Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Any experienced with a digital marketing campaign?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Nov 22, 2024, at 12:06 PM, Lorraine Faris <lor.f50 [at] gmail.com> wrote:

> We just met with some folks who can design a digital marketing campaign for
> us, targeting individuals most likely to be good candidates for our forming
> urban community.   Have any communities out there engaged a firm to conduct a 
> digital
> marketing campaign?  If so, how successful was it at generating future 
> members?

Be very careful — do a test before you invest any money. 

A forming group in Florida in the mid-90s paid $3,000 for a side-of-the-page ad 
in Utne Reader. They received 8,000 requests for information. No takers.

It was the right demographic theoretically. It was a good ad that spurred 
action from 8,000 people. But no one was interested enough to commit to moving 
to Florida or joining a forming group where nothing was guaranteed yet.

The only thing that has worked ovre and over is  personal contact. I’m 
including local news interviews in “personal contact.”  Letting every cohousing 
group know about you is also important because they can tell their friends 
about you — works the same as personal contact.

Definitely start a Facebook page and make entries often. The ambiance at 
Facebook is personal—friends and family more than anything else. And affinity 
groups.

Be sure to list yourself on CohoUS so people who are already looking for 
cohousing will find you — 10-20 percent of your buyers may come from other 
states. Many groups forget or don’t know that people are moving all the time, 
and enough of them will move for cohousing to make your time worth it.

Other contact points I know of from reading this list since 1994 are Unitarian 
Churches, home-schooling groups, food coops, and colleges and universities. You 
don’t need milliions of people. You are looking for 20-30 households. It seems 
like a lot but in the totality of things, that’s a very small number.

A total turn-offs are failure to respond to queries and putting information 
behind a wall. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at cohousing websites for a 
wide range of reasons, including when I was looking at cohousing groups to see 
where I wanted to move. Don’t require people to fill out a form before you send 
them information. It makes them feel like they are being judged and evaluated 
before you will even tell them what your goals are. Forms are frequently lost 
because no one checks the community's email. Or checks it intermittently. Or 
the new person assigned doesn’t have the password.

Cohousing is certainly more famous today than it was 20 years ago, but it is 
still an iffy project for people to commit to before the walls go up. People 
need personal contact with someone who builds trust. Someone who likes talking 
to strangers.

If the digital ad could make people feel like they were having personal 
contact, it could work. I did see an interview with a woman who was at the 
rally when Trump called off the scheduled question-and-answer session in favor 
of listening to music. She said, “it was wonderful. It was like he had invited 
us to his living room to just hang out. I felt so close to him."

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org