Botanica Resort's app: 90% usage by residents

I sat down with Gavin Third, Sales and Community Manager at Botanica Lifestyle Resort. An over 50s lifestyle resort in Caravonica, Cairns. They have their very own Botanica app, built on the Pluss Communities platform and have been using it in their community for over two years. Botanica has consistently achieved very high engagement with their residents since the very beginning, with 90 percent of their residents using the app every week to stay connected with what's going on in the village. Gavin has offered to share insights about how and why residents are so engaged and what he and the team do with their app on a daily basis.

How many residents do you have there? Tell us about the makeup of the resort.

So our first residents moved in as of December 2020, and since then, we've now handed over just under 120 homes, and we've got over 190 residents living here currently. So it's certainly grown, and we're excited to see how the community will continue to grow. For the safety and security aspect of it, we have quite a few single females living at Botanica. They just love the community atmosphere of it. It's a gated resort, and they feel a lot more secure here than out in suburbia at the moment.

So wind back to the beginning of 2020. When Botanica was looking for a communications app, a community app for the community, why did you want a community app for Botanica? And was there a specific problem or challenge that you were looking to solve?

I think it was more of a case of having a centralised communications system that we could get all of our messages out from the one place, rather than sending an email out and then hoping people have read it. This way, with the app, we can send out an alert, a notification, or news stories, and we can see whether or not people have actually had a look at that. We know that the information is getting out there. It was really a case of having that centralised system to make it easier for us. Because at that point in time, we needed to communicate with people who were living here, but also those ones that were getting close to moving in and keeping them informed as to what's going on in the resort.

So you've just talked a bit about the central reason why you use it. Tell us a bit about your app. What does it look like? How does it work? What features are most helpful to your residents?

Yes, we use the news articles quite prevalently. It is a case of whatever's going on in the resort, if there is a new resident that's moved in, if there's an activity that's happened, we've got some great photos from all that sort of stuff, we make sure we put up on the app. So everybody that either attended can see what beautiful photos we got, but we can also use it as a bit of a sales tool. So those people that are getting keen on wanting to move in, they can see all of those activities that are going on as well. Our events page is quite extensive. We always have over 200 events on there. Sometimes it's a little bit problematic that the residents can't find the event they're looking for in a hurry, but having said that, they're able to make sure there's always something happening.

We've got a marketplace set up in there as well now so people can buy, swap, and sell because a lot of people downsizing and moving to Botanica from a family home have extra furniture or extra items they want to get rid of. They can put it on the buy, swap, sell, and that's been quite successful. Our residents, as well, just get alerts and notifications, news around the resort which needs to get out in a hurry. Being in construction, still, if you need to say to the residents, "Hey, you guys in Blackwood Road, you're going to lose power for the next half an hour," then we can send out an alert, and it goes straight to them. It's just a very, very powerful communication tool for us.

What communications or community management problems does your app solve for you in your community?

It really comes back down to that communication. If we need to get any notifications out in a hurry, if we need to speak to our residents to provide them information about what's going on in our beautiful resort, we get it on the app, and we can show people what's going on. It's been very, very helpful for us to be able to communicate directly to our residents, but also the fact that we can break our users down into whether they're a resident or whether their home is still under construction. We can communicate directly just to those user groups to make sure information that goes out is relevant to those people.

And you have a really well-developed news channel. What kind of content are you sharing?

We'll share when a new resident joins the community, so when somebody's moving in, we welcome those residents, and put up a photo. Other residents around that immediate home or also just generally right throughout the whole community, they all jump on and engage by welcoming them as well, saying hello, looking forward to meeting them.

Any events that we have, any activities going on around the place, we make sure that we always have some photos taken. We put up a little bit of a write-up, but we try and do it as soon as possible after the event. So we're not waiting a week or two weeks to put up as a news story. It is either the day of the event or the day after the event that we put it up there so people are fresh in their minds, then they're not going, "Oh, when did we do that? Or what was happening?" It's really about making sure that the activities and events and everything we put up is engaging, relevant, but it's also very timely.

There's a lot of content that you're putting into the app. How do you make that work from a staffing perspective? What processes do you use to manage it?

We have a couple of us who mainly manage the app, but we also have all of the rest of our staff. We're running a small team of nine, but if there's anything they want to put up, they just come through to the main two staff that make sure that we get those events and activities up there.

