Listen to Alison and Jacob talk about pregnancy clinic branding and names. Find encouragement to evaluate your name with fresh eyes.
Summary:
This is Jacob Barr from the Pro-Life Team Podcast. In our latest episode, I was joined by Allison Guzman to discuss the intricacies of branding for pregnancy centers in the pro-life movement. Allison, with her extensive experience in running pregnancy centers and marketing for them, shared valuable insights. We explored the importance of choosing a professional-sounding name, especially for centers with a medical model, to ensure credibility and appeal to a broad audience. We also delved into the nuances of rebranding, like avoiding names that sound overly religious or have ‘life’ in them, as these can create barriers to reaching abortion-minded women. Additionally, we discussed the strategy of maintaining separate brands for donor and client-facing initiatives, acknowledging the complexity of balancing donor relationships with effective client outreach. Names like ‘Spero’ and ‘Eve’, and the concept of adopting names from different languages were also highlighted for their simplicity and appeal. We concluded with the crucial role of prayer in seeking guidance for branding decisions, emphasizing the need for divine direction in this sensitive area of work.
Hashtags: #ProLifePodcast, #BrandingStrategy, #PregnancyCenterMarketing, #EffectiveRebranding, #ClientOutreach, #DonorRelations, #NameSelection, #PrayerfulDecisionMaking, #ProLifeMovement, #HealthcareBranding
Transcript:
The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.
Jacob Barr :
Welcome to the pro-life Team Podcast i’m here with Allison and we’re going to talk about branding, brand names that are good brand names that might need some help and love and care and try to talk about the story of how you can get to a brand that you’re going to enjoy down the road. So Allison, I am glad to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Would you introduce yourself as if you were talking to a group of executive directors?
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Allison Guzman. I have been in the pregnancy center world and in the pro-life movement for about 9 years. I spent about seven years running pregnancy centers, and then I’ve spent some time doing marketing for pregnancy centers.
Jacob Barr :
Awesome And doing that marketing work and do with your experience, which brands have you come across that you think were good and maybe we can talk about which ones maybe not or aren’t so good but tell me some of your thoughts about brands and names of Princey Clinic what comes to mind when we bring up that topic?
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, of course so there’s a lot more to marketing and branding than just the name obviously so it’s not necessarily that the name is always going to fail you if you have this name or it’s going to be great if you have this other name. But I definitely like along the way have learned some pretty useful tips. I think I’m going to preface this with saying that the only truly like evidence based thing I can say as far as research is shown is life shouldn’t be in the name. Other than that a lot of this is opinion and observation and just years of experience, so I didn’t want to kind of make that clear. I’m not necessarily backing this with tons of research other than that one point.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah.
Allison Guzman :
But there’s definitely preferences i think to me, the biggest thing is professionalism. So a lot of pregnancy centers, tons of them, have names like Hope something or something, Grace and those names sound really nice. And I think a lot of times they appeal to their donor base, but they don’t sound professional. And not every pregnancy center has a medical model, but especially one that has a medical model. You want to sound like a medical clinic you know, if you’re going to be a medical clinic, make your name reflect that.
Jacob Barr :
That’s really good. Yeah and going back to that, to life. So there’s a clinic in La Habra. It’s called La Habra Life Centers of Orange County. And i was speaking to Meckey, their director and this is probably like 10 or so years ago. And I was, I essentially had told her that we need to change the name because the word life is like a roadblock or a marketing landmine where it’s going to drive the abortion minded to think, oh, that’s probably pro-life and I’m going to go try again on Google. And then one of my colleagues challenged me on that and essentially he was pushing the idea of like maybe instead of asking them to change the name, maybe we should like reframe the name. So we ended up trying to reframe it i’m not sure if it was the best decision, but what we ended up doing was we used the phrase we it was just made their slogan larger than the logo and made the slogan say it’s your life, it’s your choice, you have time being informed. And with that it’s your, you know, it’s your life we’re trying to make the word life reflect the woman’s life more so than like being pro-life But we had to make that framing bigger than the logo. Because if they just saw the logo by itself, someone could very easily think some % of the time pro-life but by reframing it, by having larger messaging. But then we actually had to have larger messaging than the logo which is not always practical and making it having to work really hard to try and re reduce the number of people who would think, oh that word life in the logo means pro-life And so if we didn’t have the word life in their logo, we could have used that valuable time in that valuable space promoting services, promoting you know a call to action or our care. But instead, we’re having to spend, you know, the very first moments trying to say, oh, you wanna make sure this is yeah, we wanna make sure you look at this in the right angle. Let’s get the angle set yeah but that’s like, that’s the, that’s what the word life does it makes this happen. We have to, like, spend all of our initial moments on that and those additional moments are so precious and so absolutely having the word life not in it, Oh, huge help, But with it, with it, in it. It’s not like someone’s hopeless with it. They can still work it, but you have to do more work like essentially just making it, you’re making, you know, we have to essentially climb those steps before we get to the, you know, where we normally would just get to right away.
Allison Guzman :
Right, absolutely. Yeah i think that’s really an important point though, kind of what I was saying at the beginning it doesn’t doom you to have a name, but it definitely makes things a little bit harder if you’re and if a pregnancy center’s you know, just starting out, absolutely avoid those names. I get that it’s harder to change a name, though I do i understand that and I understand there’s roadblocks and there’s the community knows you as this there’s a lot of things that go along with that and I get that from the standpoint of you want your donors to remember who you are, you know?
Jacob Barr :
Yeah and Speaking of the donors, so I I’m a big fan of keeping the current you know name that may or may not be that great for clients i’m a big fan of keeping it for donors and then adopting an additional name that’s specifically built for clients. When or having a second brand for client marketing and having it being different than the donor marketing brand and while donors will be with someone for decades, a client hopefully will only be a client once. And yeah, we’re not looking for repeat clients.
Allison Guzman :
But we’ll take them but.
Jacob Barr :
We will, but we will take them. That’s not the object yeah, hopefully that’s right. It shows room for improvement at the same time.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, that’s true.
