How Brookdale Senior Living makes human connections with a scalable digital strategy
The Challenge
Images from a 106-year-old resident’s birthday party. A video celebrating the life and service of retired veterans. Sharing a light-hearted #GranDADJoke. These are just some of the moments that Brookdale Senior Living captures every day on its digital channels.
But, with approximately 700 locations and social media accounts across the United States, ensuring those moments of “social gold” are part of a comprehensive content strategy and are posted to the right channels by trained administrators is essential to mitigate risk and ensure adherence with brand guidelines.
Brookdale Senior Living needed a solution that would provide:
- A secure governance model to facilitate that all content shared on Brookdale channels was reviewed, approved, and posted by authorized users.
- A scalable content strategy that enabled bi-directional content sharing between local staff and the corporate team to maximize content performance across all channels.
- A digital engagement model that could transform the way Brookdale Senior Living reaches its audience of residents, families, and prospective residents during the pandemic.
The Solution
Using Sprinklr, Brookdale Senior Living’s social media team transformed the way they engaged with local teams and customers across their digital channels.
Once Sprinklr was onboarded, the team created mandatory online training and resources, ensuring users knew how to navigate the platform. Brookdale set up rules to automatically route posts for internal review and approval before going live on any page, giving the small corporate team the ability to protect the integrity of the brand.
Brookdale uses Sprinklr to identify high-performing content and share it across more pages. Now, not only are local sites posting approved content that reflects the brand in a positive light and is driving more traffic to the Brookdale website but, the local sites have become a source of unique and engaging content that the social media team can push out to the broader community, ensuring it gets seen by a much wider audience.
Sprinklr’s governance model became critical as the world shifted very quickly from in-person to virtual during the pandemic. Social media pages became a primary source of engagement for residents and their families, and it became more important than ever for the social media and local teams to ensure that the content on those pages was in strict adherence with Brookdale’s health guidelines.
The Outcome
With activities now executed and monitored through the Sprinklr platform, the Brookdale team can effectively track and manage campaign budgets to see where ad dollars are best spent.
“Having a local social media presence is a point of difference for us. Our competitors don’t invest in local because it requires quite a bit of resources, time, and effort. We’re the largest provider in the industry so we believe the investment positions us as a leader in the category.”
Senior Director of Social Media Strategy and Brand, Brookdale Senior Living
Kristin Puckett, Senior Director of Social Media Strategy and Brand at Brookdale, sees a direct correlation between the governance model they implemented with Sprinklr, and the uptick in engagement.
“During COVID-19, the investment in social media governance really proved itself. We gained 80,000 followers on our local pages during 2020, most new followers being family members and friends of residents who weren’t able to visit loved ones in person during this time. It was critical the governance was in place so we were able to pivot our content strategy to align with the ever-evolving COVID guidelines,” said Puckett.
Today, 96% of Brookdale’s approximately 700 sites have an editor with access to Sprinklr. The corporate team can track posting frequency, identify high-performing content, and provide brand oversight for their social media pages. From governance models to sharing authentic and impactful content with their community of residents and families, Brookdale Senior Living’s ongoing digital transformation has helped them build the brand, one human touch at a time.