Using the online National Treatment Database to reach local treatment providers

Before people can come to a new meeting, they have to know about it.  One of the places in every community where we will usually find the heaviest traffic of people who might be interested in our meetings is chemical dependency treatment centers.  Local treatment facilities have a constant stream of patients, nearly all of whom need to attend self-help support groups.  It is here that we will usually find the people who want the secular fellowship and reinforcement for their sobriety that our meetings provide.

You can now get the addresses and phone numbers and some other information about licensed chemical dependency treatment facilities over the Internet.  The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) put its national treatment providers' database online on Jan. 26, 2000.  The main url is http://www.samhsa.gov/look3.htm and the state-by-state listing is at http://wwwdasis.samhsa.gov/UFDS/display_form.htm  This gives you, in alphabetical order, all licensed facilities in your neighborhood or in your city or in your zip code or in your state or in the whole country, if you want it.  You get the street address, a phone number, and some information about the types of services they offer.  In recent attempts the SAMSHA server was sometimes overloaded but if you persist you will get through. 

If your local area doesn't have very many facilities, you might want to copy the addresses from the screen onto envelopes by hand and send out letters to them, including a flyer with your meeting information.  But if the number of facilities is substantial, you may want to convert the SAMHSA information into a mailmerge computer file so that you can have your word processor do the envelope addressing. 

Unfortunately the SAMHSA online database does not make it easy to use the data for mailmerge.  You can, however, copy the data off the screen and paste it into your word processor, and then work with the Replace function until you have the data massaged into a mailmerge data file.  You may have to manually shift the contents of some fields to get a clean file.  If you know what you are doing, this is usually faster than addressing envelopes by hand -- and you get a data file that you can reuse the next time. 

A mailmerge letter that  the LSR Service Center sent out to 58 San Francisco providers this week to announce our new Tuesday night meeting is posted here in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format as an example of this kind of effort; click to view it. 

As with any kind of mailing, don't expect miracles.  Many of the letters will get tossed in the trash with other unsolicited advertisements without being read at all.  Others will be read but tossed because we are not 12-Step.  But a few of the letters will find their way into the right hands, and will result in a stream of referrals month after month and year after year. 

The database also contains phone numbers.  If you have the time and energy, you can follow up your mailing with a telephone call. 

The mailings and your follow-up can help you reach those treatment professionals who are the most truly professional -- they want whatever is best for the patient, whether or not that happens to agree with the 12-Step outlook.  Perhaps they will agree to let you make an "inservice" presentation to their staff, such as the ones described in other articles on this site. If you can establish good referral relationships with professionals, your meeting will have a constant influx of newcomers.  You won't sit alone in your meeting room very often if you let the treatment profession know that you're there, and that you're good.

-- MN 3/4/00