Jacob Barr :
But yeah, so some of the names that I have found that have been really good, like, let me back up so if someone came to you and said, hey, I got, I thought of this name, Xerox, I think it’s going to be great. Am I the only one that would think, oh, that’s terrible like, how are you going to spell it i mean, how are you going to see it in the radio like, no one’s going to get it that’s a terrible name and same thing with like, Chevron, I don’t know, maybe that would have been OK but there’s so many brands that have, like, they’re a made-up word. Honestly, on day one, I probably would have been like, I think we got to try again it’s got too many syllables, It’s got some weird letters it’s absolutely weird to say people are going to mispronounce it but in reality, like Xerox and you know, it just comes like, we all know what it is or Kleenex kleenex is a weird word. I mean, it’s got an X at the end and it starts off with a KLI mean. I mean, that’s just, it just doesn’t come off as something I would have picked.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, no, I think it worked. Really.
Jacob Barr :
Well.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah in general, I feel like simple is better you know, I want people to be able to look at it and know how to spell it. That’s how I felt when I named my children, too i’m like, oh, I want them to be able to look at it and know what it says, know how to pronounce it. And, you know, there’s a lot of big brands that don’t follow that. And I think that, you know, that’s fine but when we’re talking about the kind of budgets that pregnancy centers have, usually that’s not going to be ideal.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, and it’s a lot of for all the for the success stories with weird names i’m sure we could find a lot of names that no one knows if we were to go look. And some of my favorite phrase and collect names are very short like I really like Spiro SPERO which is Latin for the word hope. It looks like it feels like spearmint gum to me for some reason or like a bird Sparrow, but it comes off as just so pleasant and inviting and organic, and I just love the way that feels. Another one I really like is eve which is Latin for life. And then also like the sister word is Eva there’s a couple of clinics that just recently came out with Eve and Eva, and then Eva is just Eva also means life, just a different spelling. And I think those are brilliant because they’re so short and they’re so beautiful and they’re easy to and they’re easy to enjoy not alone, say and Pronounce and spell but yeah, like, I really like. I just feel good when I think of those names like they just come off as so. And I feel like they can work really well for medical. I feel like they can work really well for, you know, for being memorable, Right yeah and the shorter, the shorter it is, the bigger you can make it when you need to which is really. Yes handy for design yes 3-3 characters is amazing yeah. Eve, right. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me, what are some of the what are some of your favorite names that you’ve come across?
Allison Guzman :
So I think my all time favorite name and I don’t even know a ton about the center, but Stanton Stanton Medical Clinic. I love it sounds so professional. It sounds like Medical Clinic i’m like, that’s awesome and it was after Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, so I think it’s fantastic that’s probably.
Jacob Barr :
Like that one sounds. Yeah, it sounds like Stanford to do it. Feels like it’s right like, it’s Stanton. It felt like, oh, I just stepped into a college class or a college level, you know, like it’s going to be professional like it sounds, it’s very professional.
Allison Guzman :
Right yeah, I love that. So I think that’s probably my favorite one that’s a good. I know there’s a lot of centers with like options in the name like options for women options pregnancy center. I like those. But I think I think they might they’re the tide might be turning on those i think that it’s.
Jacob Barr :
Ok.
Allison Guzman :
A lot of people know what you mean now.
Jacob Barr :
If that makes I think the problem with the word options is that there are they have a low ceiling because there’s so many clinics that have the word option in their name that if you wanted to it’s really hard to know which one someone’s thinking about. Or sometimes if you know about a few, it becomes really hard to think about one of them because there’s like one. If you change one letter, we just got 10 more clinics if you change one word, we just found a hundred more clinics for that same name. There’s just so many clinics with a similar name. However, on the flip side, where that can work is this if you’re in a single county and there’s no one, no other clinic in that county with the name options Care Center Option Preston Clinic Option Something or Real Options even if there’s no one else in that space then you’re not competing for someone’s mind space on you know for that name. But when you when I look at it at the national level, which most people don’t. It makes me very you know i there’s hundreds of names with that word options in it or pregnancy care. Pregnancy is in like half of all the names like probably half so many names. Yeah, one of the names I also like that recently came out of Austin, texas is trotter house. And Trotter was named after a person as well. And that one is interesting because before they were Austin Pregnancy Clinic or Austin Pregnancy Center and they weren’t allowed on campus because of, you know, they were just told they weren’t allowed on campus but after they changed their name, they were invited onto the college campus and it was like a light switch kind of switch, you know, night and day. When it came to that, the name was huge when it comes to reaching, you know, when it comes to reaching an invitation to the local college campus and essentially taking out pregnancy Center was the main switch for that name piece because Trotter House essentially just simply sort of like Xerox it didn’t mean anything it was completely unmarked by previous agendas or previous stories it was a brand new name with a fresh beginning.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah it’s kind of crazy how quickly you become in your community’s mind you know exactly what you are and if that starts out bad, it’s really hard to change that. It’s really hard to go back and change that.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, that’s true it’s like 3 times harder to build trust than it is to get trust initially. And getting the trust initially is much easier than it is to try and like turn turn something around, yeah.
Allison Guzman :
But what you were talking about getting into the schools, I think that’s a really important thing for centers to be thinking about is like making sure their name is neutral enough sounding that they can get into secular events. That’s another thing religious sounding. That’s another of my pet peeves. When it sounds like overly religious, You’re not doing yourself any favors, you know.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah and my pet peeve I guess would be whenever there’s like a hidden message in it that is that if it’s Latin, I’m not. I’m not opposed to Latin. I’m OK with Latin, but I’m opposed to like it being like, you know, we have a picture of a baby, you know, a mom, a pregnant mom in the logo, but you may not see it, but our donors will see it. And so, but I think the women that are, you know, the young woman who is 17 or the young woman who is 21 is probably a little bit more savvy than our when it comes to picking up subtle imagery adjustments than our 60 plus donor audience. And so i don’t think that’s a fair you know expectation to have is that oh we can have this like hidden message or Easter egg in the logo or messaging that sort of like says but yes we are pro-life right i think it needs we need to essentially have one brand that speaks directly to the abortion vulnerable women that says we’re here to care for you and help you with medical you know at a medical professional level. And then after building trust and rapport bring in Jesus, bring in bring in the direction F but we have to have trust yeah before we start leveraging direction i mean, if you have no trust, you give someone direction, they’re just, they’re just not gonna listen it.
