Basics:
DoulaMatch is a national directory and referral service for doulas
Expected pay: You set it
Husl$core: $$$$$
Commissions & fees: $25 annually
Where: Nationwide
Requirements: Pay an annual fee
Do you have vast experience and compassion for the child birth process, either because of personal circumstances or your profession? You may want to look into becoming a doula.
Doulas advise and assist expectant parents on everything from pregnancy aches and pains to the birth itself. They can also offer babysitting, lactation consulting, sleep training advice and a variety of other services to parents of newborns.
A site called DoulaMatch can help you find these gigs, which are both rewarding and highly-compensated.
What’s DoulaMatch?
DoulaMatch is a national directory of doula services — both prenatal and postpartum. The site exists to make it quick and easy to find a doula to meet your needs, so it allows prospective parents to find a doula based on both geography and the baby’s due date.
How it works (for doulas)
Doulas who want to advertise their services here create a detailed profile showing their certifications, experience, specialties and contact information. The site also has you list your fees for prenatal care and your hourly rates.
Doulas then upload a photo and fill out a calendar, showing what days are available over the next several months. (The site promises to match clients to doulas who are available around the client’s due date.)
After that, the doula simply pays a fee to publish their profile for the next 12 months.
How it works for parents
Parents looking for a doula don’t even have to register here.
They simply plug in their zip code and the baby’s due date and the site will return with information on doulas working in their area. Profiles are sorted by the last time the doula updated his or her calendar, so the doulas at the top of the list are often the most active on the platform.
Notably, for those who don’t love being tracked around by advertisers, DoulaMatch’s privacy policy is another plus for this site. It doesn’t track you. It doesn’t use Google Adsense (which allows Google to track you).
DoulaMatch review (for doulas)
This national directory is an easy and inexpensive way to advertise your doula services. And, while the site encourages doulas to get proper credentials — and links to sites that can offer training — it does not require much of anything for people to register here. You simply need to accurately describe who you are; what you do and what certifications you hold.
DoulaMatch also gives you the ability to direct customer inquiries to your own site. That means that customers who come to you through DoulaMatch are not controlled by DoulaMatch — they’re essentially yours.
Availability matching
The platform hosts thousands of detailed profiles of birth and postpartum doulas across North America, currently boasting over 4,000 profiles.
When customers come to the site looking for a doula, the site will match them by geography and the baby’s due date. Notably, when there are multiple doulas available in a specific geographic area, the site sorts available doulas based on when they last updated their profiles. So, if you’re anxious to get business here, make sure you update your profile regularly.
If a client wants to contact you via the site, you’ll get an email and the site will show a notification on your profile. Didn’t get the email? Check whether you’ve sent any of their emails to spam. If you have, the site will not email you again. You’ll only know about client communication by checking the site.
However, you also have the ability to put your contact information on DoulaMatch so that clients can contact you directly, rather than going through the site.
All this site asks in return for its listing and matching service is a small annual fee.
Fees & Commissions
How much is the fee? The basic fee is $25 annually.
However the site gives a $10 discount to black and indigenous doulas. And, after being on the site for three years, the site raises the renewal rate to $40.
There are no other fees or commissions, which makes this listing service a relative bargain.
Recommendations:
We like this site and think it does a good job of helping doulas find new clients. You can sign up with DoulaMatch here.
What their users say (from Reddit):
The best place to list yourself is the place that has the most families in your area using it to search for doulas. For me, that’s doula match. It doesn’t have the ability to take payments and stuff because that’s not what it’s for. It’s a directory not a full operations platform. I have my business website with a scheduling function and a bookkeeping platform for that stuff.
DoulaMatch is a great platform to start on. I received the bulk of my early inquiries starting out from them.
I know so many families that search DoulaMatch to find the right doula for their family so I’m curious what her experience has been. Most of my clients when I first started out found me there. It is intended to be a directory.
Update your calendars!
DoulaMatch is the best for doulas who consistently update their availability calendars to stay on the first page of search results. It’s an availability database that allows expecting parents to find available doulas quickly and easily. If you don’t appear available (because it’s been a long time since you updated your calendar), you won’t appear in search results.
DoulaMatch is an availability database that is designed for expecting parents to easily and very effectively find AVAILABLE doulas. It does that by sorting its doula search results by order of most likely to be available. It also gives parents a lot of useful information about each doula so parents can make informed decisions about hiring or choosing the right doula for them. It’s a fairly important database and has been for almost 20 years.
