How to manage content creation for your seniors living community
It’s the start of the week, you are thinking about what news to post to your community but struggling to come up with some ideas and thinking there must be an easier way to get content sorted. We wanted to make your job a little easier and have come up with hundreds of content suggestions. We have also put them into a handy framework to help you think through content and what gives you the best engagement. But before we get into the content suggestions, we have some handy tips for you to help you with this daily/weekly challenge you face when coming up with content ideas.
Involve others
Don’t see it as your task alone to be creating content. Get your residents and other staff involved. If you are worried about quality control, then you can set up their content creation permissions in the app so that content gets work flowed through to you for approval.
Plan ahead
Create a themed content calendar for the month. Here are some useful places and tools to use to help you with your calendar creation. Take an hour or two each month to add in your topics. You will get lots of ideas for what to add from our guide and the rest of this article.
Live action
Your best content is going to come from your residents in action around the village. When you see something interesting taking place, like your residents all dressed up or heading out to an event, snap a photo and post a one sentence news post.
Keep it short
The best posts can often be the shortest ones that encourage participation or contributions from residents through comments. Ask a question, make a statement, bring up a memory or era and encourage residents to respond.
Formal and informal
Much of your content will be informal, capturing the life and activity taking place around your community. This content can be like a social media post. It doesn’t need to be perfect and can be conversational in tone and nature. When it’s a more formal piece of news that affects residents then use a regular formal heading or image. This signals to your members that there is a difference in the type of post and the way they should engage with it.
What we know is that the communities with the highest level of weekly and daily app usage post news content regularly. Yes, at least once a day. If you are wanting a highly engaged community then you need to be posting consistently. We have come up with a handy framework to help you think about the relevancy of the news posts you make, as well as a bunch of topic ideas related to each category. The content ideas below will get you started. We have put together a jumbo list of content ideas in this handy resource pack.
326 content ideas for news posts in your seniors living community >
Community content framework
The posts that get the most engagement are community driven and specific to your members. You need to think about your news posts from a sense of relevance to your members. The following model provides a framework to help you think about your content and its relevancy. The closer the content is to the middle of the circle, the more relevant it is to your community members.
Post news daily with meaningful content. We have seen lots of great content posted in communities that gets really good engagement.
Resident focused news posts
The content that gets the highest level of engagement is focused on your community members. I’m interested in the post because it relates to me or people I know and is specific to my community.
Do an introduction to a new resident that has moved in. Develop a standard set of questions you use to ask of new residents.
Take photos of residents in action at different events and activities and share a brief post of what residents got up to.
Create a monthly folder of photos in the gallery and add photos taken over the last month. Invite your residents to contribute photos.
If residents are off on holiday, invite them to share a story of where they are currently and what life is like for them at the moment.
Post news content that helps people get to know each other. Use our conversation starters. Post a question as the news post, share an answer from your own experience and invite residents to comment sharing their own answers. Do this once a week.
Create challenges that residents could participate in.
Regularly post birthday greetings. Having a list of everyone’s birthdays makes this task much easier. It also makes it easy for residents to take a moment to wish the birthday person a happy birthday.
Ask a leader of a resident led social group to talk about what their group does and why residents should join in.
Community focused news posts
The second most important type of news post is related to my participation in your community. Anything I need to know about changes in the community that affect me. This is a place for important announcements, changes to events and services I might want to access.
Share important information about upcoming events or resident meetings.
Post about capital works scheduled to be done around the facility that residents should be aware of.
Share the daily menu from the cafe if you have one.
Highlight an onsite service in your community that residents can access.
Profile a staff member, their likes, interests, what they love about the community etc.
Provide minutes or action items from any social or resident committees that are useful to share with the residents
Local suburb or town news
I am a resident in your community but I also want to participate in the wider local community. Provide me with information about community events and news that might help me participate in the community.
Pull in a story about events and activities happening in the wider local community that residents might be interested in. Use the url loader in the news feature to make this easy.
Provide a list of local volunteering opportunities.
The best places to get good coffee.
What’s on at the movies.
Organisation news
The news from your wider organisation is often of interest to your members. Whilst it might not be the most important, they appreciate being connected to what’s going on. You should think about this news as less frequent but important. For example, if you have expansion plans for another location, this can be of interest to friends and family of your residents.
Annual reports
Changes in executive leadership
Expansion plans
Fundraising causes
Volunteering opportunities
General topics of interest
The potential topic ideas that connect to the interests of baby boomers is endless. In our handy content guide, we have come up with 36 themes and 326 content ideas to fuel your creativity for news posts. We have also come up with 67 event ideas that relate to those themes. As an example there are a bunch of news posts you could do that relate to family.
Writing a children’s book for my grandkids
Father’s wisdom: ageless advice
Lessons from mum
Knowing your family history: is it important to you?
Interesting findings from tracing your family tree
An important lesson about life: from my [granddaughter]
Five skills grandparents need
Strengthening family bonds
326 content ideas for news posts in your seniors living community >