Allison Guzman :
Doesn’t even matter.
Jacob Barr :
It doesn’t even matter.
Allison Guzman :
Like you just said, yeah.
Jacob Barr :
But if you trust somebody and they provide direction, then that’s when you yeah, that’s when you listen like that’s what we all do it makes it’s part of how trust is. Trust is like a prerequisite before you give someone direction.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, absolutely. I think my biggest pet peeve in pregnancy center naming and all of that is just like the overall thing that we have to do it right because I feel like it would be so wonderful. I know I live in a fairy tale. If we just had one name, if we were just the same, you know, I think that’s one of the biggest advantages the pro-choice movement has is, you know, yes, there are other abortion clinics, but come on. Planned Parenthood yeah, everybody.
Jacob Barr :
Thinks that parenthood does like 40 % and the next player is like at I want us to say under 7 but I don’t know the next it’s a it’s a huge obviously a huge drop. But yeah, they’re practically doing half of all the abortions it sounds like yeah, no, I think that one came from Jarrell with heartbeat i think that’s where I pulled that number from and I probably, I probably broke the number, so.
Allison Guzman :
That’s right it’s a huge percentage that’s what we know huge.
Jacob Barr :
Obviously we know it’s a huge percentage, but sometimes we think it’s probably like 90 or 80 and it’s not quite there. It’s closer to like fiftyish or slightly below 50.
Allison Guzman :
Right but the ramp is on point because we think it’s 90.
Jacob Barr :
And but and the next person, you know, the person after them is like minute. So there’s not like a second player, it’s more like all the players sort of fall into.
Allison Guzman :
That segmented? Yeah just a.
Jacob Barr :
Large number of players. One of the arguments that I’ve heard is that as a pricey connect movement we have so we have 3000 names or ish 2000 plus names and so it’s really hard to throw, you know for someone to target one of us because we have so many names. Like it’s almost like we’re ambiguous but then again but also the flip side of that or the negative of that is that we’re ambiguous and it’s hard to think of us because I can think of this. I can think of some names but when it comes to the ones that you know Crisis Precis Clinic, you know the different names that start with CPC, the different names that use the word yeah care options, pregnancy, women’s There’s just so many like there are not just dozens, it’s probably more like 50 plus, you know, in all these different categories. And but again in the community, they can still be known in their community, but it’s just when they want to branch out and go from being like a four location clinic to being the five state clinic, that’s when they’re going to start to hit these, oh, our brand doesn’t work so well scenarios and they’re going to have, they’re going to be competing with people that have the same name, essentially. And that’s sort of a hard place to be but if you have a name that’s like a Bria, like, that’s a unique name no one else has got. There’s no a brio it’s just a brio,
Allison Guzman :
Yeah there’s.
Jacob Barr :
And so actually a brio would be a fun masculine version, but they wouldn’t do that they have a beautiful marketing campaign and but yeah so the Brio, they’ve got 26 locations and they’re trying to do that franchise model a little bit different than the average clinic or very different yeah going after Title 10 funding and having insurance involved. But yeah but Abria too like the you know that style there’s like birth birthright, birthright out of Canada which is obviously like an ancient name when it came to the word birth in the name and it sounds like yeah not just pre you know it’s like birthright. It’s like very pro-life very prenatal sounding like, I don’t know, can’t really get much more prenatal birth sounding and but that one’s got like 200 locations that through their franchise membership model or something, it’s huge. They do.
Allison Guzman :
But it’s from what I understand it’s decreasing so it’s not increasing, it’s the fact that they have been around so long they’ve.
Jacob Barr :
Been around for a long time and people are yeah they’re looking for and then they’re experiencing the pain of an older name that doesn’t really relate to people today I the audience of life minded women, just the abortion. The name has a marketing put off built into it.
Allison Guzman :
I I’m sorry, you kind of cut out there for a second. What were you saying?
Jacob Barr :
Oh, sorry. Oh, I was just saying that Birthright, it works well for women who have who are life minded. But when it comes to women who are abortion minded, it falls short of helping that group because they’re more likely to try again on Google if they find a birthright. I think because it because the name has a natural put off saying we’re prenatal and if someone shopping to not be pregnant, they’re not gonna go into a place that sounds prenatal.
Allison Guzman :
Right. So I think, I think the major question that senators have to ask themselves is like, do we want to be a Resource Center and help women, which is a good thing i’m not saying it’s not yeah. Or do we want to reach abortion minded women? And those are two very different campaigns, you know, And so birthrights, they do good work. I’m not saying they don’t, but they’re not reaching the abortion minded, really i mean, unless it’s happenstance, they’re not marketing to the abortion minded so much.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah.
Allison Guzman :
I came from a birthright.
Jacob Barr :
So I think they might so oh you came from one so my impression is that they do get abortion minded women i just feel like they are getting a lot less than what they would get if they had a name that didn’t have the built in put off.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah it’s not like they don’t get any, but they’re not marketing to them that’s not like they’re not doing a good job marketing to them which is why a lot of birthrights have become something else. Whenever I worked for a birthright, actually, it was. I’m trying to think. When I started it was like 2013 sixteen 2012 and so not that long ago. And they had the like, the cut out of the B was like a phone. Yes, like.
Jacob Barr :
Oh yes, like an old phone with a cord.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, that was like, yeah, God.
Jacob Barr :
Wired cord, yeah.
Allison Guzman :
And they have changed that they’ve updated that I will say, but you know it’s just.
Jacob Barr :
It’s I wrote some emails to both right back around 2012 Yeah, I wrote some emails to them about, you know, how that phone is like, People aren’t gonna know what that is.
