Taking services to ones who need them

I attended an academic conference over the last couple of days that dealt with the increase in Spanish speaking immigrants to Missouri, our home state. You can look at the conference at www.cambiodecolores.org . Many people in Missouri have decided the best way to deal with the increasing population of immigrants in general and Spanish speaking immigrants in specific is to be proactive and make the best of it. I took home many interesting impressions. One thing I thought was very interesting is the approach health and social service providers take in getting their services out to those who might need them. I don’t want to debate issues of government or non-profit organizations and their structure and spending. What I’d like you to focus on is how these agencies determine who their “population” is and how they go out and deliver their services. The self storage association and self storage insiders have been studying the self storage business and know a lot about who uses storage, when they use it and how they use it. Or do they? We do not take the same approach as some of the social service agencies, do we? One session dealt with migrant farm workers. This is a difficult population to study and deliver services to, becasue they fly below the radar and stay as far out of the public eye as possible. Do you know how sociologists are able to identify who is a migrant farm family? From school enrollment. Migrant farm families move from place to place following the harvest schedule or going after the next job. Their kids get moved from school to school. School enrollments can be tracked. So the health workers and legal rights advocates, the English-as-a-second-language teachers and the school aid workers target the kids who change schools and determine if they come from a migrant farm family. Then they contact the parents through the kids and go out to deliver their services. This is good sales technique. Yes, many of us sell boxes and rent trucks, so we can be there for people as they are moving and orgainizing. But do we track home sales, paint purchases, subscriptions to remodeling and decorating magazines, trips to the lawn and garden store or college enrollment? I wonder how clever marketers might adopt some of the best practices of social service agencies and start to take our services to the populations that should need them.

bye for now, Tron

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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