.

American Express, when we’re looking at research, coined a phrase and a system known as “cause-related marketing,” which was kind of the first time this system had ever been created or used.

And American express said that for every transaction used by American express owners, 1 cent would be donated to this fund that they were using to restore the Statue of Liberty. So as a result, 1.7 million dollars are donated to the fund and American Express sees a 27% increase in their card transactions by users.

So they see a bump in profits. They see a bump in use and obviously, a great cause was taken care of. So, these two groups work together to use each other to find a system that not only benefits American Express, benefits the Statue of Liberty, but also brings awareness to the kinds of things that American Express wants people to think about when they think about their company.

So it was kinda like history from there, using this idea of cause-related marketing, which is one of the things that we’re going to talk about today. How can your dental practice and your team align with a cause to bring in new patients and, and grow your practice?

Steven: 1.7 million. That’s a lot of pennies.

Stuart: It is, that’s a lot of one cent.

Steven: Wow.

Stuart: So-

Steven: Oh, go ahead Stu.

Stuart: So, this is us. As Steve and I have worked together all day for the last, you know, 25, 30 years, we’ve had a front-row seat to what the best dental practices in the country are doing. The Crown Council is a group, an association of the best dental practices across the country, North America, who are constantly working to improve their culture and the environment inside their practice.

And one of the things that we constantly see is that the practices that do well together not only have great growth but great teams. And our sister company, Total Patient Service Institute, I’ll let Steve talk about them.

Steven: So Total Patient Service is a coaching company, so it works with practices all over the country to coach in the highest level of patient service and case acceptance skills.

So we refer to this as the Crown Council, as a kind of the community of top practices that are committed to a culture of success. Total Patient Service is the coach that makes all of those great systems work. One of the things, if you pull up the next slide, Stu, is that Angela told you a little bit about the Smiles for Life Foundation that we’ll talk about today in the background.

And I’ll just give you a quick little snapshot of coming attractions here in just a moment.

The Smiles for Life Foundation was the brainchild of Dr. Jeff Gray in San Diego, California who wanted to find a way to do good in his community. And because of his initial thoughts, we then worked together to expand that idea, that seed of an idea that started in his practice, to practice all over the country.

And we prefer to call these efforts that we’ll talk about today “doing good.” And one of the challenges that I give you is to think about all of the things that you do as a practice and as a team to do good and to think beyond just charitable activities, but be aware that everything that you do is doing good.

For example:

• you improve people’s lives by improving their health
• you improve their smiles
• you improve their relationships

As a practice,

• you provide jobs
• you’re a participating business in your community
• so you contribute to community growth and overall health and wellness

There are a lot of things that you do to do good.

So this whole concept of doing good is very broad, much broader than just charitable activities. It’s everything you do to have a positive impact on the world. And that would include things that are tied into what Stuart has called cause-related marketing, or charitable activities that not only do good in the world but also benefit the practice as a part of that.

So, one of the reasons that it works, as Stuart will tell you now, is the ripple effect that it has in getting the word out.

Stuart: And one thing that we found is that there is no magic. There’s no secret. There’s no one thing that you have to be doing to grow your practice. There are multiple things that have to go into bringing new patients and managing a team, but all of those things cascade together to create what we call word of mouth.

This idea is that people find you based on the stories and the things that the patients and the companies that work with you talk about. What do they say when they leave your practice? We found that 81% of people still want to choose a dentist based on family and friends telling them where to go.

If you think that the stories that people are telling about you are not important, think again.

The stories that they talk about, the experiences that they had with your team, the experience that they had in the space that you’ve created, the smells, the things they see, how the doctor interacts with them…

I mean, all of these things go into word-of-mouth marketing. As soon as they leave, there’s no way that they’re sharing the clinical expertise of your doctor there, they are talking about, “you should have seen this place. Like, I can’t tell you the experience that I had. I want to tell you about the team member that took care of me. The beautiful place, the space that I was in.”

So there are a lot of ways that you can craft that message to make sure that the stories that are shared about you, and share about the experiences that patients are having, are good.

