Your senior living community’s operations don’t exist in a bubble. Countless different factors and variables impact your success, from small decisions to massive new initiatives. Naturally, this includes your sales and marketing efforts, where the tactics you use in your messaging directly impact critical metrics like net operating income (NOI).
Video storytelling is a perfect example of this dynamic, able to breathe new life into your operations through everything from increased move-ins to your community’s hiring strategy. That’s why I want to spend a few moments discussing NOI as well as the unique and powerful ways video storytelling can continually drive it to new heights.
What Is NOI?
How can you gauge the relative financial well-being of your community? There’s always revenue, of course, but it’s a pretty high-level metric that doesn’t provide much insight into your actual operations. And something like EBITDA, while immensely insightful, tends to be a little deep in the weeds for anyone outside of your accounting department.
Net operating income is the sweet spot in the middle, thorough enough to provide genuine guidance, yet not so complex that it requires spreadsheets full of data to calculate. In fact, NOI consists of just two factors – your revenue and operating costs.
Specifically, NOI is a calculation decision-makers use to analyze the profitability of income-generating real estate investments. In other words, it helps leadership gauge how profitable a senior living community is for a given financial period. The formula for calculating NOI is:
All property revenue – all reasonably necessary operating expenses = NOI
Further, operators rely on NOI profitability to inform any number of operational decisions, also using it to pay year-end bonuses for employees, operators, and ownership. Therefore, it’s safe to say NOI is on everyone’s mind – or at least should be – since it affects everyone from the new hire in memory care to your C-suite.
Improving NOI With OneDay
Needless to say, the senior living industry needs effective tools to regenerate community NOI margins as part of their post-COVID, “new normal” operations. Thankfully, as previously discussed in our insights on the OneDay Flywheel to Drive Occupancy, video storytelling can be essential to continuously improving NOI in three distinct ways.
1. Increased Move-In Volume Through Sales & Marketing
Senior living sales and marketing teams are instrumental in driving move-ins and maximizing occupancy rates, particularly when it comes to video storytelling. By providing your team with the ability to personalize your messaging across the buyer's journey, video is simply more engaging than any other form of content.
When prospects and their adult children are more engaged and feel deeper connections with your community, nothing but good can happen for your move-in volume.
OneDay’s partners have realized anywhere between 1 and 14% increases in move-in volume simply by integrating OneDay videos into their sales process. Since senior living and retirement communities need to stay above certain occupancy thresholds just to pay their bills – no easy feat in today’s environment – communities are struggling just to break even these days.
OneDay’s video sales and marketing platform transforms your team into skilled storytellers that help drive your move-in volume higher that ultimately propels your NOI upward.
2. Resident Stories Drive Satisfaction
The happier and more satisfied residents and their families are with your community, the less likely they are to move out. Just like everyone else in senior living, you’re trying to keep the proverbial back door shut by reducing controllable move-outs.
Since dissatisfaction is one of the most common forms of controllable move-outs, it's obviously in your best interest to provide a satisfying quality of life for your residents. Just as importantly, you must also ensure that families and loved ones constantly feel connected and engaged. If either of those two components are missing, it makes maintaining healthy occupancy rates much more challenging.
That's yet another area where OneDay shines for a senior living community. By sharing videos with families through OneDay Resident Stories, you're giving them an open window into their loved one's life, along with invaluable peace of mind.
As an example, a family at one of our partner communities’ described a OneDay Resident Story video of their loved one as a "gift." In this instance, it's not a stretch to assume that OneDay plays a pivotal role in keeping this family – and all others, for that matter – satisfied with the community.
With most communities experiencing churn in their resident population – particularly in assisted-living facilities and memory care – anything you can do to minimize move-outs will provide tremendous value to senior housing operators through improved NOI. Once again, this is one of the absolute strengths of Resident Stories through OneDay’s video storytelling platform.
3. Attracting Top Talent and Minimizing Staff Turnover
The senior housing industry has some of the highest turnover rates in all of the service sectors. Compounding that issue is the constant struggle to recruit top talent, where finding good candidates in some markets is next to impossible. The combination of high turnover and difficulty in recruiting and hiring makes staffing an expensive line item that directly affects NOI.
But as I said, it's not just about attracting top talent. If your community can't maintain its best employees and frequently loses them to a competitor, it creates the same corrosive cycle. Ultimately, these dynamics drive up operational costs.
Thus, attracting top talent is an essential differentiator for your community which, not coincidentally, is yet another area where OneDay can be a genuine asset. For example, something as simple as a personalized video "shout-out" can make an employee feel special and important to the bigger picture. The same goes for a video introduction of a new hire sent to the community or a heartfelt "thinking of you" video if an employee is going through some tough times.
But that's what makes OneDay such a powerful tool across the spectrum of your operations. From your sales and marketing messaging to Resident Stories and Human Resources, OneDay allows your community to be empathetic, compassionate, and caring for residents and employees alike. That's a recipe for improved NOI that benefits everyone involved, from residents to stakeholders and everyone in between.