Simplifying Activity Planning in Retirement Living Communities

Planning meaningful and engaging activities for residents in retirement living communities is both an art and a science. The right mix of social, recreational, and educational events can significantly enhance residents' quality of life, foster a sense of community, and contribute to overall well-being. However, managing the logistics—coordinating calendars, tracking attendance, handling payments, and gathering feedback—can often feel like an overwhelming challenge.

That’s where technology comes in.

This guide, “10 Steps to Streamline Activity Planning with Technology,” is designed to help leaders of retirement living communities transform the way they approach activity management. With the right tools, what once required hours of administrative work can now be simplified, allowing you to focus on what matters most: creating vibrant, engaging experiences for your residents.

What You'll Learn

In this guide, we’ll walk you through 10 practical steps to streamline every aspect of your activity planning process. You’ll discover how to:

• Gather and analyse resident preferences to plan events that meet the specific needs and interests of your community.
• Centralise and automate your event calendar so everyone—staff and residents alike—has real-time access to up-to-date information.
• Boost participation through automated reminders and seamless RSVP tracking.
• Simplify payments for paid events, eliminating cash handling and reducing the risk of errors.
• Track and analyse engagement metrics to continuously improve your activity offerings.

How This Guide Will Help You

By incorporating the strategies in this guide, you’ll not only save time and reduce administrative burdens, but you’ll also enhance resident satisfaction, improve participation rates, and create a more organised and efficient community. Leveraging tools like the Pluss Communities platform, which integrates all aspects of activity management—from communication and scheduling to payments and feedback—will enable you to focus more on connecting with your residents and less on managing paperwork.

Whether you're new to using technology in your community or looking to refine your current approach, this guide will provide actionable insights and practical solutions to streamline your operations and improve the resident experience.

Ready to take your activity planning to the next level? Let’s dive in!

Streamline Assisted Living Activity Planning with Technology

How to cater for resident interests and preferences

Activity planning for seniors in retirement living can be a complex but deeply rewarding task. Keeping residents engaged and active directly impacts their quality of life, but managing an ever-growing list of activities, preferences, and logistics can feel overwhelming. Fortunately, technology offers a powerful solution to streamline this process. In this guide, we’ll explore 10 key steps to simplifying activity planning and execution with technology, focusing on how Pluss Communities can help you transform your workflow.

1. Understand Resident Preferences: Leveraging Data to Tailor Your Events

Knowing what types of activities will engage your residents is the cornerstone of successful planning. Seniors come from a variety of backgrounds and have differing levels of mobility, cognitive abilities, and interests. The challenge lies in balancing these diverse needs while offering a compelling mix of activities.

Using Technology to Gather Resident Preferences

Manual surveys or casual feedback sessions are often time-consuming and fail to give the whole picture. Instead, a technology platform like Pluss Communities can automate and enhance the process of gathering preferences:

• Surveys & Feedback Forms: Use built-in survey features within Pluss Communities to regularly poll residents about their favourite activities, suggestions for new events, and satisfaction with current offerings.
• Behavioural Tracking: Track resident attendance and participation automatically through the platform. By analysing which types of events get the highest engagement, you can refine your activity calendar to meet actual demand.
• Segmentation: Group residents by shared interests or abilities. Pluss Communities allows you to create audience segments for specific event types, ensuring your outreach is always relevant.

How This Transforms Your Planning Process

By consistently analysing resident data, you reduce guesswork and eliminate activities that don’t resonate with your population. Technology helps you predict trends and anticipate future needs, allowing for more proactive and personalised planning.

2. Centralise Your Activity Calendar: One Place for Everything

One of the main challenges in managing activities across retirement living communities is maintaining an accurate and accessible calendar. A scattered approach—using paper, spreadsheets, or separate online systems—can lead to confusion and missed opportunities for resident engagement.

Why Centralisation is Key

Centralising your activity planning through a technology platform like Pluss Communities allows you to:

• Streamline Event Creation: Create new events quickly with standardised templates for recurring or one-off activities.
• Collaborate Seamlessly: Enable multiple staff members to add, edit, and manage the calendar from a single interface.
• Visibility for All: Make sure residents, their families, and staff have real-time access to upcoming events from anywhere, on any device.

