When it comes to tackling occupancy challenges, it’s never one thing that will do it, according to Love & Company President and CEO Rob Love.
Many times, operators are looking for a silver bullet to increase census, but it’s virtually never that easy, Love said during a Wednesday webinar on how executive leadership drives census turnarounds.
Positively changing census often means addressing branding expectations versus the visitor experience, as well as addressing lead quality and quantity, media allocations, pricing challenges, inventory mix and product issues, undisciplined customer relationship management use, lack of referral activity, and staffing behaviors and attitudes.
“It’s looking at a combination of factors and how they all play together to support a sales and marketing program,” Love said. “It takes courage to invite fresh eyes into your organization and be willing to listen to what they share.”
COVID’s aftershocks
Courtney McGinness, Episcopal SeniorLife Communities’ vice president of marketing and community engagement, shared how the nonprofit, faith-based organization came to the decision to seek an outside agency to fix the “aftershocks” of COVID-19 pandemic occupancy dips in its independent living and assisted living programs.
As McGinness tells it, things were “running smoothly” until March 2020. But it was in 2021 that the effects of the pandemic really began to surface. She said the New York-based company was not able to increase its pipeline of residents in independent and assisted living, but it also had to deal continually with attrition.
Three of its communities — River Edge Manor, an independent living community in Rochester, NY; Pinhurst, an independent living community in Honeoye Falls, NY; and Brentland Woods, an assisted living community in Henrietta, NY — were the main drivers of lower occupancy, she said. Not knowing whether the change was a blip or a response to COVID-19, McGinness said, the communities “were in a really bad place.”
Outside of opening a new community, McGinness said that she and her team had “never had to fill so many apartments.” Occupancy pressures also led to friction, competition and siloing within programs, creating dysfunction in the sales and marketing teams, she added.
“It was a daunting task,” McGinness said, adding that with many competitors looking to fill their own units, the market was highly competitive. “We needed to make a statement in the outside market, and we felt we needed help,” she said.
Obtaining outside help
McGinneess, who has led the company’s marketing efforts for 24 years, said she started to think her longevity was becoming an obstacle to moving forward.
“I knew there was such a thing as being too close to being able to find your way out of something,” she said. “With this new, significant challenge, I had to come to terms with the fact that I needed to be open to new and different perspectives. The world is not the same, and what we did before COVID was not going to get us out of the rut we were in.”
After getting buy-in from her CEO and staff members, she researched and sought recommendations for agencies to come in and assess Episopal SeniorLife’s processes. With the help of Love & Company, McGinness said, the organization found new ways to do things and even dusted off some old processes that had fallen by the wayside.
Episopal SeniorLife moved the sales strategy from a regional approach to a community approach and trained all community executive directors and their teams on how to conduct tours and field leads in the absence of a salesperson. The company also moved from a traditional media approach, with an organizational message to a community approach, with marketing dollars redirected to underperforming communities. Additionally, the organization adopted a new customer relationship management program and refreshed its communities with small but impactful updates.
The effort worked, McGinness said. The company started seeing increased social outreach, website users, inquiries and, ultimately, occupancy.
“It’s understanding your story and what you need to tell,” Love said, adding that companies need to build time into their planning and expectations to align their strategies for the biggest impact.
