|
Nov 30
2010
|
3 Gift Ideas for Your Apartment Residents For The Cost of Some Elbow Grease!
Posted by: Daisy Nguyen on Nov 30, 2010 15:02 |
|
The next 30 days are a whirlwind of end of year celebrating. Whether your residents celebrate Christmas, Hannakah, Kwanzaa, or ringing in the New Year, the spirit of giving and goodwill are out and about. Here are 3 Gift Ideas your apartment community can give to your residents, for the cost of some elbow grease!
3 Gift/Amenity Ideas for Your Apartment Residents
- Package delivery - The next 30 days, your residents maybe ordering gifts for themselves, others, or receiving gifts from loved ones. Many of those items are delivered during the time when your apartment resident is not at home. How great would it be if you could accept their packages and deliver it into their apartment? What a great gift/amenity to give to your apartment residents! To coordinate this, you will need to have your residents sign a package addendum allowing you to accept packages on their behalf as well as allowing you to place their package into their home. I've implemented this at many sites - sometimes as a year-round amenity. If you need a sample package addendum, email me at daisy@rentsoda.com and I can send you one that you can use as a template.
- Weekly Recycling AT-DOOR Pick-Up - With all the boxes arriving, packaging of gifts, and unwrapping of gifts, your resident will have additional recycling this month. (i.e. boxes, paper wrapping, newspaper, shopping bags, etc.) Why not offer a once a week pick-up at your resident's doors for their paper recycling? If you opt to offer this, you will need to set rules and guidelines so that your hallway doesn't become a trash center. I would recommend limiting it to dry packaging, so that it is not messy. However, your community can decide if you want to expand that to include any recyclables!
- Clothing & blanket drive - Find a local charity that needs clean, gently used clothing for their cause. Your residents are already being asked for donations from every avenue possible. Give them an opportunity to get rid of some of their extra items they may have lying around the house and make room for the new gifts they will be receiving from loved ones! I recommend a drop-box, and guidelines to make sure items have been recently cleaned. Your staff may need to drop off the items to your charity weekly! Depending on the size of your site, this could mean A LOT of stuff. Keep the clothing/blanket drive as long as you feel you can collect donations. I've implemented this at several sites, and we've always had a great turn out. Some of the local charities that we partnered with were surprising - one year a local food shelf accepted clothing/blankets, another year, we had a local non-profit fashion-related scholarship fund pick up our clothing drive items to sell at their annual garage sale in March. Another year, our clothing drive went to a local church that operated a homeless shelter. Don't limit your local charity options - there are tons out there that need gently used clothing!
These are 3 great ways to help your residents during a busy time of year. Great for year-end goodwill, great as "gifts," AWESOME amenity, great for resident retention and they'll love it! Do you have other ideas you want to add? Please leave me a comment!
You can read the original blog entry on my blog at:
Daisy Nguyen is owner and CEO of RENT SODA, a consulting company offering apartment marketing, business & operations consulting and apartment industry training.
