Are you familiar with Caring.com’s annual Caring Stars award program? It can help boost sales and marketing (as well as support staff recruiting and retention) for your senior living community or home care agency!

Launched in 2012 as the first of its kind in the senior living industry and now open to home care agencies as well, the Caring Stars award honors service excellence based on consumer ratings and reviews on Caring.com. Senior living communities and home care agencies achieve the “Caring Stars” award through lots of high praise in online reviews from their customers — older adults and family caregivers — and by responding to any critical feedback in negative (1-star and 2-star) reviews.

The Caring Stars award helps families narrow their choices to the best of the best, and quickly find the right senior care providers for their elderly loved ones. The integrity of our reviews program and the extensive vetting we do of the Caring Stars helps instill confidence for family caregivers and older adults in requesting more information about the agencies and taking a tour of the senior living communities. In fact, in our analysis of directory listings for our partners with the award vs. those without:

Every year, Caring Stars also generates positive content, media coverage, and social buzz — and boosts morale — for winning communities and agencies. Some Caring Star winners put the badge or winner widget on their websites, within e-newsletters, and in their billing statements, as ‘social proof’ of the high quality services they’re delivering. Caring Stars also frequently get featured in their local newspapers which helps raise awareness about their high quality services with more people in their area. Both the award and review excerpts make for good content on their social profiles as well. And the award gives senior living communities and home care agencies an opportunity to celebrate staff for a job well done, and build enthusiasm and pride in their workplace. Some communities even host a Caring Stars celebration with residents, and we at Caring.com enjoy visiting some of these resident parties as well.

More than 650 communities and agencies were recognized as Caring Stars 2021. Congratulations to each of these senior care providers for earning such accolades from their customers!

There is no application for the award — it’s based on the reviews on your Caring.com listing. To be a Caring Star of 2022, we recommend you plan to meet or exceed the 2021 winner criteria. We also recently held a series of free webinars to help senior living communities and home care agencies better understand how to get and respond to reviews, and how to qualify for Caring Stars 2022:

• June 2021 – Senior Living: How to Optimize Your Online Reputation: Peruse the slides — slide 41 has specific goals for communities; or watch the webinar recording

• June 2021 – Home Care: How to Optimize Your Online Reputation: Peruse the slides – slide 42 has specific goals for agencies, or watch the webinar recording

• July 2021 – How the Major Reviews Websites Vary, presented with ReviewTrackers: Peruse the slides, or watch the webinar recording

• August 2021 – How to Ask for Reviews, presented with Consumer Fusion: Peruse the slides, or watch the webinar recording

Have questions? Please contact our reviews team at reviews@caring.com or (650) 762-8190.

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Editor’s note: This article is published each year with updated dates and info.