The Situation

The Community Housing Council of South Australia (CHCSA) is the Peak Industry Body that represents community housing providers and other not-for-profit housing providers in South Australia.

CHCSA has limited marketing resources, particularly for the growing social media space. CHCSA recognised the importance of building the organisation’s online brand but didn’t have a clear strategy.

Hughes Public Relations has worked with CHCSA from mid-2018 onwards to develop and implement a social media strategy to grow online brand awareness and engagement with community housing providers.

CHCSA has a focus on education and professional development for its members and saw an opportunity to add value to them through social media training. Accordingly, Hughes PR ran a Social Media ‘Foundations’ Workshop for social media managers from all SA community housing providers.

CHCSA was sending a PDF newsletter with too much content and was unable to monitor interest and engagement with members.

Objectives

The Community Housing objective was to build awareness, understanding and credibility for sector and to provide a space to enable more communication with community housing providers.

It also sought to grow awareness of the sector’s commitment to excellent tenant services and built form. This has resulted in a focus on human interest stories where tenants have talked about the difference being a community housing tenant has made in their life, not just their housing. An emphasis on built form has demonstrated an interest in the lives that tenants want to live and how excellent and appropriate housing can enable this.

Elements

Hughes PR developed and supported the implementation of a Social Media Strategy and content planning to form the foundations of a successful online presence.

Over the course of the first six months, Hughes PR assisted CHCSA to gain confidence to use the social media platforms, guidance around the content types and professional visual elements, social media monitoring, paid social media advertising, website management, preparation of the regular e-newsletter, training, reporting and analytics.

This first six months following the introduction of a new an important period to get the fundamental elements right and set the wheels in motion to continue to grow the reportable metrics month-on-month.

Hughes PR looks forward to working with CHCSA in the next six months to significantly grow the CHCSA online presence, positioning and engagement.

Hughes PR also planned an online video campaign to showcase community housing tenant stories, a series which was filmed and produced by the Hughes PR video team.