Allison Guzman :
I know, I know.
Jacob Barr :
But yeah, that’s interesting. But so you. So what was your role at the Birthright when you worked there were you working on their marketing or were you working as a clinic director?
Allison Guzman :
No so yeah, I started as a program director and then I was the executive director for a while. So it was a pretty small clinic and honestly the name was hurting it I mean.
Jacob Barr :
It’s, yeah.
Allison Guzman :
They have since closed. It just wasn’t. I don’t know it wasn’t really easy to reach people with that name, to reach the and we did a ton of helping the community and helping underprivileged moms and, you know, giving out diapers and things like that, which is great. Again, I don’t have any problem with that i’m not trying to say it’s less than.
Jacob Barr :
Oh yeah.
Allison Guzman :
But if that, and if that’s your goal, that’s wonderful but if your goal is to reach abortion minded women, you have to rethink your marketing.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, i think some people find themselves working within that birthright kind of name structure. And they have a desire to reach the abortion bind to women. But then what’s sort of holding them from making that change is that they would have to like disconnect from their umbrella group and who is providing like this back story and like and we’ve have all this, all this good history and we don’t want to dishonor all that experience. And so it creates like this, it creates a little bit of a hard place to be when it comes to wanting to reach the abortion minded better, but yet also wanting to honor our roots. And I feel like a lot of clinics who have less known names are in that same exact boat when it comes to having a name that’s been around for 30 years and here we are, we find ourselves in this position today where it’s not working well for the abortion minded it’s working brilliantly for donors and we have we don’t want to dishonor all of the work and the team who has been putting in decades of volunteer prayer. But and so i would just I guess what I would say is sometimes just simply speaking making yourself vulnerable by sharing the truth of what’s going on is probably the best way to try and just like figure it out or if you reach out to someone who is gifted in marketing and ask them for insight and to simply lay it out in a helpful way. Our goal is not to step on people’s toes but sometimes we sort of need to share things in a way that says we really want to honor what you did. But at the same time we also want to be positioned to be relevant for the next 20 plus years. And so absolutely and logos and brands are like the long game. You know having a good brand that’s today will be an impact on the work being done in 20 years. It’s just a or you know it was it could be a positive impact, a negative impact, but it will, it will continue to impact because it’s like the cornerstone piece that connects all these other elements and services that are provided. And so one of my favorite stories when thinking about brands and telling this to clients and clinics and working with people is i tried to find the whole like a similar story in the secular world when it comes to like we have one part of us is serving the life minded. I mean one part of us is serving the abortion minded client And then we also have donors who are opposed to abortion. So we are on the, you know, on the spectrum of life meaning like pro-life or pro abortion, we have people on different parts of that timeline. And so when looking for like an example of this in like somewhere outside of the pro-life world to try and get insight on what someone else did and came across quicker routes. So out of curiosity, I know I showed this one to you before, but do you happen to know who owns quicker Oats? Maybe so Quick Roats is owned by PepsiCo and so Pepsi owns quick Roats but the reason why you don’t know that is because they never market them together. Because it doesn’t make sense to have Pepsi, which is delicious and sugary and bad for you, but yet still delicious. And then Quick Roats, if it doesn’t have the sugar in it, it’s actually heart healthy like that’s a genuine statement and so at least I think it is. But on the spectrum of health, we have one that’s healthy, one that’s not healthy but they’re both great in some ways, yes. And So what I find interesting and then Oh yeah, Pepsi also owns Taco Bell. They own laced potato chips they own Gatorade and.
Allison Guzman :
See, I knew all that.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, because those are all inside the Taco Bell like they have, they have the Dorito flavored, you know, Taco and they have the different Mountain Dew flavors and that’s because they’re all under all under the same ownership and but Quaker Rose is never in Taco Bell because it’s obviously a different genre. I feel like you know, they have like an unhealthy vehicle going One Direction and they have a different healthy vehicle, you know, servicing a different population of people on a different part of town going a different direction. And what I have learned from that is that I think it’s OK for Pacey Clinic to consider the idea of having the multi brand or you know more multi brand strategy meaning more than one brand and having one brand for life minded work and one brand for abortion minded friendly work. It’s not that those clients are, it’s not that they are pro abortion it’s more like they’re OK using it based on their scenario and what they’ve been told, right and what they think that they can do based on the fact that it feel like they have no option more so than they have options. And but anyways, all that to say is having one more than one brand is something that other companies do they have a brand per audience and they well sometimes have multiple brands based on the different things they do. But yeah, changing brands is such a big undertaking and I think it’s really good to plant seeds and then let them. You know, it might take five years before that new brand’s ready and that’s fine. That’s good if it takes two years, five years, maybe even six or seven. But the idea is that prissy clinics are so needed even in 40 plus years. You know, even with Roe versus Wade being overturned, obviously the need to help women in unplanned pregnancies is not going away it’s just changing the state you’re in and so there’s no end based on Roe versus Wade being overturned it’s more of we have to adjust our strategy to reach women based on how they’re looking and where they are. But I don’t think unplanned pregnancies are ever, you know, I don’t think they’ll, I think they will.
Allison Guzman :
All be anywhere.
Jacob Barr :
Exactly they’re they will always exist as far as long as we have humans, we will have unplanned pregnancies. Yeah that need help so.
Allison Guzman :
I live in Missouri, so a lot of people think there’s no abortions happening in Missouri that’s not quite accurate, but yeah.
Jacob Barr :
There’s like the Saint Louis border it’s all you’re like, yeah, there’s states all around you with abortion clinics just across the state lines.
Allison Guzman :
Well, there there’s ones in Missouri as well i mean a lot of.
Jacob Barr :
Hospital isn’t there’s isn’t it just one?