And one of those systems is, what do they say about you and about how you’re doing good? Whether it’s a charitable cause or whatever you’re doing, what are they saying?

Steven: So two years ago, there was a well-known song by Bonnie Raitt. And I won’t sing the chorus, I won’t punish you all with the chorus, but it basically said, “let’s give them something to talk about.” And that’s the great thing about word-of-mouth marketing.

We know it continues to be the most powerful form of marketing today in dentistry -in fact, it’s even more powerful today than it was years ago because we have the X factor now with digital communication, online reviews, and social media… word of mouth has just gained that much more power.

And as a practice, we have to give them something to talk about. So here’s an interesting example on the next slide. This was a survey that was done by Roper Starch Worldwide; they’re a worldwide survey organization, and what they found is this 60%, 67% of consumers prefer to buy from a business that’s engaged in cause-related marketing, over the competition.

This means that when all things are relatively equal, this is what influences their buying decision. So a business that is engaged in cause-related marketing or doing something that is cause-related or charitable-related, something that is doing good in the community or beyond, has an impact on consumer behavior.

Now on the next slide, there’s also another study that found that 9 in 10 consumers are likely to switch brands to one that’s associated with a good cause -assuming that the products are relatively comparable.

So this, I mean, has an impact on consumer behavior and how we make decisions if what we’re doing is, in some way shape, or form, connected with a worthy cause or something that’s doing good.

Here’s another story -Stu, do you want to give me the next example of this? This is an example that you all, everyone should be relatively familiar with.

Stuart: Yeah. So sometimes, you know, when we think about cause-related marketing or doing good, I love this example because Dove tweaked that idea.

And what happened was, in 2004, they launched this “real beauty” campaign by doing a study and they asked thousands of women a couple of questions.

Now, one of the questions was do you describe yourself as beautiful? That was one of the questions they asked the women, and only 2% of all the women that were surveyed said, yes, I describe myself as beautiful, which absolutely blew away Dove and blew away the experts doing the case study.

And so, Dove aligned themselves with the cause, this beauty cause for real beauty, and started to create the synergy of the two things working together, where Dove was willing to now share a cause to help women feel beautiful.

And you saw their ads. You saw the things that they changed and switched to make their company align with this cause to help women overcome what mainstream media, what magazines, and what social media started telling them was beautiful.

And Dove launched this idea with growth from 2004 to now with a 60% growth in profits and distribution from Dove, just for the kind of showing that, if they put two body washes side-by-side, why wouldn’t I choose one that is related to a cause that is doing good and making a difference when it comes to anything really?

I mean, we’re not saying it’s got to be some gigantic thing -it just has to be a cause that they’re connected to.

Steven: So the challenge that we’re going to give you today is to figure out for your practice, your “doing good” strategy, and this can come in a lot of ways, shapes, and forms. It can be something charitable.

It could be a message you’re trying to communicate. It could be dentistry that you do for those who can’t afford it, it could go in so many different directions.

There’s a whole doing good strategy here to be a part of your overall marketing strategy and your overall business strategy. Here are some other examples that you’ll recognize that are business-to-consumer brands:

• So, Target, for years, has donated a percentage of its profits to local schools, and that primarily has been their main cause. And they promote that. It’s very difficult to walk into a Target store without seeing some recognition in the entryway of the good that they’re doing for local schools.
• We’re all familiar with Paul Newman foods. That’s been around for a long time. That brand was launched, obviously, with a celebrity face on it. Everybody’s familiar with Paul Newman and their cause, their commitment, was that all profits after taxes go to charity. And that has accumulated to be millions and millions of millions of dollars. Paul Newman actually admitted several years ago that the food business has done far more in terms of revenue than he ever did in Hollywood as an actor. And so there’s an interesting combination with this one, granted that yeah, you’ve got the combination of a celebrity plus a cause, that’s a pretty powerful combination.
• In addition to that, you see this at Starbucks on a regular basis. They’ll do different charitable causes that are tied to sales.
• Everybody’s familiar with Toms Shoes. Their whole company was launched on a cause-related strategy: buy one and they give one, right? So every time you buy a pair of shoes, they donate a pair of shoes to someone in need, typically in a third-world country.
• And so you see the Walmart foundation too. Again, Walmart’s one of the biggest companies in the world. They’ve incorporated cause-related marketing into many of the things that they do. So this is everywhere you look. There is, you know, there’s some tie in, in some of the biggest brands in the world, to doing good and connecting what they do as a business to a worthy cause, so that everyone can work together to make the world a better place.

