April 22, 2022
As competition in the retirement village industry increases, activities are becoming one of the key ways villages can make themselves stand out from the pack. There’s only one problem: managing activities is really difficult.
A full range of activities needs to be planned and scheduled. Timetables and capacities have to be sent out to residents and bookings have to be taken. In many cases, village staff must even take attendance at each activity. This adds an administrative load that is simply too large to be undertaken without some kind of technological help.
Software specifically designed for activities programs in retirement villages is very difficult to find – staff often have to make do with products designed for other industries and applications, and the struggles with these products make the provision of activities more difficult than it needs to be.
That’s where Spritely’s activities module comes in.
Spritely’s activity management module was made in close collaboration with Alpine View – a village with nearly 400 residents in Christchurch, New Zealand. Alpine View runs nearly 10 activities per day on average, and staff desperately needed help managing the administrative load.
Since they began using Spritely, a booking process which once took three days now takes only three hours, and Alpine View residents have used the system to book more than 50,000 activities.
The Alpine View activities team use Spritely as a one-stop-shop: creating one-off and recurring activities, taking bookings, managing capacity and even taking attendance in just a few simple clicks.
With Spritely, activities are created with a simple online form – villages can designate everything from the location, capacity, category, and price (if applicable). Recurring activities (e.g. those that happen weekly) can be ‘set and forget’ – Spritely will automatically generate each new activity as needed.
All of the village’s upcoming activities can be viewed and managed from one dashboard, which can be accessed on any web browser anywhere in the world.
From the activities dashboard, it’s just one click to add any of your residents to any activity. Bookings for every activity can be viewed from the browser, or you can generate a PDF of bookings for an activity if you’re going somewhere without your computer or phone.
If residents are equipped with Spritely tablets, they will be able to view and book their own activities without any staff involvement, saving hours every week.
Not every village takes attendance, but it can be an excellent way to track residents’ engagement with activities and a useful source of data.
Luckily, Spritely also makes this process easy. Every activity has its own booking page, optimised for mobile devices, where residents can be marked off with a single tap. Quick links to residents’ profiles and phone numbers are also provided in case staff need more information or to provide a reminder.
Spritely’s activities module is ideal for any retirement village in New Zealand or abroad. If you’d like to learn more, you can read more here or contact us here.