We allow our residents to submit news events, any articles, any events they want to put on, we allow them to put it up. We just review them, check them, make sure it's actually something that we want to have on our app, and make sure it is worded correctly and all those sorts of things. But it's really up to myself and also Alana as our administration person that she looks after the app alongside me. But the other staff members also are able to facilitate any news articles that they need to go up as well.

You are getting almost 90% engagement from your residents on a regular basis with your Botanica app. What are three or four reasons that you think you might be getting such high engagement?

I think it's really about relevance and timing. That would be the two main things, making sure as I previously said, we put anything up on the app that we need to get up there. But we do it straight away after the event. So if there is something that is a news article that we want to get out there, it's whether it's a new resident coming in or whether it's a beautiful event we've just had. So we've had a high tea for Mother's Day, we had a Biggest Morning Tea fundraiser. We're getting that news out there straight away so it's on the information. It's timely. People don't have to go, "Oh, that's right, we did have that event three weeks ago." It's getting it up there straight away. That would be the two main reasons I think we have such huge engagement.

I think another reason is allowing our residents access, being able to put up events that they want to put up as well. So it's not just us, Botanica management, coming up with news and events. If they've been off on a trip, there's activities where some of our residents will get together and go to one of the markets and use the community bus and then take some photos. They send it all through to us and put up a little bit of a news article, then we put it all out there, and then others go, "Oh, I missed out on that." So next time there's another activity going on, they want to be involved in it. So it's engaging for the community as well as allowing them to put up their activities as well.

What advice would you give to other organisations looking to get residents more engaged with their community app? You've just talked about getting them to your buy, swap, and sell channel, posting events. Is there anything else that's a key to success in increasing engagement?

In-house IT support. Being an over 50s lifestyle resort, a lot of our residents are early adopters of wanting to use the app, but then we do have some which are technology challenged. So having somebody that's able to support them through that is very, very helpful. If they've got to get on the phone or ring an IT support or do something else apart from being able to come up to a desk and have a face-to-face conversation with somebody, how do I fix this? Or how do I sort that out? I think that's really important. So just having one or two staff members able to be that contact if there are any support issues that need to be done. Apps at the best of times get a little bit twitchy, and sometimes it's just a reset, sometimes it's a log back in, and quite an easy fix most of the time. But if they can't do that straight up and don't have anybody to give them that advice, then they'll probably just lay the phone in the drawer, not worry about looking at the app. But we try and keep everybody engaged on a daily basis by putting at least something up every couple of days. But also having those people around to be able to help them if they are having issues.

That is excellent advice. What process do you use when you've got new residents moving in all the time? How do you get new residents oriented to the app?

Well, we even get them onto the app before they move in. So even once they are interested in moving to Botanica, we want to get them onto the app so they can see what sort of community they're moving into. From there, we give them a little bit of what's available. We now give them access to the full app, so they can't use all the communications within the community side of things, but they can see the events and they can see the news. So that's just them getting to know what's going on in the app. Then as they get a little bit closer and actually, where their construction is getting close to them moving in, we start giving them access to be able to communicate with their neighbors and do messages and things like that. And then once they do move in, then they've got open slather on being able to use everything. We give them a bit of help in regards to this is an event. This is how you book a seat or reserve your spot in the event, just to show them the general runaround of how the actual app works. It just sits in all the different places, and how they can actually be involved in the community by utilising that app. We really push the fact that it is our communication tool. It's our main communication tool, and therefore, they really should be basically waking up in the morning and checking Facebook, but also checking the Botanica app.

Would you recommend other retirement villages and over 50s Lifestyle Resorts use a community app in their community?

Yeah, definitely. It is engaging as long as you've got the content, and you've got people that are able to put things up in a timely manner. But I just keep coming back to communication. It is an easy central location to get all the communication you need to get out to everybody, whether or not they are looking at moving in, they're about to move in, or they've already moved in. It keeps them informed about everything that's happening at Botanica. So yeah, highly recommend having some sort of communication tool, and this app is just the easiest way for us to be able to communicate that.

Well, thank you, Gavin. I really appreciate your time and all of those incredibly useful insights. You've done very, very well, not only in building a great community at Botanica but making sure that your residents feel safe, engaged, and having just a wonderful time.