And so our challenge today is to do this. I’m going to rework your vocabulary on this. Here’s a phrase that crept into our vernacular in our culture that we call “giving back,” you know, companies that give back, organizations that give back, people that give back… that’s starting to change.

And one of the things, if you think about it: In our organization, we don’t believe in giving back, because when you think about that phrase, if you’re giving something back, what did you have to do in the beginning?

We had to take something, right? It’s kind of implied; I’m aware the phrase exists, but it’s a misnomer. It’s almost like we have to give something back because we feel guilty for something that we took.

In fact, Stuart, I don’t think, as a kid growing up, that phrase, giving back, was ever used in a positive way. I mean, I can hear your mother now, “give that back to your sister!”

Even in kindergarten, “give those toys back,” it’s never used in a positive way. And so that’s why we prefer to call the efforts to do good exactly that: doing good, your efforts in doing good. And as we mentioned before, it’s more than just being charitable. It has something to do with everything that you do. Good.

So the challenge today is to develop your doing good strategy. You’re not going to give back, you didn’t take anything that didn’t belong to you. And you can do a lot of good based on your position in the community and the kind of business that you have.

So, our challenge is to grow your practice even more by doing good. That’s the whole name of the game here, which is to develop a clear strategy for doing good that incorporates this. So we’re going to give you some dental examples here and some cultural examples.

Stuart, why don’t you tell everybody about this one great example of Dr. Dale Schisler, with who we’ve worked within the Crown Council for many, many years. And it’s just a great example of somebody who built his practice on cause-related marketing.

Stuart: So when we talk about growing your practice through doing good, we’re talking about not only the stories that people share, the patients and what they talk about but also the opportunity to create new patients to grow your practice based on what happens when the patients leave.

And Dr. Schisler, he’s from Canada. We have watched him, for years, create a system inside of his practice where I don’t even know, at the outset, if he was doing it on purpose if I’m being honest. Now, as I talked to him, I interviewed him earlier this week, and I talked to him. I said, “Dale, how have you created such an incredible doing good strategy?”

And he said his team maps out the entire year of what they’re going to do to do good. And what they all do is commit to sharing on social media, the ways that they do good.

And one of the ways that they do good is that every year, they participate in a humanitarian trip.

Steve and I are not saying that’s what you have to do to do good, but this is what Dr. Schisler does. Every year, they either go to Guatemala or go to the Dominican Republic and their patient know it.

It’s on all social media. It’s on all their posters. It’s on all the pictures inside the practice. And so when the patients come in, they are constantly asking, “How was the trip? What happened? Tell me a story. Look at that cute girl, Dale. What, what happened there?”

And they continue to foster this idea that they are doing good through a humanitarian effort inside the practice. Additionally, patients can contribute. So they ask for donations, they ask for opportunities to donate things that they can take on these humanitarian trips so that then, they can tell their patient about the stories, “Your contribution helped in this way. Your contribution helped this girl, this person…”

Sometimes they’ll take balls or toys or games that the patients donate and they share them with the people in the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. They also have a video. So, in the patient waiting room, they’ve got videos playing and pictures running of what they did as they did well together. And then beyond that, the team loves to talk about it.

So each team member uses their own personal social media or their own personal opportunities to interact with patients and to tell these stories of how they do good.

And that grows their practices. People leave and talk about what an incredible team and experience they have. And I would just like to, I mean, use the example of, if I am putting two salad dressings side-by-side, right?

And they’re both equal. I love ranch from Hidden Valley, I love ranch from… the idea here is that if they are equally loved, why wouldn’t I buy Paul Newman’s dressing because it goes to a great cause -that’s where my money goes.

