Enhance Community Engagement with Special Interest Groups

Active adult communities are centered around the idea that engaged seniors stay healthy, sharp, and able to care for themselves independently longer than those who are isolate. The success of a property manager depends on enhancing community engagement and giving residents access to special interest groups that appeal to them.

Successful Community Engagement Depends on Variety, and Member Leadership

Should your active adult community offer spinning or Zumba? Will you attract more residents with a book club or photography group? How many different special interest groups can your staff really handle? These are the questions that plague every property manager in the industry.

There is no one best answer to community engagement. Climate, demographics, and geography will likely affect your choices – a snorkeling excursion probably isn’t an option in Montana – however it is unlikely that all of your residents will have the same interests. Instead, you will need to provide a variety of special interest groups that appeal to different segments of your community.

But managing all those groups, arranging their outings and gatherings, and monitoring their online conversations can take up a great deal of administrative time. Whenever possible, you need to shift these tasks to the members and leaders of the group itself.

LifestyleLink Lets Members Maintain Special Interest Groups Themselves

There are many different software options available to facilitate online groups, or manage the use of community facilities, but few put it all in one place. Juggling apps like Eventbrite, Facebook, and a proprietary web portal can frustrate active adults, some of whom are not technologically savvy.

LifestyleLink creates a one-stop spot for your community’s members to find and join special interest groups, participate in group discussions, contribute to shared photo albums, coordinate events, and reserve facility space. It gives your property managers the flexibility to delegate tasks to group leaders, while still supervising and giving permission to use community space. Members can create a public or private group, invite new members, and set privacy options to suit their needs. They can create reoccurring events, push notifications to their members, and share documents and photos among the group. Members can self-regulate online discussion groups, granting leader permissions to moderators or other members to direct the flow of conversation. When it is time to get together, LifestyleLink allows them to reserve amenities and locations, invite group members to attend, and track registration and attendance. By putting all these features together in one place, group members have less to learn, creating fewer barriers to community engagement.

LifestyleLink is available to active adult communities across the country. No other tool helps community engagement the same way, connecting residents to special interest groups that meet their needs. With three tiers of features, you can customize the software to fit your needs, and your facility. If you want to provide an integrated social media community experience to your members, contact a LifestyleLink representative for a tour of the software.