Keyton Resident Activity Program

Thanks to PerData’s expertise, Keyton, one of Australia’s leading retirement lifestyle providers, has opened an automated, data-driven feedback channel so that its more than 17,000 residents can easily have their say about what types of activity-based programs they want and are more likely to use.

Since launching its resident activity program in March, Keyton is financially supporting 181 resident led activity-based projects across 63 villages from the 260 applications it received.

As a result, more of Keyton residents will be participating in activities such as communal gardening, art and creative writing workshops, and cooking classes.

One site is poised to receive funding for a slot car racing set, while others can expect bee hives, and workshops on researching family ancestry among other activities.

Keyton’s National Resident Engagement Manager, Annabel Norris, said the program was “incredibly successful” partly due to the way residents were able to engage with the submission process.

She said the process followed this year was vastly different to how they have approached other initiatives in the past, where residents would generally be expected to post or email their submission, and the entry would be logged on a spreadsheet manually and inserted into another system for reporting.

Collating and organising previous entries was manually intensive and inefficient, leading to a poor experience for the residents and a burden on staff’s time, with individual inboxes inundated with emails.

“When we looked to launch this resident activity program, we were committed to ensuring it was an efficient process and a better experience for residents,” Annabel said.

“As good as our team is with attention to detail, the reality was that with the volume and manual handling of data we always ran the risk of emails being missed, data entered incorrectly and then stored in different ways which made it difficult to interpret and generate reporting.”

Anticipating the numbers of residents engaging with the resident activity program would be far greater than previous campaigns, Annabel turned to PerData to design and install an accessible online platform that residents could use to progress their submissions.

PerData’s advice was to produce a web content management system (CMS) based on platforms created by Kentico, a PerData technology partner that provides developers with customisable basic infrastructure for building websites, online communities, and e-commerce stores.

“It was the perfect fit, exactly what we were looking for,” Annabel said.

“It was quick to stand-up, about two months in total, and easy for the residents to access and operate once it went live.

“And the process was fantastic. Our team really enjoys working with PerData. They are switched-on, passionate professionals and they were really excited about the outcome and about what we were trying to achieve. It wasn’t just a job for them.

“They really cared about the customer experience, which is why they paid attention to even the smallest details, like making sure the text was in a dark font on a light background at a larger point size for older eyes, and the clickable buttons and drop-downs were larger.

“Most of all, the residents liked the fact they could partially fill out their submission, save it and then come back to it later to complete in stages.

“The mobile-friendly version was also extremely well received.”

Accessing a standardised, templated form, users are prompted through the submission process to include all the information Keyton managers need to assess each proposed project’s viability and compliance with budget guidelines and other parameters.

With each submission, residents can provide cost estimates, drawings, and designs, who is going to be involved in building and coordinating the project and why it will be of value to the wider village community.

Without such information included, the submission won’t progress, preventing essential information from being missed and saving staff time from having to chase up omitted details.

Keyton managers with access to the platform can also see the submissions lodged in real-time, increasing shared visibility of the process and building automatic transparency and accountability into the system.

With each submission lodged, the platform also generates its own data-informed profiles through integration with Power BI so that Keyton managers can see what types of activities have been requested most or if there are different preferences depending on geography.

“The program that PerData installed allows us to slice and dice the data anyway we want, which gives us incredible insight into what residents enjoy and how we can best support them,” Annabel said.

“What PerData have delivered is a technical tool to support a health and wellbeing program for older Australians that is accruing real and measurable benefits.

“But what we also have is a powerful, data-informed system that will empower us to better plan for the future, continuously improving the retirement lifestyle that older Australians seek from Keyton.”