That is what we’re saying here is it’s a similar idea -that Dr. Schisler’s growth happens as his practice grows, as people watch him do good together with his team. Is that good? Is that enough?

Steven: Perfect. Yep. And so, you know our whole strategy or challenge is that there are so many things that this does in terms of team retention and culture, all-around having a cause-related strategy and a doing good strategy built into your practice to connect it with your purpose and everything that you do.

So with that, I think you have a very fascinating example of an entire culture, an entire culture of a country that is built on this whole idea of… and this is actually, this becomes legendary.

One of the things I love about the doing good strategy is there, it is embedded. It becomes embedded with so many powerful stories like you’ve shared, like how Dr. Schissler has built over the years, and how you can build great teams.

Great practices and great cultures are steeped in lore, folklore, and not made-up stuff, but things that have actually happened that people talk about because they’re so emotionally powerful.

So, Stu, give us an example. It’s an example of an entire country that is built on powerful stories that give people something to talk about.

Stuart: And these stories exist in… I mean, that is how cultures are built. It’s how families are built and it’s how dental practices are built through stories that are constantly shared and reshared that kind of shaped that culture.

Well, I live in a country, so in Northern Ireland, if you’ve ever been into that country, you will see this symbol. This is called the red hand of Ulster. So Ulster is considered one of the top six counties of the island of Ireland.

And on that island, if you didn’t know, Northern Ireland is actually part of Britain, so that country exists. Those six counties exist – Ireland in the south, northern Ireland in the north. And in order to keep that, as you know the history of it, they’re very prideful about who belongs where, what we believe, and how the cultures interact with one another.

And so everywhere you go inside Northern Ireland – get ready for the next graphic – you will see the red hand of Ulster.

This is on the side of just a normal neighborhood walking around Northern Ireland. And I’ll tell you a quick story, you can see this guy riding in his boat, and you can see his right hand.

There’s the stump of his hand on his boat and then his bloody hand is on the shore. Well, the story goes that these clan leaders had a race across this lake where the first one to touch the other side becomes the king of Ulster, the king of these six countries.

Seeing that he was gonna lose, he chops off his own hand and chucks it to the shore. And that’s his red bloody hand – it’s memorialized everywhere that the sacrifice and service of this clan leader are what it takes to belong to this country, to this culture.

You can see up above the mural, that there’s that red flag, the red and white flag, and in the middle of the flag is the actual red hand itself. When this flag flies, every person is reminded that our country – the place where you live -revolves around this idea that hey, we’re going to chop off hands to make sure that you serve to make sure that you sacrifice for where you live.

And I mean, over time, that culture is built. And if you know anything about the country, if you know anything about living there, the culture is built on that. They’re built on the idea of doing whatever it takes to protect, sacrifice and serve where they live.

Steven: So now please do not take this literally, do not go chop off your hand. But what’s amazing about this -and I love that story -is that we’ve noticed that practices that have incorporated a great doing good strategy and cause-related marketing into the practice, have so many amazing stories to tell about people they’ve helped and causes they’ve benefited.

It just elevates the whole conversation. So as we’ve said before, you know, in a doing good culture, the best teams have an organized plan. They do this by design to do good in the community with their patients, and with their team.

It is a very well-organized effort. We challenge you to make that part of your overall marketing strategy. So to get you started, we have a resource. Stu, I believe you can throw up the QR code. So if you can just scan, grab your phone, and open up your photo app, and you can just scan that QR code and download a free resource, just a one-pager, that will walk you through five questions of a doing good strategy to just start you thinking down that pattern of, of how can we incorporate this or how can we incorporate it better into our practice?

So five quick questions and then an additional resource. Michelle Penrose on our Smiles for Life team: one of the things that they do is coach teams. There’s a resource there where we’ll spend a little bit of time with you, free of charge, to walk you through some elements of a doing good strategy for your practice to increase word of mouth and increase your new patient flow. So that’s a resource we recommend.

