Marketing your housing co-op or association online (without a marketing team)

Small housing organisations often feel stuck on marketing. There's no comms team, there's no budget, and the website was built by someone's nephew in 2013. The good news: you don't need any of those things to do a decent job. You need a couple of afternoons a month and a clear view of what you're actually trying to achieve.

What are you trying to do?

Housing teams usually need the website to do four things:

• Help existing tenants find information and report issues.
• Tell prospective tenants or applicants how to apply.
• Attract board members, volunteers and partners.
• Demonstrate to regulators, funders and stakeholders that you're well-run.

Everything else — SEO, social media, newsletters — is in service of one of these. Pick the one that matters most right now and plan around it.

The low-effort, high-value checklist

On your website

• A clear, one-page “How to report a repair” that works on a phone.
• A page for prospective tenants that says who's eligible, how the waiting list works, and what to expect.
• Your annual report, board papers and complaint performance on a page that Google can index — not just as a PDF in a document library.
• Contact details that are accurate, on every page, and include out-of-hours.

On search

• Claim your Google Business Profile. Add photos. Respond to reviews.
• Make sure every page has a title and a meta description that would make sense on a search result page.
• Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. Check it weekly.

On content

• Publish one page a month. Tenant stories, service updates, board changes, community projects.
• Write the way you'd speak at an AGM. Not the way you'd write a grant application.

Social media, without a social media manager

LinkedIn is where sector peers, funders and potential board members are. Post twice a month — a milestone, an anecdote, a piece of news. Facebook is where many of your tenants actually are. A private residents' group, lightly moderated, is usually more useful than a public page. Twitter/X is optional.

Whichever you pick, consistency beats volume. Two posts a month for a year is a credible presence. Twelve posts in one week, then silence, is noise.

Email is still the best channel

A short monthly email to the tenants who've opted in is the single most effective communication tool most small landlords have. Three sections: what's coming up, something useful (a how-to, a repair tip, a local service), and one human story from the organisation. Keep it under 400 words.

What to measure

• Applicants: where did they hear about you? Ask on the form.
• Repair reports via the website vs phone. If this moves up, you're saving staff time.
• Newsletter open rate. 30%+ is healthy for a housing audience.
• AGM / consultation attendance. Communications exist to drive behaviour, not traffic.

Where CHICS fits

Our Marketing CRM module is designed around this loop: applicants and tenants sit in one place, consent is tracked, newsletters go out with an audit trail, and the results come back into the system alongside the housing data. You don't need a separate marketing stack.