Allison Guzman :
There’s not 3 standing ones, but a lot of hospitals perform abortions most people don’t even realize that. You know, so there’s abortions happening in Missouri, but it’s probably the best example still of you know what it could look like after if Roe versus what it gets overturned you know we if it does go to state rights probably Missouri will become an abortion Free State. Does that mean that they’re going to stop? Absolutely not the clinic right across the river from Saint Louis that is in Illinois is huge and it’s so many Missouri women are going there now. And so I think that’s one of the things that, you know, we need to be thinking about and actually a pet peeve of mine because a lot of people say, like, Missouri doesn’t have abortions anymore. I’m like, well, Missouri women are still getting abortions we’re, there’s still a fight to fight, you know? Yeah, I was.
Jacob Barr :
At the Alliance for Life Missouri and one of the gentleman was one of the speakers was talking about how they’ve been measuring the numbers of abortions happening. And really they’ve seen they’ve seen a shift. So like the number of abortions across the state line has gone up, while the number of abortions may be reported in Missouri has gone down. But the total number of abortions almost. It seems like it just matches the trend line more so than it being a drastic shift.
Allison Guzman :
Exactly and if Roe versus Wade gets overturned, Illinois is not going to stop having abortions. They’re not, you know, so I think we kind of live here in this, in this world that’s almost the same as it will be if that happens where you know, people are just going right over the state lines and they also make it really easy for them so if you go to the Planned Parenthood in Saint Louis, they make it really easy and if needed, they will provide transportation over.
Jacob Barr :
To the one across the I’ve been seeing that messaging showing up the, yeah, transportation so like if someone needs a flight or a or a carpool. Yeah that’s essentially sort of trying to yeah including that and part of their service of reaching their audience and essentially they’re just they’re. So it sounds like the Illinois group has expanded their reach when it comes to marketing in order to include Missouri because now they’re showing that as a need probably on their side yeah but you know quote they’re servicing that area as like their scope of area.
Allison Guzman :
Right it’s an interesting dynamic.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, So what are you going back to the idea of what if we all had the same name? I wonder what the So on one side, people would know our name. On the other side Planned Parenthood might shift their mud throwing from crisis prensi clinics or whatever they happen to be calling us now probably still that to maybe that new you know unified name. So we would we would become more of like a unified target but yet we would also have more of like it would be more of like a household like you could get help at that name. And so that would become more of like the we would have more awareness amongst the nation if we had a unified name and it would come with a text, but it would have also great greater awareness and awareness has been like our or Achilles heel in some way like that’s.
Allison Guzman :
It is it’s definitely a stop.
Jacob Barr :
Awareness is that’s the hurt that’s the part we always seem to fall short. Like across the nation. Yeah, I don’t think i don’t. I can’t think you know, everyone’s got an awareness issue.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah no, I agree. I think the main thing there, there’s definitely positive and negative to it. I understand. Like, in some ways, we don’t necessarily want everybody to know exactly who we are and what we do, right? In the sense that we want to reach a woman who may not come there if they know it’s a pregnant or a pro-life center. We want to be able to reach those women so having one name definitely can make you become OK that that’s the pro-life place. I get that however, if you think of the marketing dollars that are being wasted, that if everybody was under a unified name, unified branding, we would have so much more funding to put into things and one of those things to me is having really good medical models. So I think if you have a really good medical model, it’s a little harder for you know Planned Parenthood or NARL or whoever else to sling mud. You know if we are providing the medical services and a lot of centers are and a lot that aren’t are moving towards that. But if we can provide really good medical centers where they can’t say fake clinic, then I think we can keep that.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, they seem to say it regardless of what’s going on in a clinic though like, I feel like they just throw it as like their default statement regardless of the medical services being provided. I mean, regardless of the fact that the, you know, if an organization under the, under the supervision and direction of a medical director and who’s licensed, you know, spent a lot of time in school, has all the credentials, but yet they still throw that like they don’t. I don’t see them holding back at certain clinics you know, they seem to just throw it on anyone who will be promoting life as the best option.
Allison Guzman :
Right no and i know what you’re saying, especially from the standpoint of places that have a medical director and maybe have a ultrasound, but I’m talking about like full medical services and there comes a point where what they’re saying people are like that doesn’t make any sense because you have full medical services i’m talking about places like Pro Women’s Health centers. Are you familiar with those?
Jacob Barr :
No so tell me more about that. So is that a? Is that a pro-life or is that a neutral group or?
Allison Guzman :
Pro-life Group, they are pro-life the Pro Women’s Health Centers is it’s basically a certification i don’t, I don’t know exactly the word they would use, but basically there isn’t a center called Pro Women’s Health Center, right. There’s different centers that meet these standards that become a pro Women’s Health center, but they have a different name. It’s you are considered a pro Women’s Health center because you meet these standards and because you have these services.
Jacob Barr :
Ok.
Allison Guzman :
And so and I think it’s one thing that they really did probably to get around the fact that we are operating under different names, but to still be able to say like we want to partner together and basically hold each other to a higher standard and there’s not a ton of them. I think there’s like 8 or 9 could be wrong, there’s not a ton of them throughout the states, but these places have prenatal care. I mean, these places have full medical centers, you know, not just ultrasound or just STI testing, which most centers, if they have medical it’s ultrasound, maybe STI testing. But these centers are doing, you know, like I said, prenatal care and everything. And so if we have those kind of services and we become places that you can accept insurance and things like that, then it’s a little harder to sling mud but that means you have to have lots of pro-life OBGYNS and you have to have lots of funding and it’s one of the places that I see, you know, if we could cut down that marketing budget because we don’t have to market 50.000 thousand names, maybe we could put it toward more services i think most centers want that the centers that I talked to, they’re not, they’re not stagnant. They’re not wanting to stay stagnant they might be somewhat stagnant because of funding. But nobody’s like, Oh yeah, we’re totally satisfied with exactly the services we do. Even the ones that do a ton, they’re like, we want to do more and we’re excited about this. Yeah i mean, the pregnancy center directors I know are they want to help people. They want to be there. And funding’s a challenge it is.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah and providing greater services gives us the ability to build more rapport, trust along someone’s life journey. I was talking with a clinic who essentially works working you know a couple of clinics were working on this new idea of providing rape kits for helping women who have gone to a rape scenario providing the medical services after that experience. And what we what that resulted in was the Police Department sending referrals for women to get care at that Praisey clinic instead of sending them to the because the Praisey Clinic was built to give more compassionate care, whereas the may have been more sterile or you know, that may have been lacking in the compassionate side of things. And then another thing that same those same clinics were doing was going through a certification process to understand how to identify if someone’s being sex trafficked in order to then send referrals to the police when they see a sex trafficking scenario taking place where the women showing up in that kind of scenario. But yeah, I would. So certain services have direct impact on how to reach our current primary audience and there’s a lot of services that we could do i mean, the yeah, the rape kit and the identifying sex trafficking are just two examples of like they’re completely in line with serving our audience and helping them have healthier, better lives and helping reach women in these hard scenarios with our current, you know, heart.
