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The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing was founded in 2003 and is the premier independent authority in training and designation for real estate agents working in the luxury residential market.
How The Institute’s switch from Facebook to Mobilize increased renewals by 20%.
The Problem
For years the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing used Facebook groups to engage their members. The group itself consisted of both paying members and former members with inactive memberships. With no way to connect Facebook data to their AMS there was no way to understand who was a paying member, and with no meaningful analytics data from Facebook, there was no way to ensure that the community on Facebook groups was benefiting current members. This caused high overhead for The Institute employees, and the overall experience was lackluster for all. The Institute knew there had to be a better way to manage their member data and ensure the community was a “value add” for current members. Additionally, they knew there had to be a way to reduce their community management overhead, as well as get actionable analytics to ensure community growth and meet their retention goals.
The Solution
A modern, friction-free community solution that integrated with The Institute’s AMS so they could keep track of members across all systems. Little did The Institute know that community would become their biggest member benefit.
Diane Hartley, President
Key Features
The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing is the leader in training and designation for real estate agents working in the luxury residential market. The institute serves over 12,000 real estate professionals through training and ongoing luxury home marketing support.
The Institute used a Facebook group to connect their community of luxury real estate members, yet struggled to keep a pulse on the health of the community. With little data from Facebook and no integration with their AMS, The Institute was in the dark when it came to truly understanding the value members were receiving from the community, as well as whether or not the group consisted of paying members.
The Institute knew their members wanted to connect with one another beyond events and chats in social media groups. While Facebook provided them with a space for doing so, it came with restrictions, including not being able to post real estate listings and having to give up personal information to Facebook in order to participate.
While their community on Facebook groups was growing, and primarily driven by member activities, The Institute had no formal strategy in place. Creating a community without a formal strategy is like building a house with no prior home-building experience. Chances are you’ll need to rebuild the house (your community) from the foundation up at some point. By putting a strategy and team of experts in place from day one, you will not only have a strong community from the beginning but a user base that is engaged as well.
After meeting with the Mobilize strategy team, The Institute knew that both the Mobilize platform and its roster of community-building experts were the missing pieces to their community puzzle. With the help of Mobilize strategists, The Institute promptly started to build out a custom strategy for creating a successful and enduring community. In just 5 months after launch, they saw that engagement among paying members had exceeded their expectations by reaching 25% engagement … That’s 15% more than the industry standard!
The Institute chose Mobilize as their community partner because they understood that community was much more than just a suite of features. They needed a true community-building partner and, of course, a modern and easy-to-use platform that would allow for a smooth transition from Facebook groups.
Over a period of 3 months, The Institute and Mobilize worked together to build a custom community strategy and prepare for a formal launch. Since The Institute was focused on both member-to-member interactions and knowledge sharing, they focused on building out the Resource Center and ensuring that they connected members quickly during the first few weeks by promoting their Member Directory.
Using Mobilize Data Studio to analyze their community performance was key to proving the impact that community had on the rest of The Institute business. The Mobilize team worked closely with The Institute to create reports using advanced analytics. Within the first year of using reports from Mobilize Data Studio, The Institute was able to compare their membership numbers to previous years, as well as prove that the community itself influenced a member’s decision to renew.
By moving their professional network off of Facebook groups and onto Mobilize, The Institute was able to:
Most importantly, The Institute was able to prove that their new community actually had an impact on whether or not a member renewed. In 2020, The Institute renewals were at 68%. In 2021, with a Mobilize-driven community up and running, overall renewals were up 5% to 73%, but if members were in the Community the renewal rate was 88%. In other words, there was a 20% increase in renewal rate if you were in the Community, which accounted for most of the 5% they saw YoY.
