There’s no doubt postcards are a great tool for finding dental hygiene work. Our own story isn’t the only success we can report – we’ve worked with dozens of hygienists who have found employment this way.

So let’s talk mechanics to help you get up and and out the door with them.

Here’s five tips about the process and mechanics of dental hygiene postcards.

Determine Where You Will Work
You’ll need to think through exactly how many you want to send out. I recommend choosing a specific mile radius you are willing to work within and then stick to it. For my wife that was about 10 miles and within that radius we located about 110 dental offices.

Work Out Your Budget
Design
First are your design costs. At GetHiredRDH.com we design postcards for you for $57, we also have templates you can customize yourself in Microsoft Word for $7. There are, of course, many other options such as hiring a local designer or purchasing or using a template from another online source.

Printing
Next you have printing costs. There are lots of choices here, too. You can find a local print company to do it or there are many online companies, too. My strong recommendation is to use VistaPrint.com. I have used them many times am pleased at the price and quality. 100 postcards is about $20 to print.

Postage
Finally, you have postage to consider. Postcards in the United States cost $0.34 for sizes up to 4-1/4” x 6” and $0.49 for sizes up to 11-1/2” x 6-1/8”. Click here for more information.

Gather Addresses
This is the part of the job that for me was most painful because it took me many hours to do it. I did find some things to speed the process up or even take it completely out of your hair.

Sometimes, state wide dental associations will have an online database where you can search for dental offices and they often include addresses. You can also search a variety of Yellow Page types of directories online for dental office listings.

My favorite way though is to hire someone else to do it for you. Go to Fiverr.com, elance.com, odesk.com, or peopleperhour.com and you will likely find someone to do all this work for you and deliver it to you in an Excel file for as little as $20.

Label Them
Once you have your database in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, run a mail merge between Excel and Microsoft Word to create a batch of labels. It’s really not too hard but if you have trouble doing it there are lots of online tutorials like this one.

Send Them
When my wife and I sent her postcards out we just sent them all at once on a Friday, not really knowing what to expect. We thought it best to have them arrive on Monday morning. We’ve since learned that postcards statistically do better (are not as easily discarded) if they arrive on a Tuesday. That’s because there’s usually a bigger batch of mail that comes in on Tuesdays because there are two full days of deliveries.

A second suggestion is to stagger them in smaller blocks. I would suggest sending out 25 to 50 percent of them at a time. Reason being that you may get too many calls and not be able to manage them. If you have to turn someone down for a temping assignment you may not get another call from them. Staggering the delivery doesn’t completely fix the problem, but it may help a little bit.