How to Use the Pluss Communities Events Feature

Pluss Communities’ centralised Events feature integrates directly with your community’s communication system. Here's how it can help:

• Cross-Platform Accessibility: Whether residents prefer to check their schedule on their smartphone, or an in-house display board, the digital calendar syncs across all devices.
• Real-Time Syncing: When an event is added, edited, or cancelled, the calendar automatically updates across all platforms in real time, reducing confusion.
• Customisation: You can categorise events by type (social, educational, physical activities, etc.) and colour-code the calendar for easy viewing.

Benefits of a Centralised Calendar

Having everything in one place ensures consistency and prevents double bookings or overlaps. Additionally, it allows staff to focus more on engaging with residents and less on managing the logistics of the activity schedule.

3. Automate Activity Notifications: Boosting Participation with Timely Reminders

Keeping residents informed and reminding them about upcoming events is critical for participation. But relying on manual reminders can be labour-intensive and prone to human error.

The Power of Automation

Automating notifications with technology not only reduces the workload for your staff but ensures that residents always know what’s happening:

• Personalised Reminders: Residents can receive automated notifications tailored to their preferences, such as upcoming physical therapy classes or weekly game nights.
• Multiple Channels: Send reminders through email and push notifications on mobile devices, depending on the resident’s preferred communication method.
• Timing Flexibility: Notifications can be scheduled at different intervals—whether it’s 24 hours before an event, a reminder the morning of, or a “last call” alert 30 minutes before the event starts.
• Change in event details: If you need to change the details of the event or the timing, immediately send out a notification of the change to all the people registered for the event.

How Pluss Communities Automates Notifications

The Pluss Communities platform allows you to set up automated reminders for all types of events:

• Customisable Settings: You can choose how far in advance notifications are sent and customise the message to make it more personal or engaging.
• Multi-Channel Delivery: Notifications are automatically sent across multiple channels to ensure residents receive them in the format they prefer, whether via email or in-app notifications.

Results of Automation

With reminders automatically sent, participation rates tend to increase significantly. Automation also frees up staff to focus on direct resident interaction instead of logistics, ensuring they can spend more time on meaningful engagement.

4. Use Real-Time Updates for Flexibility: Stay Adaptable with Instant Changes

Plans can change unexpectedly—an outdoor event may need to move indoors due to weather, or a guest speaker might cancel last-minute. When events change, keeping everyone informed can be a scramble.

Why Flexibility is Essential

Using a digital platform allows you to make real-time updates to your event schedule, keeping everyone in the loop. It ensures that residents aren't left confused or disappointed when there’s a change.

How Pluss Communities Enables Flexibility

With Pluss Communities, last-minute changes are simple:

• Instant Event Modifications: Adjust the time, location, or even details about the activity, and the changes are immediately reflected on the central calendar.
• Immediate Notifications: Residents and staff are notified of the changes via automated alerts, ensuring they can adjust their plans without stress.
• Offline Access: Even if some residents don’t regularly check their mobile devices, the platform can integrate with on-site digital signage to reflect updates instantly.

The Impact of Real-Time Flexibility

This feature not only reduces confusion but enhances the resident experience. Knowing they will always receive the most up-to-date information builds trust in the reliability of your community’s communications.

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5. Simplify RSVP and Registration Processes: Know Who’s Coming with a Click

For event planning to be efficient, it’s important to know how many residents plan to attend each activity. This helps with resource allocation (such as meals, staff, or transportation) and ensures you’re not over- or under-preparing.

Challenges of Manual RSVPs

Traditional RSVP methods, like sign-up sheets or calling residents individually, are time-consuming, prone to errors, and often leave you guessing about the final headcount until the last minute.

How Technology Simplifies RSVP Tracking

Using a digital platform, residents can RSVP with ease. Here’s how it works:

• One-Click Confirmation: Residents can register for an event with a single click from their mobile device or computer. The platform updates automatically, and staff can track the attendee count in real time.
• Instant Feedback: As residents RSVP, the system can provide immediate insights into expected attendance, allowing staff to adjust accordingly.
• Automated Follow-Up: For residents who haven’t responded, the platform can automatically send a follow-up message to encourage participation.

Pluss Communities RSVP Features

The RSVP tool built into Pluss Communities is intuitive and easy for residents to use:

• Export Attendee Lists: if you like a printed list of attendees for on the day management then use the export list function to get your list ready to be printed or use the spreadsheet to tick people off as they arrive on the day.?
• Live Headcount Updates: View live updates on attendance from the dashboard, ensuring you always have an accurate view of expected participation.