You can scan it, and automatically download it, and there are some personal reflective questions and some questions to pose to your entire team as you walk through and develop your doing good strategy. So with that let’s talk about some specific examples of how you can do this in your practice. We’ve given you some examples of business-to-consumer businesses and cultures.

Let’s talk about specifically dentistry, and how you can make this work.

One of the things that we applaud and that we encourage is that, as you start building this into your marketing strategy and your overall business strategy, you appoint somebody on your team as what we call the “charity champion” or the “doing good champion.”

So this is going to be somebody on the team that is the flag-waver, the drum beater, the one that is primarily out front helping develop the strategy and carry it through. Everyone’s going to be involved, and the charity champion is the one who’s moving it forward.

So Stu, why don’t you tell us about an interesting example of this from Mortenson Dental Group out of Louisville, Kentucky. And how they use the charity champion concept.

Stuart: Yeah. We’ve watched a group practice, Mortenson Dental Group, for years participate in multiple charities. But what they constantly do is they have someone in the practice who is the babysitter. As Steve said, they are going to be in charge of their doing good strategy.

And I can reiterate this person is never the doctor. This is a team member who can be passionate about the charity that is passionate about the cause and the people that they’re going to connect with and connected to the marketing and the tools and the things that will be used to share the cause.

And so this charity champion maybe is self-appointed, maybe they say, I do have a cause, I do have a doing good strategy or a charity that I want to be part of.

I’m passionate about it. But without fail, your doing good strategy needs someone who is constantly watching their relationships, watching the things that happen, to make sure that the cause is taken care of.

Steven: Excellent. So, along with that idea of appointing a charity champion, here’s an idea. Let’s see. So, here’s an example of how, as a practice, you can incorporate doing good into your practice.

I mentioned Dr. Jeff Gray, and you can go to the next slide Stu. Dr. Jeff Gray in San Diego, California, years ago, came to me and he said, you know, I love to benefit, good causes. And every month for the month of February, I’ve decided that I’m going to donate all my fees from whitening to St Jude’s hospital for children’s cancer research. And he said you know, I got thinking about it. And he said, well, how much good could we do if I didn’t just do it on my own, but if we incorporated a lot of other practices.

And so we did two things. We originally reached out to other Crown Council practices. The Crown Council is an association of practices that are committed to creating a culture of success in their practice.

And Dr. Gray issued the challenge to Crown Council practices to join him in doing good. And along with that, the strategy was that, for a short period of time, out in the community, the offer would be that you could come in, that anybody could come in as long as clinically they’re qualified, and they can get their teeth whitened for a very reasonable fee and 100% of that fee would go to charity.

And the way that works today is it’s one of the most amazing win-win-wins that has ever been created in the charitable world. So here’s how it works. The practice donates their labor to whiten teeth, the patient donates the money.

So the money that they would normally pay for whitening, a hundred percent of that goes to Smiles for Life. Ultradent, who is a very generous donor to the Smiles for Life whitening campaign, donates the whitening kits at no cost, including the shipping, to all the practices that participate in the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign.

And so everybody donates something. Ultradent donates the whitening kits. The practice donates the labor, the patient donates the money.

Our organization, the Crown council, donates administrative work and labor to administer the entire campaign. We have a social media company that helps donate some of the promotional materials.

There are a lot of all hands on deck to make this work. And we have practices all over the country that participate in the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign every year. As a part of that campaign, practices can choose a local charity, something in their area, that can receive up to 50% of the money that they raise.

So they can choose their own local charity and then half the money they raise goes can go directly to that charity. The other half goes to some larger charitable projects that I’ll share with you in just a moment.

All of us together benefit to do good. So over the last 25 years, over 800 charitable foundations have received money from Smiles for Life.

And all of those foundations have been chosen by the practices that are raising the money. There’ve been hundreds and hundreds of practices that continue to participate in the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign.

Over a quarter of a million patients have contributed, with over 46 million dollars that have been raised and donated to worthy causes all over the world.

So this is just an example of how practices promote this. So they promote this as part of their doing good strategy. And one of the things that really makes this work, is it’s really easy to do this.

