Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Best Places to Advertise for New Members

[Craig Ragland (craigragland]

Martha (and others interested in using media to sell cohousing homes
or to recruit for a forming group),

I love it when people ask for things on Coho-L that we have
ready-to-use resources on the Cohousing Website that might help. We
have a little section on Advertising and the Dec 7 Call-in will also
address this. Martha, since another Daybreaker, Terri Huggett, will be
one of the panelists, I strongly urge you to talk with her sometime
this week. She can pump the panelists for their insights.

ADVERTISING SECTION

The Cohousing Website has a Members Area, which includes some pages on
Advertising within the Resources section of the Cohousing Marketing
room:

http://www.cohousing.org/node/1084
(warning: you must be logged into the Cohousing Website site as a
Member to access this Members-only content)

I created this content, but have not touched it for months. I could
add a lot more to this after talking with about 30 people about how
they are marketing their forming groups. We'll be talking about it on
the

This page is much less developed that I'd hoped, but I never found a
co-host for the Marketing Room (two people said yes, then backed out)
or received feedback or input - why? Almost nobody has discovered this
page, the page view count to date is only 62 (and that includes my use
which probably accounts for about 20 of those PVs).

The original intent for the Members Area was that "Members" would work
with the limited Coho/US staff to help us build the Cohousing Website
into an increasingly more valuable resource. Given the level of
participation to date, the Cohousing Website team is seriously
rethinking that approach and will probably shift to a different use
model.

DEC 7 CALL IN

http://www.cohousing.org/Workshops

The second Coho/US Call in focuses on forming groups and the current
economy. A huge issue for forming groups is the impact on prospective
members as they think about the implications of moving - selling their
home and buying a new one. I hear reports that a smaller percentage of
inquiries result in memberships than a year or two ago. People believe
that are roughly the same number of inquiries, but the conversion rate
of inquiries to member has appeared to have fallen off. This is a bit
of a different problem from generating the initial inquiries in the
first place, but may be even more important for forming groups to
address. Its pretty useless spending money to advertise if people who
contact you just "want your information" because they are scared of
trying to sell their home.

More to come...

Craig

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:14 PM, Martha <wordbiz [at] spiritone.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Our Membership Team would like suggestions from other cohousing
> communities about what national print and online media have worked
> best to attract potential members from beyond their locale. While our
> construction moves forward, we are looking at magazine advertising as
> well as blogs, Google pay-per-click ads, and social media such as
> FaceBook.
>
> Martha Wagner
> Daybreak Cohousing
> Portland, Oregon
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/
>
>
>



-- 
Craig Ragland
Executive Director
Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US)
425-487-3550
http://www.cohousing.org
craig [at] cohousing.org

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