Hiring an agency for a hospice: what to establish before you sign

Hospice is the hardest local category to market without doing harm, and it is the one where the gap between agencies is widest.

The reason is not technical. It is that most local marketing playbooks are built on persuasion, and persuasion is the wrong instrument here. The family doing the searching has never done this before, is usually deciding on behalf of someone else, and is doing it in a week they will remember for the rest of their life.

Six things to establish before an agency touches anything public.

Who writes anything that describes care

The answer has to be the hospice. Not the agency, not a freelancer, not a template adapted from a home care client.

Descriptions of what hospice provides, what palliative care is, what a family can expect — these are clinical and organizational statements. A vendor willing to draft them unsupervised has told you where its judgment sits. Ask directly, and listen for whether the answer contains a review step.

Whether they know the referral path exists

A large share of hospice search traffic is verification, not discovery. A discharge planner hands a family three names; the family looks up all three that evening.

That changes what the work is for. The profile is not competing to be found — it is being checked. An agency pitching a hospice on ranking above competitors has not understood which search it is in, and the plan it builds will optimize for the smaller half of the traffic.

What happens to the listings if you leave

Ask it as a flat question: if we stop paying you in March, which of these assets do we still have?

Directory listings created inside an agency’s own subscription vanish when the subscription does. Listings you own and listings you rent look identical right up until the moment they don’t. For an organization whose accuracy across every directory is a patient-safety-adjacent concern, that difference is not a commercial detail.

How reviews will be requested

Not whether — how. Asking families for reviews is legitimate and many hospices do it thoughtfully. What is not legitimate is asking only the families expected to say something kind, which is a Google policy violation in every category and a poor fit for this one on its own terms.

The timing decision belongs to the hospice’s leadership. A vendor should be executing it, not setting it.

Whether the phone number and hours are treated as clinical information

Families call at night. An hours field that says the office closes at five, or a number routed somewhere nobody answers, is not a marketing error in this category. It is the reason a family called someone else at eleven o’clock.

Ask how the agency verifies these, and how often.

What they will refuse to do

A good answer exists and is short. No promises about position, no invented service descriptions, no reviews solicited from anyone who was not actually served, no claims about outcomes.

An agency without a refusal list has not been asked this before.

We publish the deliverables so they can be checked against a proposal: what each plan contains. If a hospice wants a read on its current profile before deciding anything, ask for the free game plan — it costs nothing and commits you to nothing.