We have talked a lot on the site about finding ways to have the resident's experience at their community improve over time - similar to having a rewards card, where they get more benefits the longer they live there.  This concept is potentially incredibly powerful, as the more you give a resident over time, the more they have to give up if they want to leave.  While they are a VIP at your community, they are just a boring, new resident at some other community.

Previously, we had talked a lot about providing a way for residents to receive apartment upgrades as renewal incentives.  That was a brilliant approach as not only are you giving residents additional value, but you are also upgrading the community at the same time.  This past weekend, however, I realized that resident events could be used in a similar fashion.

We often look at resident events as giant community pool parties, or something similar, where the goal is to get as many residents to attend, load them up with food and a few games, and hope that it impacts their decision to renew.  Since we are attracting such large groups, the spend per person has to inevitably be pretty small to handle the cost.  But what if you limited an event just to long-term residents?  With a smaller pool of residents, the budget could remain the same but the benefit/resident could go up dramatically.  I like the idea of segmenting residents into different levels based upon their length of stay (although this is a pretty simplistic approach - I'm sure there is an even more innovative approach out there).  So for example:

Year 1 - Year 2 Residents:  VIP LEVEL 1
Year 3 - Year 4 Residents:  VIP LEVEL 2
Year 5 - Year 6 Residents:  VIP LEVEL 3
Year 7 - Year 8 Residents:  VIP LEVEL 4
Year 9 - Year 10 Residents:  VIP LEVEL 5
11+ Year Residents:  VIP LEVEL 6

Thinking about these levels from an events point of view, maybe you have some big, all encompassing parties throughout the year, but you also have more exclusive events for the different tiers, with the benefits getting better as time goes on.

For example, maybe VIP LEVEL 6 residents get to attend a dinner at a nice resident once a year, as a show of appreciation.  This event isn't meant to be all-encompassing, but rather target the absolute best customers and give them something special, that is more expensive than can be provided to the overall resident population.  Another example is the Escape Room event we just shared on ResidentEvents.com.  At $25/person, this isn't an event that can be provided for all residents of the community, and frankly, it isn't really designed for that large of a group anyway.  But it would work for a really memorable engrossing event for a high level VIP group.  So by segmenting the resident population, the community opens up new opportunities for offering different types of resident incentives that don't have to be provided to the entire community at large.

Beyond simple free events, a community could still go for a large event concept, but the benefits they receive are relative to their level.  For example, the community could get a big group rate for discounted tickets to a certain sporting event, and then pass on a discount to the residents.  So a VIP LEVEL 1 only gets 10% off, but a LEVEL 2 gets 30% off, LEVEL 3 gets 50% off, and the top tiers pay almost nothing.

Overall, this approach really is just a segmenting of the resident retention budget, where instead of having an overall budget that gets applied to the entire community equally, the budget is segmented into one line item for community-wide endeavors, and then line items for each level of resident.  Then taking those individual budgets, the office team can create an event schedule that provides increasing benefits the longer a resident stays there.  (Note:  You could probably keep the budgets the same across each level, and since the community will naturally have less top level VIPs, the dollars budgeted per resident will be greater for that group.)

What do you think about classifying your residents based upon their length of stay, and giving them different benefits based upon that?