Allison Guzman :
And it’s such a great step in the right direction you know, for centers who would love to become full medical but don’t have 1000000$ to throw around, You know, because it is, it’s very expensive to provide prenatal care. That’s, yeah, extremely expensive. But if you can provide some real services, real medical services other than just ultrasound, and I’m not discounting ultrasound, I love ultrasound. Oh, yeah, extremely important. But when we focus on just that, we’re missing a lot, you know?
Jacob Barr :
Yeah it it’s a it’s an important part but there’s yeah, there’s other parts that are complimentary and building that, you know, building up that trust essentially means building up relationships with clients in a way that we can well hopefully be known when they need to think of somebody or when they need to refer somebody, they’ll think of us and we’re sort of breaking that awareness barrier yeah. So Allison, when you think, if you imagine a clinic director and her board, maybe her and her husband brainstorming and maybe you know people at our church brainstorming a name, what would that look like for you how would you start your brainstorming session? I’m trying to think of a name for a new clinic.
Allison Guzman :
I think I would start with building the parameters of what we don’t want, You know? Ok, You know, everybody’s in the room oK hey, we need to talk about let’s we’re gonna all throw out ideas but we want to make sure they don’t sound religious we want to make sure that life’s not in the name. We want to make sure that it’s not hard to pronounce, you know, those kind of things. And just starting with those parameters and just being in that mindset i think people are creative people can come up with lots of amazing things. I’m so impressed all the time whenever I see what these centers are doing. But if you don’t have those parameters in mind to begin with, you’re going to come up with things that really appeal to donors.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah and I would say, I think that’s that sounds really good i would agree with that. And then I would say making a list, making a long list of ideas and then start crossing off. Oh, that one actually does sound religious or that one oh, that sounds like it could be more pro-life than the others. You know, that doesn’t meet our objective. And then this one, oh, it’s hard it’s a little bit too hard to spell this one’s too long, too many characters. But if you come up with a list of, like, you know, if you work on making a long list, you do need to remove all but one. And so it’s OK to start taking them out one at a time like, oh, someone else already has that name or, you know, that one sounds really similar to this group’s name. And so there’s it’s good to start taking those out and then and just thinking you know someone’s going to answer the phone, you know that name. You know thank you for calling da name. And so it’s good to think about how that’s going to sound because someone’s going to put someone’s going to be saying it so many times it’d be nice to honor that volunteer and staff by giving them a name that sounds enjoyable.
Allison Guzman :
Yes, and simple. Not overly complicated.
Jacob Barr :
Spiro Eve eva Yeah there’s a group called Collage Center and I think that that’s a brilliant name thrive i think that name is oK so full of energy i love it yeah word obria. It sounds yeah, I think it sounds like OB Doctor and then it’s got that feminine Hispanic yeah, feminine Ria to it that’s nice obria Trotterhouse. I love you know, someone’s last name. It’s a, you know, that was the Canton, right? Yeah.
Allison Guzman :
That’s Stanton yeah.
Jacob Barr :
Well, Stanton, yeah, Because there’s only one Stanton. I don’t. And there’s only one Trotter House like because if you pick someone’s name, you’re essentially creating something that’s, you know you’re really unique.
Allison Guzman :
As long as their name’s not Jones, right?
Jacob Barr :
Exactly yeah. Make sure it’s, Yeah, pick. But it’s also a way to honor one of the founders or one of the inspirational people who may or may not still be with us. But you know, honoring that person with using their name is a really good idea. One of the clinics in Los Angeles, I mean Orange County life centers of Orange County, their donor facing name is Mechi team and Mechi is the name of the person who started the clinic that’s her first name. So Mechi team is like their donor facing name and it that one came off really well and what actually one of the very first clinics ever opened was Pearson Place in Hawaii and that one’s based on the name Pearson and that one’s got that one still actually sounds really good for being one of the first names it’s got some long good longevity that was they got lucky or fortunate or they were blessed they have such a good name for yeah, because most names don’t last 40 years they don’t come off as sounding good still in 40 years as they did on day one but person play sounds really good i still i think that one’s a solid name. But yeah, So what? What were you guys saying?
Allison Guzman :
Sorry, I was looking at the Pro Women’s Health Center, so it looks like there’s like, oh, twelve of them now that’s good.
Jacob Barr :
Ok. Oh, good.
Allison Guzman :
They’re growing, but one of them that I really like the name of is Tepiac. So they’re.
Jacob Barr :
Tepiac Oh, I see the area, yes, yeah.
Allison Guzman :
Fantastic name and I know I said simple i guess it’s not simple but it’s not hard. It’s not. It’s easier than.
Jacob Barr :
Xerox, it’s easier than right?
Allison Guzman :
And it’s unique, you know?
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, there’s a lot of names that you’ll only think of.
Allison Guzman :
One thing.