I mean, in terms of, you sign up, the kids show up, you promote it within your practice, as well as outside your practice through social media, community marketing, every way you can get the word out.

And it is a very, very powerful new patient generator. As you engage the community in doing good, they can come in, they get their smile whitened, and a hundred percent of what they donate goes to charity. And that money goes directly to the Smiles for Life Foundation, so they don’t have to wonder what you’re doing the money, but it’s a win-win-win on all fronts.

It helps practices get engaged with the community, do good, generate new patients, and it’s a great example of very powerful cause-related marketing that benefits a great cause, which can be of your choice.

So again, you talk about giving them something to talk about, this is a snapshot of the wall in a practice that participates in the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign.

When the patients come in to have their teeth whitened and make the donation, then they get to put their name up on the wall and that wall fills up, then everybody can see who’s onboard and the momentum that you’ve created to do good in your community. So we’ve done some fun challenges over the years.

Stuart: Wait for the story on this one.

Steven: So yeah. So this is Dr. Mark Marion, and one of the challenges -we’ve done a number of these -but this one was setting a goal for money raised. And when that goal is achieved, then the dentist commits to dressing up as the tooth fairy for an entire day and treating patients.

So this is Dr. Mark Marion, who accepted the challenge, met the goal, and exceeded the goal. And so this was his day of treating patients in his tooth fairy outfit. He looks beautiful, doesn’t he? We’ve done pie contests. We’ve done all kinds of fun stuff. Then part of this story, if you want to skip up to the check slide.

So what we encourage practices to do, let’s see the… go forward.

Well, what we encourage practices to do is, at the end of the campaign, all the money is collected, tabulated, and then the money that’s being donated to the local charity, a check is cut from the Smiles for Life Foundation.

We encourage the practices to go have a formal check presentation to that charity at some kind of an event or someplace where you can get even more people engaged in doing good. So this is about setting a great example and benefiting a worthy cause. It’s just a great win-win-win. So we love this as an example of one part of your doing good strategy in your practice.

It may not be everything you do, but it can be a significant part of what you do. It’s easy. Everything has been put together to make it so that you can carry this out without a whole lot of effort.

You just schedule the patients like you normally would. The materials are there from Ultradent so that you can whiten teeth. And you treat these patients just like new patients as if it’s their first time in your practice.

And what we found is the retention is very, very high on these patients when they come in for the first time where you’re working together to do good for a worthy cause.

So, you might consider as part of your doing good strategy in your practice, the Smiles for Life whitening campaign. As we mentioned before we’ve got some great partners that make all this work by donating materials and different resources to make it work.

And as one associated campaign with this, there’s a great company called Trez that does clear aligners. They have built into their entire business plan, from their inception, a doing good strategy where they donate to the Smiles for Life Foundation.

They donate for every case that gets submitted. They make direct donations to the Smiles for Life Foundation, and they also donate a free case to the practice so that they can help somebody in need that otherwise would not be able to afford aligners.

So there are a lot of different things going on in this space, with companies in dentistry that are participating as well, that you can incorporate into your strategy.

So, as far as the specifics of this go, when you sign up for the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign it’s very, very simple. You just fill out a form, and you’re signed up.

There is a nominal donation that you make as a practice to the foundation of $249, that you donate to the foundation to defray some of the marketing and the shipping costs.

And what you immediately get is this cool little box with all kinds of materials in it that you can use to promote the campaign. We’ve worked to make this very, very simple.

Then, you’ll automatically receive your whitening kits when you fill out the form, and then you’re off and running to make it work in your practice. So again, this is just one example of some things that you can do in your doing good strategy.

So Stu, let’s skip ahead to the next QR code. And here’s the challenge: you can scan this QR code, and this will give you additional resources for creating your doing good strategy.

So what you’ll find here when you scan this, is that it’s going to take you to a landing page that looks just like what you see on your screen.

And all you have to do is fill out that very simple form there, which will then give you access to the resource section. There’s no charge for this.

It takes you to the resource section of the Crown Council. The Crown Council is the engine that makes the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign work, as well as a number of other doing good campaigns.

