Understanding the benefits of your own branded retirement village community app
You might be thinking about signing up for a community app for your seniors community. You have seen your competitors get their own branded app and are weighing up whether it’s worth the investment. Alternatively, you might be dealing with residents complaining about poor communication with management or that it’s difficult to find out what is going on in the community and it’s hard to get things organised. Or it could be that your staff are complaining about there being too many paper based systems in use and that it takes too long to communicate urgent village news, like the water is going to be turned off on Friday between 2pm and 4pm. Whatever the motivation, the start of the year is the perfect time to explore options, do some research, get ready for budget approvals and work out which solution best fits your needs.
What is a community app?
A community app in a retirement community is a mobile app used by your residents and staff to manage all the communications and community organising in the village or resort. A good app will allow your residents to book into and pay for events, lodge maintenance requests, read and comment on news posts, chat to other residents, organise themselves into social groups and activities, answer surveys, and read and respond to alerts and notifications. It should also be a place where you can have all your services and products listed and makes it easy for residents to book the various facilities you have in your community.
Have a closer look at all the features of the Pluss Communities app.
You can also explore each feature in detail through our extensive user guides and training resources.
Why do organisations use community apps in retirement communities?
There are four key reasons why community apps are used in seniors living communities.
It makes it easier for residents to communicate with each other. Residents want easy ways to get in touch with other residents. Having a full list of residents in their community app with their name, photo, unit number and click to chat or call, make it the go to place for resident to resident communications. You no longer need to provide residents with an updated paper list of contact details or email them the latest list every time a new resident joins the community.
It makes it easier for your staff to communicate with residents. A community app allows you to instantly send alerts to residents. If the water is being turned off, a car needs to be moved or a lift is not working, it no longer requires phone call or printing out paper notices to be posted around the facilities. You can send an alert about these things directly from your phone or computer and see which residents have received the message.
It makes it easier for staff to organise and communicate activities and events. Community apps can allow you to create calendars of events and enable residents and guests to book in for events. Really good apps will allow residents to pay for events and download the details to their calendar of choice as well as allow all sorts of notifications, reminders and event details to be communicated to residents. The Pluss Communities app has an advanced events system providing you with all the tools you need to schedule large numbers of daily activities. It can even be used to run a conference, providing different schedules for attendees.
A community app centralises all your utilities. Your retirement community will have all sorts of practical information that you want your residents to be able to access. All the kind of information you put in your resident handbook, can now go or should go in your community app. You no longer need to keep those handbooks up to date and now it can be interactive. This can include a list of facilities you want available for residents to search and book. You will have local services you want your residents to access, you might even deliver your own services you want to prioritise to your residents. Enabling residents to be able to lodge and manage maintenance requests and defects is also important in your community. You may even want your community app to include surveys or discounts and offers from local businesses. For a full list of features in the Pluss Communities app check out the features page. There are plenty more features you can add into your app.
What are the benefits of using a community app in a retirement village?
Save Time
You can save staff 30 to 40 hours a month of time in communications and management of the community. Think about all the time tied up in phone calls, printing out notices, menus and newsletters. Think about what hassle it is in contacting residents when there are last minute changes to events. Wouldn’t it be easier to type out a quick message in an app to let the resident know their bathroom door will be fixed next Tuesday rather than to have to ring them? The Pluss Communities app is really easy to use and you can send alerts and notifications from your phone or your computer. The Pluss Communities Alerts User Guide shows you how.
Save Money
You can get rid of spending all that money on paper and printing. We have been told by retirement village managers that they can spend up to $50,000 a year on paper and printing to handle all the communications in a village. That might include notices, posters, flyers, newsletters, resident handbooks and guides. All of that information and content can now be accessed through your community app. You don’t need to spend a couple of days a month on writing that newsletter and then printing out a couple of hundred copies. You can now take 5 minutes a day to post an article and residents can access instantly. If writing content, news and articles for your retirement community is something that stresses you out then consider our handy framework for content writing and the 356 content ideas guide.