Jacob Barr :
Tepiac Yeah, I know exactly who you’re talking about. That’s good.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, I also think, you know when centers have two different names, I personally like that when they have a donor facing name and they have a client facing name. But I understand that not everybody wants to do that. So one of the things that I love is whenever people just play off of a different language, you know, just I think you were talking about even Eva and you know all of those that you can play off of it another language and still kind of pull in that life affirming name without yeah, without being super.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, but someone that hears the name Eve, they might think of, you know, the Disney character or they might think of Eve from the Bible right. Which is a woman. They might think of a woman and right. Exactly. Yeah, Actually, I think that might have did I get that wrong i wonder if Eve actually means woman and not life, because Vitae Vitae is life in Latin. Yeah, I wonder if I made a mistake there let’s see, what’s Eve? Latin to English let me go look that up, Eve. Oh yeah, it’s life oK, it’s life. But it very easily could be woman because of Eve and right Genesis. Yeah i wouldn’t be surprised if people translated to this woman as well. That would be very reasonable.
Allison Guzman :
Right, absolutely.
Jacob Barr :
Actually, that sort of makes that name even more brilliant that it could be Life or Woman or yeah, a really fun Disney character.
Allison Guzman :
Exactly.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, and actually, Speaking of that, if you think about Planned Parenthood and their name for their app, which is Roo, you know the cute kangaroo from Wearing the Poo and they named it Roo. It just makes like that’s that was a good name and it makes me sad that they had such a good name for their app yeah.
Allison Guzman :
They have some brilliant marketing.
Jacob Barr :
They do. They have some brilliant marketing people working really hard yeah. I mean, they have to. They do they have to work hard. They have. And they’re, yeah, they’re spending, they’re spending all that money they’re making, working on things to make more, Yeah, But yeah.
Allison Guzman :
It’s pretty wild but I think, I think the biggest thing is pregnancy centers need to know that they have to be thinking about these things you know, they that it’s not just what sounds good to you because you as the director, as a board member, you’re the donor audience, you know, Yes, If it sounds good to you, it might not be. It might not be that good, you know? And yeah, asking neutral parties, I think that’s another thing just like informal surveys, super helpful. I’m not saying survey your donor base and ask them what name you should get. Don’t do that. But just informal surveys, especially, you know, if you have a teenage daughter and ask her friends, you know, things like that ask some young people and just get lots of ideas. And I like your idea of just making a huge exhausted list and then just mark off what’s not going to work.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah And I think I like your idea of like if you go to a college campus and you don’t mark yourself as like you go there with a generic survey in order to ask, you know, they have no option but to give you good feedback because they’re not trying to tell you what you want to hear. You know, they’re essentially if you just if you set yourself up to get neutral, unbiased feedback from the audience you’re trying to serve.
Allison Guzman :
Right.
Jacob Barr :
That that’s a really that’s smart, Yeah, I think.
Allison Guzman :
I think something a mistake a lot of centers do whenever they’re rebranding as they go right to their donors and they go to they’re like, oh, they’re a big donor so maybe they’ll have input and that’s great and all but our donors don’t know our business for the most part. They know the goal they know the mission, but they don’t understand the day-to-day A lot of time, yeah. And not all of them. Certainly there’s more that there’s some that are aware than ours, yeah.
Jacob Barr :
And we can always share that day-to-day with them, but it takes time to because.
Allison Guzman :
It’ll exactly.
Jacob Barr :
This is not general, You know, this is not we’re marketing enough we’re not we’re in a battlefield and we’re trying to get help from one group and we’re trying to help this other group who is, yeah, almost like as if they’re in a burning building and we’re trying to send in the troops, the firefighters, to try and help pull them out of this terrible experience and with all these negative Planned Parenthood marketing messages, trying to set them up for destruction, essentially trying to help rescue them from this.
Allison Guzman :
You saying that just made me I now I just want to write a book called Marketing in a battlefield you.
Jacob Barr :
Want to ride?
Allison Guzman :
It with me, Jacob.
Jacob Barr :
I would say yes, but I’m already like three times overbooked. I’m actually, I’m in the middle of another book project called Constant Marketing and we’re like we’re halfway through it. And so I probably need to honor my current writing friend before I start a new one. My friend Bill and I are working on that one and it’s been about 10 months before I’ve written anything and I need to get it’s on my To Do List.
Allison Guzman :
I hear you. I understand that.
Jacob Barr :
So one more thing, just to try and bring this back to like how to do it. I think besides making that long list, besides getting feedback from the community, another element that I think you know should probably be at the very beginning and then in the middle and the end would be prayer. You know, going to God, asking for inspiration, asking God for direction and then trying to listen for his voice and then looking, listening for, you know, looking for opportunities for him to speak through the Bible, through prayer, life. And then when you get down to those, those final four names, just praying over them and asking God which of these names is the name you want us to use or please tell us the name you want us to use. And then being patient and keep praying and waiting, because it’s by my church on Sunday, we were going over Philippians 4-4-2-7 it talks about having joy, being gentle, giving all of our requests to God. And then it talks about having finding the peace of God so that you can avoid problems and it sort of sounded like to me like having the peace of God means you sort of know where God wants you to go after you’ve prayed so that you have confidence and where to go and you can relax and have peace and drop off all you know let the anxiety just fall off and so I would say if you pray about a name and you feel like God said that’s the one, you don’t have to keep looking. You can now have confidence and go with that name and hold on to it. And if by chance you have uncertainty, you should probably ask your team members to pray about it too. Because God’s gonna say God’s consistent. And if you end up hearing something different, you probably need to ask that voice was Jesus, God is did Jesus come in the flesh did Jesus die on the cross? And if that voice says yeah since that’s the way of trying to test the spirit. But you know another way of testing the spirit is also to make sure that you have you know everyone on your team is praying and trying to test the spirit. But anyways, all I have to say is I think prayer is a way to find that confidence in like this is the name that we’re going to use for a season, for our for 10 years, for some period of time. But then again, that name might change and prayer life needs to be part of that journey because it, you know, if we’re trying to reach a group that’s changing, you know, a group that didn’t use Twitter 10 years ago or, you know, didn’t use Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat, tik tok and tinder and all of these dating apps and social media and, you know, and essentially living online and we’re, you know, this wasn’t even a thing 30 years ago when all these clinics started you know, 2835 years ago when clinic started, you know, we were people were different people’s reaction to ideas was different. And so and having a good prayer life means you can, you know, hear God’s direction on where you need to go to reach the people we’re trying to serve.