So you just fill that out. It’s free. It’ll give you access to all the doing good strategies that we’ve put together, including the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign and everything that is involved in that.

We have built out, as we mentioned with Dr. Schisler, an entire mechanism for doing dental humanitarian expeditions. Everything’s all done. All you have to do is just sign up and show up and everything is all organized to do good in dentistry in some very interesting places.

We’ve created a great program with the Special Olympics organization where you can adopt an athlete from the Special Olympics and be their dentist. And again, this is where you work directly with your local Special Olympics organization to do good.

You get to choose how many athletes you’d like to treat. So there are a number of different resources here that you can tap into with details. In each of these areas, you can, when you sign in, click on each of these area and it’ll give you some ideas on how to incorporate doing good into your practice and marketing strategy.

So we challenge you just to log on there, take a look at all those different resources, and if it fits, we invite you to be a part of the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign to raise money, choose a great local charity to partner within your area to do some good, and then build out your entire doing good strategy for your practice.

It’s great word of mouth. It engages your community. And most importantly, it does good. So with that, here’s the final challenge that I’ll give you: Number one, go through those five questions.

That’ll help start you on the path of thinking about your doing good strategy. Number two, log on to the landing page. Look at all the resources for doing good and then build out you’re doing good strategy.

On the page that you’ll download, you’ve got a great resource in a doing good strategy coach: Michelle Penrose, who can walk you through lessons learned and things that you can do to build out your strategy as part of your entire marketing strategy. So with that, Angela, I think we’ve got some questions.

Angela: We do. I just want to say thank you so much for the presentation today. This was awesome. And I know so many people who have joined are going to be really excited to start a program in their practice to give ba-I mean, do good. I love the idea of doing good instead of giving back. Because you’re right, with all the little kids needing to give back the cookie.

Steven: That’s right. So you’re going to have to -it’s so funny how that is ingrained in our vocabulary and you really have to consciously think, okay, I’m going to say doing good, not giving back.

And what’s interesting is, that we’ve looked around, and more and more organizations are adopting the doing good phrase. You’re starting to see them giving back things fade a bit. It’s still out there, but this is a transition that’s starting all over the country.

Angela: Perfect. Well, I have a couple of questions. The first question is, would it be possible for you guys to put up the slide again with the QR code for Smiles for Life? If they could put that up, I’ll go through a few of the other questions in the chat here.

One of them is, what’s the best way to pick a case that we’re going to support as part of the doing good strategy?

Steven: Yeah. As far as the best way to pick a charity, we suggest picking a local charity where it’s got some local presence and local involvement. Okay, so that’s number one.

Number two, make sure that it’s a cause that you believe in for whatever reason, maybe you’ve had some personal experience, but you’ve got some kind of an emotional or other connection with them so that you can really get behind it.

Number three criteria would be to sit down with that charity, explain the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign and how it works, and get their commitment to helping promote the campaign since they’re going to be benefiting from the money raised.

In what ways could they promote the campaign to their constituency, too, you know, people that they are connected with so that you raise the awareness and get it out.

Whether it’s posting it on their social media, sending it out through their email, to their contacts, whatever it might be, but to create a partnership where they’re helping promote the campaign since they’re going to benefit from the campaign. So those would be my three key suggestions.

Stuart: A good partner is not someone who receives a check and then says, “Oh, thanks. We forgot that you guys were going to donate money to us.” That is not a good system.

The only other thing that I would add is if you are choosing a local charity and if you were just practicing and you’re trying to decide how you’re going to do good, pick one that is registered by the government.

They will have a tax ID number as a registered charitable organization, the 501C3, and just make sure you’re not partnering with, like, Uncle Bob’s Charity Program… Make sure that your charity is legal, it’s set up, and that when you’re going to do good, you’re donating it to a legitimate, government-regulated charitable organization

Steven: 501C3. Yep. It has to be a designated, legit charity. All right.

Angela: Another question was, is the Smiles for Life Foundation whitening campaign only for new patients, or can existing patients be included, or both… what’s your recommendation?

