How to deliver a return on investment with your seniors living app

If you are a manager or director of aged care or retirement living services and are considering a software solution for your business, it is important to consider return on investment (ROI) metrics in order to put together a sound business case. This is particularly relevant for purchasing your own branded community communications app. It’s going to be your front door for your residents and families and you want to make sure you get it right. You will be very interested in things like, how you can justify the costs of time, capital, and ongoing expenditure on this software solution in your budget. Will this solution deliver a return to your bottom line and how can you prove it? Will your staff and residents be more satisfied with your services as a result of implementing this solution? These are all critical questions in the decision-making process.

In order to determine those metrics, it is necessary to be clear on what problems you are trying to solve. For example, you may want to improve the speed and clarity of communications, make it easier for residents to lodge maintenance requests, save money on paper, printing, and staffing costs, or provide residents with their own tools to communicate with each other and create news and events. You may also be looking for ways to generate additional revenues through your solution so that you can cover the costs of implementation.

We have put together six broad examples of how you can deliver a return on your investment in a community app that you can use in your business case.

1) Saving on paper and printing costs.

One of the big advantages of using a community app is the reduction in paper and printing costs. Calculate what you are currently spending on paper and printing each month, and now think about how much you would save if you no longer had to print out newsletters, notices, programs, posters, menus, resident handbooks, resident contact lists etc.

2) More efficient use of time for communications.

This can be a big one for you. There are lots of tasks in administering a community that can be done more efficiently with a community app. We have put together the table below to help give you a sense of the value of those hours saved. The table below allows you to have a discussion with village management about how much time these tasks are taking per month. You can then calculate potential savings by eliminating or greatly reducing the number of hours involved to complete each task per month. This list might inspire other tasks that a staff person does that no longer needs to be added. For example, think about the time saved in not having to update and distribute printed resident contact lists.

3) Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction. This metric provides insight into how likely your users are to recommend your community to others. If your NPS is high, it means that your users are highly satisfied with living in your community and are likely to recommend it to others. Think about the kind of service and community-related measures that are likely to boost your NPS. Things like the sense of welcome in the community, how friendly everyone is, the quality of the activities, feeling safe, and how responsive staff are to requests and needs of residents. All of these qualities can be boosted through effective use of your community app. When residents know what is going on in the village, can communicate easily and efficiently, and can build a strong sense of community, NPS goes up. As a result, your occupancy and sales conversion rates go up, and you need to spend less on advertising and sales.

4) Engagement metrics

It’s important to take note of the number of users engaging with your community app. You can measure things like regular weekly and monthly usage, the number of users engaging with content including news, alerts, events, and services. You should be aiming for 80% uptake in new retirement communities, 70% uptake amongst families connected to aged care homes, and 60% in older villages with a much older group of residents. How engaged your users remain is up to you in making sure the content is new and engaging and how much you stay true to not going back to printing out communications and losing all the efficiency gains because a few residents complained about not having their printed phone list.

5) Sponsors

Many retirement villages will have companies that are keen to promote their services and products to your residents. Before you get put off by this concept, think about sponsors more like you do with the local sports club. When your kids played sport, you were more than happy to have the local plumber or car dealership as the sponsor on your kid’s jersey because it meant your annual fees were so much cheaper and you felt good about supporting a local company. If you think about your retirement community or aged care the same way, then think of the additional benefits your community could receive because their fees were discounted or celebration events were free. All thanks to income from sponsors.

Typically, these companies are local and are known to you already. Your financial planners, the local chemist, or hearing specialist. It could be domestic service providers, transport, or care services. If you run a local service expo, you know the kind of company that would show up to promote their services. It could even be the local RSL club that would love to have your residents show up regularly at their club. Think about how much these companies are paying to promote their business and how more efficient it is for them to have an exclusive relationship with your community. Your residents are their exact target market, they are grouped together so servicing them is so much cheaper from a relationship and transport perspective, and they can build a direct relationship with your community. How much you can charge depends on the size, age, and proximity of your community to their company. The larger and more active your community, the more attractive you are to your sponsors. Aim for $250 a month per sponsor and aim for 5 sponsors as a place to start. Give them a chance to write a news post once a month and host or sponsor an event every couple of months. The $15,000 a year can go back into community activities or events. Make sure you take your residents on the journey of sponsorship and are clear to them about the benefits flowing back to them as a result.

6) Cross-selling the services from other parts of the business.

This concept is similar to sponsorship, except you are promoting services from other areas of your organisation. This only works if you have other services to promote. Many retirement living operators will also be delivering care-at-home services or be providing residential aged care. It makes complete sense to have these services listed inside your app and to be regularly communicating about their availability. You can even track and measure conversion rates on enquiries to these services. Think about the value of increasing sales of these services by 10% just because you had them displayed inside your app.

If you would like some help in building your business case for your own community app, then please get in touch with the team to set up a meeting.