Generate Revenues
A good retirement village app will have marketplace tools to allow you to handle payments for events, products, service and facility bookings. There are a range of strategies you can you to increase revenues in your retirement village, including room hire and collecting transaction fees for 3rd party services. Read more about increasing revenues in your village
Your Own Branded App
A good community app gives you control over your own branding and allows you to have your own branded app in the app store. You have invested heavily in building your brand, you want your core communications platform to be all about your residents and your brand, not some generic social media platform that your residents don’t trust. If you want to know more about brand building in a retirement village then consider building out your brand strategy.
You Have Control Over Communications
When you leave communications to take place over social media, you have far less control and the messaging can get lost in the sea of ads and news posts. Having your own app removes the noise and allows you to monitor and make sure the news posts are true and comments are managed.
Promote Your Village
Your own community app can be a selling point for for potential new residents. Residents now expect that they can access everything remotely and access information when they decide if it is convenient. You can showcase your community app to potential buyers, giving them a taste of the life and activities going on inside your community. You can prove to your buyers that there is so much to do and so much life to be had in your village. You have the evidence in the palm of your hand.
Integrate Communications Across TV Screens
An integrated community app can connect to TV screens in your village or residential community, allowing you to share events, photos, news, alerts, and menus with residents. It can even be used to provide birthday greetings and announcements. This is a great way to communicate and remind people of what's happening in the village as they go about their daily lives. We have developed a handy guide on how to setup your TV screens to connect to your community app.
Front Desk Kiosk
Convert your community app into Kiosk mode: This front desk solution provides contractors and visitors with a quick and efficient check-in process. Kiosk mode allows businesses to streamline their customer service process, as customers can quickly enter their information into the kiosk and be directed to the appropriate service. Furthermore, kiosk mode can be used to offer customers a range of services, including but not limited to payment processing, appointment scheduling, and even product purchasing. It's no wonder more and more villages are turning to kiosk mode as a front desk solution; its versatility and ease of use make it an ideal option for any residential community.
Personalise The App Experience
A personalised experience is easily achievable with the help of views, tags, and types. Each view, tag and type provide the user with a unique and tailored experience, enabling them to access the content that is most relevant to them. This can be done by customising the way data is displayed or by categorising content into different groups and labels. Furthermore, tags can be used to group different content into categories, allowing users to quickly and easily find what they need. Types provide an even more granular level of control, allowing users to access content that is specifically tailored to their interests and needs. By combining these three features, users can enjoy a truly personalised experience.
Manage Access
Managing users: permissions and notes is an essential part of managing your community. It involves setting up user roles, granting access to different areas of the system and ensuring that all user activity is monitored and recorded. The Pluss Communities platform has extensive user permission controls, including linked users, allowing you to link family members to residents if you have residents with declining capacity and have a family member helping with managing daily living. You also have the capacity to log any notes that may be pertinent to the user's activity, such as maintenance documents, preferences, memberships and staff notes. This will allow for a better understanding of the resident and their needs and makes it easier to address any issues that may arise in the future. Furthermore, keeping track of all user activity helps to identify any security risks and take appropriate measures to ensure that the system remains secure. It also enables organisations to identify any potential areas of improvement in their processes. In conclusion, managing users - permissions and notes is an important task that should be taken seriously in order to ensure the safety and security of the system.
Get Residents Involved
Residents can contribute content and help organise the community. Residents can use the groups tool to form social groups and committees with a place to keep notes and documents for meetings. They can contribute to the news by creating news that can be work flowed through for approval. Residents can also share photos and create events that bring the community together. Through this, they can have a voice in their local community, help shape the news, and have their own input on the things that matter to them. By working together in their community app, they can make an impact in their village.
Monitor Engagement
Monitor and measure engagement, track progress with analytics, and utilise data-driven insights to gain a better understanding of your audience's needs. Keep an eye on how users interact with your content and use analytics to identify where you can make improvements to drive higher engagement. Keeping tabs on the performance of your content with analytics will help you gain a better understanding of what resonates with your audience and how to optimise your strategies for maximum engagement.