Steven: So it is multifaceted. Getting your existing patients involved is great so you can let them spread the word. So what we love to do is, yeah, you can start with some of your existing patients, and then get their help to post on their social media and tell their friends, “Hey, I just got my teeth whitened for a great cause and, you know, go to Dr. Jones’s office and you can do the same thing and help kids…” or whatever it is.

So it’s both. Angela, as you know at Roadside Marketing because you teach this and you incorporate it every day, the best marketing is word of mouth marketing.

When you can get your loyal patients to wave the banner and go out and spread the word for you, that’s the most powerful form of marketing. That’s one of the things we love about the whitening campaign, is that it includes everybody.

It includes your existing patients. It includes new patients. It’s getting the word out. Anybody can participate as long as, clinically, they qualify, and they’re a good candidate for getting their teeth whitened.

Angela: Okay, perfect. Thank you. Another question here is, can you review the cost again to start the whitening campaign?

Steven: You bet. Stu, do you want to go over that? Maybe you can do a better job of explaining that than I can.

Stuart: You bet. So, the costs associated with participating in Smiles for Life, there are two costs. One is a donation for the marketing materials.

And the reason we ask for a donation is that we want a hundred percent of the money, a hundred percent of the donations that are given to Smiles for Life, to go to the charities.

So essentially there’s an upfront cost for your marketing box. It pays for an employee here at Crown Council that participates in counting the money, organizing all of the receipts, and making sure that Smiles for Life runs effectively.

Secondly, every single person that participates in the Smiles for Life Foundation is a member of the Crown Council community. The programs do not exist without the community.

As Steve said, Jeff Gray, a member, created the idea as a way of bettering the community and bettering this group. And so, participating in Smiles for Life also gets an opportunity to join this group.

And when you sign up for Smiles for Life, we have a really neat system where you can have 60 days free inside the Crown Council membership to see if this is a good fit. You know, this community is a place where you can feel that your culture and your team will grow.

And with the programs like Smiles for Life, there are multiple different ways to engage in the Crown Council community beyond Smiles for Life to see if this is a good fit. So that is kind of how the system works.

When you get to the registration page, it’s broken down into those two ways; you pay for the Smiles for Life fee, and then in 60 days, you have the opportunity to join the Crown Council community if you want.

Angela: Absolutely. Thank you. I don’t see any other questions in the chat. If anyone else has any final questions, please pop them in the chat and we’ll get those answered.

But again, I just want to thank you guys so much for your time today. Do you have any final words to let everyone know about? I really appreciate this presentation. I think you guys are just doing an amazing thing, and everyone here, I know, is really appreciative of getting this advice and suggestions and how they can do good.

Steven: Thank you, Angela. I’ll just end with this one thought, and this challenge: I don’t know how everybody listening made their decisions to be in dentistry as a career, as a profession, but they made a really good choice.

Dentistry today is the frontline, leading healthcare segment. More of America goes to the dentists than any other healthcare professional.

As a whole, a greater percentage of America sees you than any other healthcare professional. You picked an amazing profession. And part of that is the latitude that we have in dentistry to do so many things.

Thank goodness we’re not in medicine. Whew. It’s crazy where they’re controlled by insurance companies and they don’t have much room to move. Dentistry has so much freedom to schedule the way it wants to schedule, do what it wants to do, and do as much good as it wants to do.

And so it’s just the perfect setup to make a huge, huge difference.

This is what I call Emotional Income. When you know, at the end of the day when you walk out of the office, that you have done well for the patients that you served.

And when you incorporate a doing good strategy into your business strategy and your marketing strategy, it just elevates the culture of success in your practice to a much, much higher level.

Team members love to work in a practice that’s doing good. Patients love to go to a dentist and a dental practice that’s engaged in doing good. Communities love a practice that’s engaged in doing good.

So our challenge is to incorporate a doing good strategy into your practice, and we’ve given you some great tools today to start building that. And we look forward to walking that path together with you so that we can do more good and make a difference in people’s lives.

Thank you, Angela, for hosting us today. We look forward to working with everybody to do good.

Angela: Thank you very much, guys, really appreciate it.