Does money motivate prospective foster parents? Are responses from high vs. low-income towns different? Evidence from Google advertising

Recruiting foster parents is a worldwide challenge. In the US, foster parents are supposed to volunteer but receive stipends to cover the cost of foster children. Thus, Foster Care agencies hesitate to highlight the Stipend in their recruitment messaging to prospective foster parents. This hesitation is to weed out extrinsically (stipend) motivated prospective parents early in the application, training and licensing process.

The first step in foster parent recruitment is to start the conversation between prospective foster care parents and foster parent recruiters.

Extant research has relied on current or former foster parents to find their motivations for fostering and continuing to foster. We believe ours is the first study to empirically examine whether mentioning money (stipend) early in the recruitment process makes a difference in the response of prospective foster parents.

The research reports Google ads data from two foster parent recruitment campaigns. These Google search ads showed when “foster parenting” related words were Googled. One ad had the word “stipend,” and the other did not. We then examine differences in response between high and low-income towns. Next, we analysed differences in click behaviour over 207 days between the two versions of the ads. We then examined differences in click behaviour between residents of high and low-income towns. We used the t-test to test for differences in our data analysis approach.

We find no statistical difference in response between the ads that mention ‘stipend’ and those that do not (t = 0.64, p = 0.26). However, residents of low-income towns are five times more likely to click on a foster parent ad than residents from high-income towns, irrespective of whether the stipend is mentioned in the ad (without mentioning stipend: t = 3.21, p = 0.0008; mentioning Stipend: t = 3.77, p = 0.0001).