Increase Resident Satisfaction
Using a community app in your retirement village has been proven to increase resident satisfaction and improve the overall quality of life for those living there. The app allows residents to stay connected with each other and the wider community, providing them with opportunities to participate in various activities and to access useful resources. It also serves as a platform for residents to communicate with staff and management, enabling them to voice their opinions and get answers to their questions. In addition, the app helps build a sense of community among the residents and allows them to connect with others in the village in a comfortable and safe environment. An increase in the sense of community increases customer satisfaction. There are a number of things you can do to increase the sense of community in your retirement village. All of these benefits make the app an invaluable tool for retirement villages, and its use can help create a more enjoyable and enriching experience for everyone involved.
Increase Sales
Community apps can also be used to generate leads for apartment sales, giving property owners and managers the opportunity to effectively target potential buyers who may be interested in their offerings. By leveraging the power of friendships and connections in the village and their social networks a community app helps to fuel word of mouth sales and referrals. You have another way to keep your potential prospects engaged and participating in the community even though they have not moved in or are still in the consideration phase. By providing an easy and convenient way to connect with potential buyers, these community apps can be a great way to expand your reach and entice more people to explore your apartment or housing options. Five ways to use your community app for lead generation.
How do I use my community app to get the most benefit for my residential and retirement community?
Once you have your community app setup and begin to use it in your community, there are a number of things you can do to make sure it is being well used. This includes making sure content is refreshed daily, your members are using the events feature to book and pay for events and that you are now sending alerts and notifications through the app. There is no point having a community app and still doing communications via paper. Make the most of digital screens around your community rather than putting up posters on cork boards. You should also consider how you get your residents involved in creating content and organising themselves through the app. To get the most out of your community app, consider this maturity model. It will walk you through the steps you can take to create a world class community through your community app.
How long does it take to get your own community app implemented in a community?
There are a few things we will need to get from you, things like, name of the app, colours and logos and also input on your app store descriptions and screen shots of your apps. We provide you with canva templates you can edit to speed up the process and we can also provide you with some examples. How long that takes depends on your own internal approval processes. Our experience says that the bigger the organisation, the more levels of approval and the longer it can take to get these assets together. That’s all ok, we work with your own timelines. Many of our team know what it’s like to work in big organisations so we hold plenty of empathy there.
So, what’s the minimum amount of time likely to be required? Well if you are just using your company logo and brand colours, then you could be ready in half a day with a bit of focused efforts to create the content for the screen shots and write the app store descriptions.
Once we have these assets from you, the setup and approval processes to get your own app in the app stores can take a few days. We do all of that work for you. We have to get your app ready to be submitted to the app stores for approvals and we need to get your back end database setup with your own subdomain ready for you to be managing your own app. The is also a lengthy questionnaire to complete for each app store and the requirements of your community shapes how we answer those questions on your behalf. Store approvals require Apple and Android testers to review our answers and to test the app to make sure it does what we say it does. We have been through this process many times so it’s likely to get approved on the first go.
Once your community app is live, you can begin the process of onboarding community members. There are a number of ways to onboard members. You can do a bulk upload of all your existing members. We can help you do that or you can do it yourself using our help guides. You can also invite your members to set themselves up using an invite code. The code is unique to your community and sets up a registration process for your members.
Depending on the type of community you are running, the process you use to onboard new members can vary. In established retirement communities, you might host a couple of morning tea events and invite residents to attend, in order to provide them with instructions on how to get setup. This could be done on the big screen at the event, or via our templated handouts. You can then assist your residents in downloading and logging into the app for the first time. If you have done a bulk upload, you can trigger a welcome text or email that provides the login details and a link to the app in the app store. Additionally, if you are using an invite code, you can show residents how to download the app, and then where to enter the invite code in order to get them started.
On the other hand, if you are launching your app in a brand new village or resort, you may choose to do a bulk upload of residents, but still manually provide the login details when new residents come in. This is a great way to give them a personalised welcome and orientation to the village. Many villages will do a 30 to 60 minutes orientation session with new residents, and during this session, you can introduce them to the community app. We can provide you with more details on how to make this a reality and ensure that your new residents are onboarded quickly and efficiently.
The first step to getting started is getting in touch. We can provide you with a demonstration and help you work through the best solution for your organisation.