Allison Guzman :
Absolutely oh.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, prayer. Lots of prayer from the whole team. But yeah, I think, I think blessed, you know, asking for God’s blessing and prayer of our name would be really. Yeah, the beginning, middle and end kind of steps while doing all the work in between.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, exactly you still got to do the work.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, well so I’ve really enjoyed this podcast would you mind wrapping this up in prayer and sort of praying for those clinics who might have one of those names that might need to be redone or rebranded or refreshed and just sort of helping encourage them to seek God’s voice on it perhaps?
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Dear Heavenly Father, I just, I pray that you bless us in this movement i pray that you bless the pro-life movement as a whole, and especially these clinic directors and volunteers and everybody who’s just on the front lines in the day-to-day helping women and trying to reach women. I just pray for your direction and everything that we do. I pray that you will just break in where it’s needed and stir hearts where it’s needed. And I know there’s so many challenges when different people have different opinions and all of that. But we also know that you are God and you are mightier than that. So I pray that it doesn’t become an issue of strife between people where when people have different opinions on what should be done and instead they can come together and bring you into it and find good solutions. And I just, I pray for, again, all of those center directors, just bless them and all of the women that we’re reaching amen.
Jacob Barr :
Amen. All right, Awesome. Cool well, I’m going to work on putting this together probably tonight and I’ll send you a link and I’ll hopefully this will. There’s a lot of clinics that need to hear this so I think this is going to be really helpful to them because they need to be encouraged that it’s OK they’re not they’re in like they’re all in the same all I’m in the same boat. They think they don’t know in the same boat but sometimes, you know, they don’t realize that everyone else has also got a bad name.
Allison Guzman :
Yes, yeah and I think, I think the biggest thing is like, I want people to realize we’re not insulting.
Jacob Barr :
You know, no. If I was in that room 34 years ago, I would have made the same decision they did i would have been like, let’s do Crisis Princess Clinic that’s the name to go with.
Allison Guzman :
Well, and so many of them were brilliant for the time, you know yes, for that time. But times change. It’s not that, it’s.
Jacob Barr :
Exactly.
Allison Guzman :
Always a bad name. It’s just things change.
Jacob Barr :
Exactly, yeah. And honestly, when I have my first website that I have ever built for the Crisis Princess Clinics at Tucson, I made all the mistakes you could possibly ever make as a brand new person on the learning curve like it was. I’ve got i’ve got no judgment. Yeah, i know exactly how people make bad mistakes and bad decisions when they’re starting off at Ground Zero like, i just feel blessed that we’ve got so many experts in the field now they can help, right. People fast track their, you know, skipping all the bad decisions and bad choices and so there’s we’re in a different space we have we have mature team members in the pro-life world who you can leverage their expertise and creativity. And as a group, we are so much better. And we’ve been, yeah, we’re helping each other along that journey it’s been good.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, and so I don’t know if you can like if you can clip this in, but.
Jacob Barr :
Sure i’ll be Yeah, I can clip it in,
Allison Guzman :
Yeah. Ok so another thing that I wanna mention is we do have lots of experts we do have lots of resources to reach out to so you’re not on your own. And I work for VTA Foundation. They are free, a free resource to pregnancy centers. We don’t charge anything we want to help you. And so if you have questions about your name or your branding or how to market, like that’s literally what we’re here for we’re here to help in that regard and one of the ways we’re going to help with that is introducing the Vt Vault. So that has lots of free content on different best practices, what our research has shown, trainings, even some like social media graphics that you can literally just like pull over, you know, copy paste. If you have someone who is new to social media, or you know they’re not sure what needs to be on your page, we’re going to have some stuff available. So all of that is just to help. So no cost anyway oh.
Jacob Barr :
Awesome Yeah vt yes you’re a unique group you’re a fundraising so that you can provide free services to clinic and help them with their marketing. And that’s just a that’s just such a like a it feels like a picture of Jesus where you’re essentially doing the work, you’re going the extra mile by fundraising and then doing the mile of helping the clinic with their marketing like that’s just that’s a sweet, sweet thing.
Allison Guzman :
Yeah, it’s pretty wonderful i have to say, I feel really blessed to be where I’m at. I was 11 years old the first time I got introduced to V Tay and it was at a fundraising event i think my mom like, I think my babysitter cancelled or something, I don’t know but for some reason, my mom brought me along to this event, and that was like my first introduction into the pro-life movement, which I don’t think I would be here if it weren’t for that.
Jacob Barr :
Aw, so, Well, yeah, God’s got fingerprints on how probably you probably could explore how his fingerprints run, how you were there that night then.
Allison Guzman :
I know it’s so easy.
Jacob Barr :
Awesome all right, Allison well, I think I’m gonna. I’ll include this last bit and then, yeah, I might just put it after the end music piece. It sort of flows in naturally oK. And it looks good awesome well, hey, have a great day. I will look forward to seeing you at some future conference i’m sure we’ll, yeah, I’m going to talk to you about.
Allison Guzman :
Will you be at Heartbeat?
Jacob Barr :
Yes, yeah end of March. I’ll be there as well.
Allison Guzman :
Oh, OK.
Jacob Barr :
I’ll probably see your colleagues then.
Allison Guzman :
We have. We have four people going i won’t be there, but we do have people going so which?
Jacob Barr :
And you’re out of Missouri, is that right? Yeah, I’ll probably see you at the Alliance, Life Missouri then I would expect or maybe do you, do you ever go to that one? Oh, yeah i’ll see you it’s an October ish, right so yeah, I was gonna.
Allison Guzman :
Say that’s the right way see.
Jacob Barr :
You in October?
Allison Guzman :
We’ll see ya.
Jacob Barr :
All right. Have a great day.
Allison Guzman :
Nice talking to you thank you so much.
Jacob Barr :
Bye, bye, bye.