Subscribe
Membership subscriptions
Some initial ideas about the website and service. How to add value for members, without doing masses of work!
Initial thoughts about the market / domains
Should it be Dental Therapy Dogs UK (DTDUK) or a more general therapy dogs UK? Being more general will give it a much larger customer base, especially as it will be almost the exact same service offering regardless.
We could still have some specific content for dentists, nursing homes, mental health facilities, special needs, assistance, and other service animals… but that doesn’t need to affect the core offering of services and features such as risk assessment, HMRC, CQC and accreditation.
Also, many ‘therapydogsuk’ or similar domains have already been taken… I did however find ‘uktherapydogs.com’ and ‘uktherapydogs.co.uk’ are at the time of writing this, both still available to register! (so a quick move to secure these is my suggestion, with a slight rename / rebrand to “UK Therapy Dogs” ). Note one domain would be the actual website (ie. the .com) and the other (.co.uk) would be set up to simply redirect.
Some interesting stats on Therapy Dogs in the UK
Pricing / Revenue Streams
Firstly …we need to start small.
An annual recurring subscription at £120 per year (or £15 if paid monthly) so it’s a third off the price if paid as a single annual payment.
Possibility of additional revenue streams from advertising partner products and services (see ‘features’ below).
The price could increase as more features are added (see below) however, rather that bump up the existing / base price, a further tier could be added to the pricing model – eg. a premium membership which has desirable new features. This would then not directly impact existing members, and avoids changing existing recurring payments. The downside is that some thought should be given in these early stages, as to the possible additions and direction the site is headed (so that value of each subscription type remains valid and there are incentives to keep members paying regardless of which tier they subscribe to).
Suggest the easiest way to get started with recurring payments is going to be PayPal (we could expand on this later, but it will also manage card payments, so is very versatile) – do we have an account, can we set one up?
Features
To begin simply, we could just set up a recurring payment via PayPal and send an automated email to the member with the certificate attached – as we haven’t looked at a system to let users set up or manage accounts on the website. Without accounts, there is no way to provide member-only content or features. Accounts aren’t difficult to set up, but they do need some bespoke coding and testing. If we do choose to set up accounts, we should have a list of email addresses that members initially provided (to tell them to set up their accounts).
Access to a downloadable certificate which could eventually be personalised with the name and photo of each registered dog, but initially I think a generic PDF that we can be simply emailed to the new member, is probably the simplest start.
Dentist promotion in an emailed newsletter / on social media / and in an online, publicly accessible directory of DTDUK members, so members of the public are able to search for dentists who have therapy dogs (with photos and a brief description). Is a really good on-going incentive for members to continue to make payments. This would be one of the first things I would set up, along with a mailing list and some social media pages (that anyone can choose to follow).
Discounts on partner products (such as local dog trainers, behaviourists, and veterinary practices, plus suppliers of food and toys etc) advertising these external businesses could be good other revenue stream.
Automated reminders for other things like dog vaccines – another incentive to keep making membership payments.
Access to exclusive content such as
research articles
latest updates in therapy practices
exclusive training videos
online forums
an advice chatbot
Notes
Much of the above can be 100% automated. Therapy dog owners maintain their own account and animal details – which in turn powers things like certificate generations, vaccine reminders and payment collections.
There are plenty of platforms that could eventually be set up to automatically manage things like social media campaigns, and templated monthly email newsletters.
The business could start small and grow over time, as membership grows and additional development / features are in place.
General Content
With all pages, we need to review ChatGPT content as it tends to think that we ourselves will be carrying out all tasks in relation to things like accreditation and certification.
I imagine this simply isn’t true… and the most we are going to do, is potentially link candidate therapy dog owners, with local / registered dog behavioural specialists, and it is themselves who will certify that a dog meets requirements. We should put a clear disclaimer somewhere, stating that our accreditation / certification is only applicable when a dog meets certain criteria, and that even though we offer accreditation, we are in no way responsible for any harm, destruction, or loss by an accredited animal.