Celebrate Thanksgiving at Your Apartments
Thanksgiving gives us all a chance to focus on the most important elements of our lives – family, friends and food. It’s easy to boost your resident retention and goodwill with some festive activities. This year, there are so many creative ways to celebrate Thanksgiving at your apartments, you won’t even miss the hosting. We’ll show you how to incorporate cooking classes, a one-of-a-kind cookbook and a fulfilling food drive into this month’s marketing plans.
Cooking Classes
Create a menu of Thanksgiving favorites and host a virtual cooking class (or a series of them) for a fun and educational way to celebrate Thanksgiving at your apartments. Plus, a cooking demo is the perfect type of event to welcome both residents and prospects – kill two birds with one stone – or something less gruesome, you get the point!
Ordinarily a cooking class would be an in-person event, but with COVID still underway, consider inviting a limited in-person audience so that social distancing can be easily observed while recording the demo on Facebook Live to reach a wider audience. Make full use of the community kitchen by showing off those stainless appliances and spacious kitchen island that is perfect for recipe prep. Work the room while you work your recipe. Feature your gas stoves or quartz countertops with festive ingredients and flowers. Cooking classes make for a great recurring series by demonstrating one or two recipes a week all holiday season to keep residents and prospects entertained. Make it a whole team affair, and have each leasing consultant pick their favorite recipe to record for the series!
When hosted virtually, residents and prospects can tune in together to follow along and connect with one another. Hire a specialty chef to make it a unique culinary experience or connect with a local culinary school to partner with your community. Post the menu a few days ahead of time on your socials to get residents excited and grocery shopping so they’ll be prepared to follow along at home. Once the session is recorded, you can always repost to help anyone that missed it live.
Community Recipe Book
Although the traditional Thanksgiving menu stays fairly consistent, no two families do it the same. A great way to connect with friends and family this year is to ask them for some of these special recipes. Let them know about a dish you’ve always loved but haven’t recreated in your own kitchen yet. They’ll be flattered and happy to share.
As property management teams, take this a step further and do a community-wide recipe book to celebrate Thanksgiving at your apartments. Take recipe submissions and organize them by starters, main course, sides and desserts. And don’t forget the drink recipes – Apple Cider Mimosa, yes please! Once you’ve got the collection of recipes, share them with the community at the beginning of Thanksgiving week, giving residents time to shop. On Thanksgiving Day, encourage residents to share pics of their culinary creations.
This creative endeavor doesn’t have to stop with Thanksgiving. Feature unique recipes from your residents to showcase the collection of cuisines being cooked up across your apartment community throughout the year. The cookbook could be a great resident retention or move-in gift in digital PDF form or as a printed, spiral bound book – in either case we can help design this for you.
Food Drive
In this thankful season, it’s important to connect with others in our local communities. Food pantries see increased numbers of families in need of holiday meals each November and December. With this challenging year, this will be even more paramount and it’s a great way to celebrate Thanksgiving at your apartments through a spirit of generosity. People are always happy to come together to donate to a charity or food partner that makes a difference in their community. If your residents aren’t hosting a big meal this year, they may be able to give extra non-perishables to the food drive of your choice. It’s easy to set up canned goods collection boxes in the leasing office or lobby to catch residents each day. Creating a campaign around seasonal giving can be a nice way to attract prospects as they see the good you are doing in the community. Eblasts, flyers and social graphics can be bundled to really spread the word and increase resident donations this year. This is a year for connecting and a common goal makes this a win for your property.
Get the Word Out
Making your holiday events come to life is so much easier when you’ve got the marketing collateral! A recipe eblast to your residents – no problem. Flyers to highlight the food drive donation spots – easy! We even design social media graphics so it’s as easy as save and post. Just let us know your plans and we can make sure your events look flawless – email us today.