Housing Association embracing social media!

Digital Media Communications Agency, The Mill Group, has helped a housing association’s tenants to carry out everyday household repairs.

The company have created a series of 13 short online films which demonstrate to tenants, how to carry out simple repairs. It has been predicted that York Housing Association, can save up to £1,000 a month through the use of the ‘Fix It’ campaign, as it will hopefully see a major decrease in the amount of telephone calls and repairs callouts. This ‘online repairs clinic’ was created for York Housing Association, which found its call centre was taking too many calls on non-essential repairs.

“Housing associations can’t afford to keep going out to fix a blocked sink, or other small jobs that are the tenant’s responsibility to do themselves. They can go out do the repair and lose money, or do it and charge it back, costing the tenant,” said David Fawcett, Mill Group’s marketing director.

“Offering an easy way to help the tenant to do it themselves makes it ‘win-win’ for everyone, just what we wanted to achieve with the Fix It! series. This unique service is now in over 500,000 homes, which will grow to over a million over the next few months.

“We will develop it as time goes on to include extra types of repairs. More and more housing associations are realising there is some serious money to be saved through this kind of initiative, even small organisations can save £500 – £1,000 a month.”

Kate Spencer, York Housing Association operations director, said the association’s main goal with the films was to help tenants, but they had also cut costs by offering ‘Fix It’, as there had previously been occasions when they had carried out repairs that the tenants should really have done themselves.

She said: “If a tenant calls to say their electricity isn’t working we now point them to the repairs clinic on the website, which shows them just what to do. We see it as a valuable enhancement of the service we provide to tenants, but it also saves us money as we are freed up from getting involved in things that are not our responsibility.”

The films cover a variety of topics including safety tips, simple plumbing advice, dealing with pests and coping with power failure.

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Sourced from: Housing Excellence