The commonest failure is scope, not skill
Clinics that struggle with internal marketing rarely struggle because the person doing it lacks ability. They struggle because the scope is larger than the time, and the time is unprotected.
The pattern is recognisable. A practice manager takes on social media, then the website, then email, then reviews, then advertising, each added because it seemed small. None of it is scheduled. The clinic has a busy fortnight and all of it stops. Three weeks later somebody notices the last post was in April.
The remedy is not motivation and it is not training. It is reducing scope until what remains fits the time available, and then protecting that time. A clinic doing three functions consistently is in a better position than one doing eight intermittently, because intermittent marketing produces the costs without the compounding.
Where the work is bought rather than held, the supplier selection rubric covers the corresponding question. Criterion ten exists because resilience to pressure is the test that matters. Everything works in a quiet week. The question is what happens in a fortnight when two practitioners are away and the diary is full, and the answer should be a defined reduced level rather than a stop.
Which functions to hold at all is the prior question, answered by the capability decision matrix. This assessment asks whether you can support the answer.
How to score this assessment
List the functions the clinic currently holds internally, then score the ten criteria against that list, taking the weakest.
For protected time, look at the diary rather than at the intention. If marketing time is not in it, score 0. This criterion is scored from the calendar and nowhere else.
For skills, ask the person doing the work which parts they feel unqualified for. The answer is usually specific and usually correct, and clinics that ask it discover the gap is narrower than feared.
For tool access, check whether anybody is using a colleague's login or a personal account for clinic work. Both score 0 and both are also data protection findings.
For approval capacity, compare the publishing rate with the approver's availability. A clinic publishing daily with an approver available weekly will either delay or bypass approval, and it will bypass.
For resilience, ask what happened during the last genuinely busy fortnight. The answer is the score.
Common scoring errors
Scoring time by intention. Look at the diary.
Assuming the person will absorb it. They will, until they do not, and the failure arrives without warning.
Treating access to a shared login as tool access. Shared credentials are a governance failure as well as a capability one.
Scoring standards as existing because the owner knows what good looks like. Criterion six asks for a written statement, which is what makes review possible and what survives departure.
Excluding approval from the capacity calculation. Approval is part of the function's cost and it is the part most often unbudgeted.
Reducing scope deliberately
A clinic scoring in the lower bands should reduce before it improves, and the reduction should be a decision rather than a drift.
Rank the internal functions by the pattern the decision matrix produced, and keep the ones with high clinical proximity and high frequency. Those are usually enquiry handling, review responses and approval of published material. Everything else is a candidate for stopping, deferring or buying.
Stopping is a legitimate option and it is under-used. A clinic that stops posting on a platform nobody at the clinic can sustain has not lost anything it was getting.
Then define the reduced level: what continues in a busy fortnight. Enquiries answered, reviews responded to, nothing else. Writing that down means the reduction is a plan rather than a failure, and it means the work resumes rather than lapsing.
Use the instruments in this library as the written standards criterion six asks for. Each one is a specification, which means a clinic does not have to invent its own definition of what good looks like for a treatment page, a booking journey or a review process. Then set the review cadence, and review against the same criteria each time so the comparison means something.