Benefits for Staff and Residents

Streamlining the RSVP process saves your staff hours of manual work and prevents last-minute logistical headaches. For residents, it makes attending events seamless and easy, reducing any barriers to participation.

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6. Streamline Communication Between Staff and Residents: Keep Everyone in the Loop

Effective activity planning requires good communication between staff and residents. When multiple methods of communication are used—emails, phone calls, paper notes—it’s easy for messages to get lost or misunderstood.

Why Centralised Communication Matters

Having one platform for all communications ensures everyone is on the same page. A digital solution like Pluss Communities brings structure and clarity to conversations about upcoming events, last-minute changes, and feedback.

How Pluss Communities Centralises Communication

The Pluss Communities platform offers a comprehensive communication hub where staff can:

• Post Event Updates: Keep residents informed about upcoming events with group posts or direct messages.
• Engage Residents Directly: Use the chat function to answer questions about events, take suggestions, or provide real-time responses.
• Staff Collaboration: Enable staff members to collaborate on activity planning and ensure no detail is missed, all within one centralised platform.

Results of Streamlined Communication

With a single communication hub, both residents and staff feel more connected. Residents are more informed, and staff spend less time chasing down information or rectifying miscommunications.

7. Track Participation and Engagement Metrics: Measure Success to Improve Future Events

Planning activities is only part of the challenge—measuring their success is just as important. Without understanding how well events are received, it’s difficult to make improvements.

The Role of Metrics in Activity Planning

Tracking participation and engagement provides you with concrete data on which events resonate with your residents and which need rethinking. Manual tracking is prone to error and often fails to give the full picture.

How Technology Enhances Data Collection

A technology platform can track event attendance, participation rates, and resident feedback automatically, without manual work:

• Real-Time Attendance Data: Automatically track who attends each event using sign-ins or check-ins on the platform.
• Engagement Analytics: Analyse which events have the highest attendance, which types of events generate the most excitement, and which residents are most engaged.
• Feedback Surveys: Collect resident feedback directly after the event through digital surveys.

Pluss Communities Engagement Metrics

Insights on the most popular events can help make your program even better:

• Attendance Trends: View participation trends over time to identify popular events and avoid scheduling conflicts.
• Resident Engagement Scores: Generate reports that give insight into individual residents’ activity levels, helping you personalise future event offerings.

Impact of Data-Driven Planning

Using this data, you can refine your activity calendar, improve engagement, and cater to the specific preferences of your residents. This ensures your efforts are focused on what truly matters to your community.

8. Create Recurring Event Templates: Save Time and Boost Consistency

Certain events, such as weekly fitness classes or monthly movie nights, are essential to a vibrant community but require consistent planning. Creating these from scratch every time is unnecessarily time-consuming.

The Efficiency of Recurring Event Templates

Instead of manually entering the same information for recurring events, templates allow you to automate the process:

• Consistency Across Events: Templates ensure that details like time, location, and event description remain consistent.
• Time Savings: Staff can spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks and more time planning unique, engaging events.

How to Use Pluss Communities’ Recurring Event Feature

Pluss Communities provides an intuitive system for creating and managing recurring events:

• Customisable Templates: Set up one event with location, details and contact details? and choose the dates and times each week that you would like the event to recur.?
• Automatic Scheduling: The platform automatically adds these events to the calendar, reducing the need for manual updates. Recurring events can be modified as needed without losing their core structure. Add an end date or let the system automatically continue to add the event into the calendar
• Edit Existing Events: If the details of a recurring event need to change then choose the event from the list, edit the necessary details and click save. Done!

How Templates Improve the Planning Process

By using templates, you free up valuable time for staff to focus on creating unique, one-off events that bring variety to your residents’ routine. Meanwhile, recurring events happen like clockwork, ensuring that your calendar remains full and consistent.

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9. Encourage Resident Feedback: Constantly Improve Your Programming

Getting feedback from residents is crucial for continually improving your activity offerings. However, manually gathering feedback can be time-consuming, and many residents may be hesitant to share their thoughts without an easy way to do so.

