What are the marketing needs of established cohousing communities? Individuals that want to sell their existing cohousing homes clearly have needs, but what other marketing needs do you see?

Please leave your ideas in the Post New Comment, below... This works best if you are logged in as a Member (it's free).

I took an interesting phone call today. The wanna-be cohouser that is the "burning soul" for a new, forming group wanted to know if they could use the same name as another, well-known cohousing community. I told her about the problems I thought it would cause - mostly for them, as people tried to learn about them on the web and got confused.

So, we talked a bit about what makes a good name. I mentioned having done a little writing about it and told her I'd share them here - so here are some notes I put together when last considering the queston.

Did you attempt to use the 2008 National Cohousing Conference to market your Forming Group or Units for Sale or Professional services? Those who attended probably witnessed most of the efforts by (1) seeing the logos of our sponsors (4 Professionals and 3 Forming Groups) on the Conference web pages, (2) seeing same projected in the Keynote and Plenary sessions - and hearing me thank the same folks, (3) attending the exhibit area where both these folks and others had booths to share with cohousers, and (4) hearing presentations by the same people about topics that might serve their own interests, as well as the attendees.

How did this go for you? Both for people that used it to market and for those who were "marketed to"?

How might we help people get together in 2009?

What do those of you who didn't attend think?

I am about to post a response to a Coho-L post that ends with what's below. You can access the whole thread in the Coho-L Archives, starting with this posting.

---------- clip from my Coho-L post -----------

Credits Due: the baggage metaphor came from the consultation Diana Leafe Christian writes about in the current issue of Cohousing magazine:

http://www.cohousing.org/cm/article/different

(although this article does not address that part of the consultation)

---------- end of Coho-L post clip -----------

After taking over the Advertising work for the Cohousing Website in Jan-08, I looked very carefully at the traffic patterns. What did I find?

That a great many of our Classified Ads were hardly ever read... this isn't right I thought - people that take out Classified Ads must receive their money's worth. So, what did I do?

I started playing around with the website's Right Column - which appears on most of the pages throughout the Cohousing Website. I created the idea of "Featured Classified Ads" and put links to specific Classified Ads there.