Some companies seem to be able to sell themselves. The marketing doesn’t matter. The product isn’t perfect. You might wonder how they are doing it. If you look a little closer, you’ll notice. People are the key. These organisations have thriving communities of customers that are creating real connections with other people they know. They are recommending and referring, and creating one of the most valuable assets a business can have: a sales pipeline.

Community building is particularly important in aged care. This article outlines how retirement and aged care organisations can use community building to create a reliable sales pipeline.

Have you ever walked into a retirement village and felt right at home? The buildings might be older, the decor a bit dated, but there is a feeling as soon as you walk into the place. It is welcoming, people are smiling. For some inexplicable reason, the occupancy is always high. Potential customers prefer to stay on the wait list rather than go into the state of the art new facility down the road. Friends report how good it is to live here. Families say that this is the place that will help an ageing parent with major health needs. For any company, this is a wonderful place to be. But how does it happen?

Engaged communities refer and recommend

In great aged care communities, new people of all backgrounds feel welcomed, residents feel safe, and have a sense of ownership, pride and belonging. When you talk to the residents, their happiness goes beyond having lots of activities and beautiful resort style facilities. It is about the depth of relationships with their neighbours and staff, and a belief that others genuinely care about their well-being. The people inside the community feel like they own the place. They are not passive. Their ideas, suggestions and needs matter. People listen and act when concerns are raised. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there are no issues, or grumpy residents, or complaints. However, the deeply developed sense of togetherness means the community is committed to working things through and sticking together.

This sense of community can feel elusive and hard to describe. More importantly, if an organisation doesn’t have a thriving community referring other customers, it is going to have to work even harder to make sales. For aged care and retirement organisations, without an engaged community, the only thing being sold is real estate. And that is not enough to succeed in an increasingly competitive market.

What makes a thriving community?

The good news is that researchers have been digging into what makes a great community for 50 years and it’s possible for you to greatly improve the community you are trying to sell. That sense of community is more formally described as Psychological Sense of Community (PSOC) and is defined as having four elements, according to McMillan and Chavis (1986), namely: membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

MEMBERSHIP

Membership is all about enabling your community members to feel a sense of belonging within a defined sense of boundaries. Members know what it means to belong to the community, how to interact with others and that they can feel psychologically safe within the community norms. This concept is easy to take for granted. When was the last time you checked in with your residents on their understanding of shared community values? Have you involved your residents in creating a set of values and principles on what is acceptable in this community? How does your community uphold these values or principles?

Build an inclusive culture. Tackle ageism, segregation and ableism head on by challenging remarks, setting the standard in orientation meetings, and encouraging equality.  Without involving and upholding your community norms and values you won’t generate a sense of belonging because members don’t have anything they belong to. If you are using a community app like Pluss Communities, you can include your community guidelines in the information section of your app. You can also survey your residents on what they would like included in the community guidelines. We have written some tips on how to write your community guidelines for your community app.

How to write community guidelines

INFLUENCE

Communities are much more attractive to its members when they have a sense of influence and determination over the direction of the community. It also means the community can influence the members. Influence happens in both directions and this interaction creates a psychological sense of safety. This bi-directional influence communicates that members matter to one another.

What this means is that participation in decision making about what the community does and how it operates is critical to creating a thriving community (and is not optional). You have to find and use mechanisms for residents to create their own groups, create and run their own events, decide on community values and principles, decide how resources get allocated, vote on the types of activities they want to do or provide feedback on how the community can be improved. Aged care organisation need to find ways to enable residents to run their community.  In her book, Disrupting the Status Quo of Senior Living: A Mindshift (2019), Jill Vitale-Aussem describes the role of leadership in a retirement village or aged care home as being more like governance in a local village or town.

The local government in a community has two roles: (1) to sustain and improve infrastructure and (2) to build the social fabric of community. So to create true communities, rather than seeing ourselves as the ones who create the vision, solve the problems, and drive change, we must begin to view ourselves as social architects whose role is to provide infrastructure and create a culture that encourages residents and team members to identify with and think more like citizens than consumers and to be a part of the solution by identifying and solving their own issues.

The benefit of being courageous enough to hand over significant decision making to your community is that you get back a happier community where members actively talk about how great it is to live there and advocate to their friends and family. Using surveys and live polls is a great way to engage your residents in decision making. If you would like to learn more about how this tool can work for you then check it out here.

Surveys and Live Polls

Another great tool is to empower your residents to contribute to the content creation and management of your community app. Resident can create their own groups, upload community photos, write news posts and create events.

INTEGRATION AND FULFILLMENT OF NEEDS

In a healthy community, members believe and know that the community will look after their needs and that members will be able to contribute towards the meeting of needs in others. In a world of consumer directed care (and designing our aged care and retirement villages to be like a resort) it can be easy to think that it is up to staff to meet all the needs of the residents.

Whilst this is desirable for a holiday it’s not necessarily desirable or attractive in a healthy community.  It is important to find a balance between customer service and citizenship. The village might be built like a resort, but meaning and purpose don’t come from being on holidays for the rest of your life, they come from being able to help others, meaningful contribution, mastering new skills and giving and receiving love and care.

When organisations seek to be everything for their residents, they take away the capacity to fulfil the needs of others, and they take away a core pillar of creating a healthy community.

SHARED EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

In order to create a sense of community, members need to participate in positive shared experiences. When members have worked on a project together, engaged in meaningful conversations, shared stories about their life histories, laughed and cried together, then the bond of the community will be even stronger. We have all experienced this in our lives - whether it was a group project in school, a camping weekend away as a family, a sporting team we belonged to, or a workplace where everyone came together to deliver - the stories, memories, sense of togetherness, and common purpose all bond you together in a place, time and history.

Creating a healthy community means the work of creating emotional connection is never finished. Take the time to nurture and enable the building of relationships. They don’t always come naturally or easily. Different types of communities have their own challenges. In aging communities, cognitive decline, hearing, vision and physical impairments can make the task of making friends difficult, let alone participating in community building activities. 

Conduct a workshop on how to build a community with a cross section of people who would be involved. In aged care organisations, the residents committee and social committee are great resources and should be engaged in the process. Consider using icebreakers and team building activities at the start of meetings, or morning teas and social events.

We have put together 55 conversation starters to use with your community

You might be running a movie night or concert. Take the first five minutes to encourage people to answer three get-to-know-you questions with someone they don’t know so well. Profile residents in your newsletters and help existing residents get to know new members. Feature one each week. If you are using a community app to enable communication, coordination and connection, then make sure you use the community building tools built into your platform. Give members opportunities to tackle local projects around the village or come up with volunteering opportunities in the wider community that can be done as a group.

Your community investment will reap rewards

Doing the work to build and maintain a healthy community pays back tenfold. It not only contributes to the happiness of the people inside your sphere of influence, which is a worthy endeavour in itself. It also fuels word of mouth advocates in your community who tell other people how great you are because they feel such a strong sense of ownership, pride and joy. Companies that build a great community are not only enabling authentic relationships around their product or service, they are building a reliable and evergreen pipeline that can help guarantee ongoing business success.

This article was first published in Capfeather Edition