The Importance of Regular Feedback

Feedback helps you understand not only how residents felt about an activity but also how your overall planning process is working. Gathering this information allows you to:

• Improve Future Events: By acting on feedback, you can adjust your programming to better align with resident preferences.
• Boost Resident Satisfaction: When residents see that their feedback is valued and implemented, they’re more likely to engage and participate actively.
• Address Concerns Early: Timely feedback helps you address issues before they become larger problems, ensuring continued trust and satisfaction among residents.

How Pluss Communities Facilitates Feedback Collection

Pluss Communities includes a built-in feedback system that makes it simple to gather insights from residents:

• Post-Event Surveys: Send surveys after events to gauge resident satisfaction. Use multiple-choice questions, star ratings, or open-text responses to get a full picture.
• Anonymous Feedback: Some residents may feel more comfortable providing feedback anonymously. The platform allows for anonymous responses, ensuring you get honest insights.
• Immediate Analysis: Pluss Communities’ analytics dashboard compiles feedback data in real-time, giving you quick insights into what worked and what didn’t.

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How Feedback Drives Improvement

By consistently gathering and acting on feedback, you create a cycle of continuous improvement. Residents feel more engaged and valued, and your activity programming evolves to better meet their needs.

10. Simplify Event Payments: Save Time, Eliminate Cash Handling, and Enhance Convenience

In many retirement living communities, certain activities or events may require a small fee—whether it’s a contribution toward a special outing, supplies for a crafting session, or food for an event. Traditionally, managing these payments can be a logistical challenge, involving cash collection, manual tracking, and a higher risk of errors. For staff, this adds complexity to an already busy day. For residents, handling cash can be inconvenient and sometimes confusing.

Challenges of Manual Payment Processes

Collecting payments manually often involves:

• Cash Handling: Which increases the risk of loss, theft, or mismanagement.
• Time-Consuming Administration: Staff need to track payments, follow up with residents who haven’t paid, and manually reconcile amounts.
• Increased Errors: Manual processes are prone to mistakes, from miscounting cash to losing track of who has or hasn’t paid.
• Resident Inconvenience: Residents have to make the time to walk to the office to make the payment and now more than ever, expect to make payments at a place and time that suits them, not your office hours.?

How Technology Can Eliminate These Issues

By using a digital platform like Pluss Communities, you can streamline the entire payment process, removing the need for cash transactions and significantly reducing administrative work:

• Integrated Payment System: Residents can pay for events directly through the Pluss Communities platform, using a credit card, debit card, or other online payment methods.
• Automated Payment Tracking: As payments are made, the system automatically tracks and reconciles them in real time. This eliminates the need for manual updates and reduces the likelihood of errors.
• Secure Transactions: The platform ensures all transactions are secure, protecting both residents and the community from potential security issues associated with cash handling or paper-based transactions.
• Payment receipts: Residents receive a receipt of their payment directly in the app. You no longer need to issue the receipt in another system.

How Pluss Communities Simplifies Event Payments

The Pluss Communities platform is equipped with features that make event payments simple and efficient for both staff and residents:

• Online Payment Integration: When creating an event in Pluss Communities, you can easily add a payment requirement. Residents are prompted to pay when they RSVP or register for the event, and all transactions are handled securely through the platform.
• Transparent Reporting: The system generates real-time reports on who has paid, allowing staff to see at a glance how much has been collected and who still owes payment.
• Resident Convenience: With the ability to pay digitally, residents no longer need to handle cash or write checks. This makes it more convenient for them to participate in activities, especially if they’re already accustomed to online payments for other services.

Impact on the Community

Streamlining payments makes the whole process smoother and more efficient. Staff spend less time on administrative tasks and more time engaging with residents, while residents enjoy a hassle-free experience that encourages greater participation in paid events. Reducing manual handling of cash and paperwork also contributes to a more secure and reliable financial process for your community.

Download the ebook as a handy reference.

Conclusion: Simplify Activity Planning with Pluss Communities

Streamlining your activity planning process with technology not only saves time but enhances the quality and impact of the events you offer. With tools like the Pluss Communities Events feature, you can centralise your calendar, automate tasks, and use data to continuously improve resident engagement. Ready to see how Pluss Communities can transform your planning process? Request a demo today and take the first step toward more efficient, effective activity management.

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Sarah Wright is the principle at Wright Change Consultants