Forum Activity for @dan-vallaro

ABCD in Apartment Communities

ABCD - Getting Started/Challenges

The organization I work for operates within apartment complexes around the country and we use ABCD principles to connect residents to each other and to the local community in 5 categories (Family, Recreation, Education/Career, Spiritual, Health/Wellness).

How does everyone feel about what we're trying to accomplish given the following:

1. Apartment's are typically a temporary housing situation (people move from one complex to another and/or people live in apartments till they can afford to own).

Can these principles be applies to apartments, or are they better suited for longer term communities (condo's, townhomes, houses, etc)? Do you have any ideas or suggestions on to better put ABCD in action?

updated by @dan-vallaro: 10/24/16 04:45:35PM

Neighbors & communities connecting through technology

Tips, Tools, Strategies, and Technology

Hey Deb,

In the apartment industry it can be easier to recruit people because we work with the apartment office (leasing office) and we can sometimes have "incentives" to have people join. For instance, one property we worked with raffled off an Ipod to the one resident that had the most friends join the page. Winning something can be a cheap and easy way to add to your page or group.

We use Facebook to invite apartment residents to events, to highlight our Constant Contact newsletters and as a place to share photos of past events. We actually also use a FB Group to communicate between all of our employees to share ideas, post pictures and video and just to rant and rave a bit.

Here's a link to a new FB page setup by one of our folks:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Community-Life-Woodfield-Crossing/223580807676741

Here's a link to a FB page that was setup by the apartment complex that we help contribute to:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/ArborLakesApartments

Neighbors & communities connecting through technology

Tips, Tools, Strategies, and Technology

The organization I work fortried doing this in apartment communities and we ran into a lot of resistance. We found that people are so overwhelmed with usernames and passwords already. Our websites whichwas similar to the one you show above (we tried Ning, Webs, an in-house site and several others), just didn't have enough appeal for others to join outside of a core group of 10-20 people. We wanted everyone to connect, so we put our heads together and realized that "everyone" has a Facebook account. So we created groups or pages on Facebook for our apartment neighborhoods and that ended up being exactly what we needed.

I wanted to stay as far away from Facebook as possible when we started looking online for technologies, but every time we turned a corner, Facebook was right there in our face. I know that like Myspace, Facebook will probably also fall to the wayside and something else will take it's place (Google+ maybe???). The key to connecting through technology, in my opinion, is to stay on top of the popular trends. Even if that means changing it up every 5 years or so...which isn't a bad idea when it comes to technology anyway.