If I go to small towns, out of the Shreveport area, I can get more money, but usually for special things, like Nursing Home Week, holidays, special parties, etc.
When I was doing lots of nursing homes, with my friend Dean Mathis, we didn't charge them anything. We did a printed program and sold ads to local businesses to finance it. We got an endorsement/introduction letter from the NH and went to the business and sold small ads starting at $35. each.
I laid out the program, more like a small newspaper, on my computer, had copies printed, and took them to the Activities Director. They would mail a copy to each family of each resident, and to each advertiser.
In this way we could get from $500. up to $2,000. per show, and this was a number of years ago. After expenses and splitting two ways (there were two of us doing it), we made very good money doing nursing homes. We usually did each town twice a year, and after a couple of years almost all the ads were repeats. We did something like 40 nursing homes in 25 towns, so that's around 80 shows a year. If there were two or three NHs in one town, we'd try to do them all in one day. When you figure in an extra trip or two to sell ads, there is some overhead, but still very lucrative.
We found that this program does not work well in bigger towns. It works great in small towns with lots of mom and pop businesses. EVERYBODY knows someone or has someone in the Nursing Home. Dean started doing this 40 years ago and is STILL doing it when he needs a little $$!
Here is remnants of a website I made for this endeavor.
http://donnymason.tripod.com/
There is more than one way to skin a cat!