After you have assessed your organization’s readiness and assembled your team, you’ll need to focus some resources on recruitment. This page includes a helpful guide for providers working with potential clients. We recommend consulting your YAP (Youth Advisory Panel) as you develop your recruitment plan.
Develop an Outreach and Recruitment Plan
Strategies for identifying potential Y2TEC clients include:
In-reach
- Ask for referrals of potential clients from medical providers and case managers.
- Generate a list from organizational databases of clients who may meet your enrollment criteria. Develop a process to recruit these clients.
Outreach
Develop printed and electronic recruitment materials to increase awareness of Y2TEC. Recruitment materials should summarize the intervention, specify eligibility, provide contact information, and mention incentives, if any.
- Enlist the help of peer staff to develop recruitment messaging and strategies:
- What social media platforms does the priority population use?
- What kinds of messages and images appeal to the priority population?
- What are strategic places to post flyers and hand out brochures?
- Distribute and post recruitment materials in waiting rooms, exam rooms, and pharmacies.
- Post about Y2TEC on websites and social media.
Community partners
It is important to utilize your partnerships with other community organizations to reinforce bidirectional referral systems specifically for the young people in your client populations. Engage your partners in discussions regarding the young people they serve, and what they see as the gaps and missed opportunities, and brainstorm ways to strengthen linkages between services.
Engage with your partners and your Youth Advisory Panel to identify partnerships that are still needed to address the needs of your younger client population. Additional partners may include housing agencies, food assistance programs, health departments and HIV testing sites, criminal justice partners, mental health and substance use treatment/counseling agencies, and other community-based organizations that specialize in providing services specifically tailored to young adults.
Incentives
- Consider offering incentives, such as cash via digital wallets with an alternative option for non-cash gift cards to local stores, national chains, or online stores, for enrolling, taking the biopsychosocial assessment, and attending counseling sessions.
- Gradually increasing incentives from the first session to the last may help with retention.
- Cash incentives are not allowable under Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program funding; however, if organizations obtain additional funding for cash incentives, then it is recommended to use payments using reloadable debit cards or digital wallets.
Social Media examples and flyers:
- Flyer example for recruiting clients.
- Recruitment provider letter example.
- Recruitment provider text example
- Consider posting on popular sites, such as Grindr.