A Place for Mom (APFM) is launching new enhancements for its online senior living referral platform in a bid to make those reviews more helpful for prospects and operators alike.
New York City-based APFM is upgrading its existing review system, which compiles scores on an average rating of all family and resident reviews, with a 10-point review score that weighs communities differently than before.
The new review score is still an average rating of all family and resident reviews, but with added weight given to communities and operators with the highest positive reviews relative to the size of their operations.
APFM CEO Larry Kutscher said that reviews are an important cornerstone of the company’s platform, and that the new enhancements are the culmination of almost two years of planning. If all goes according to plan, the rollout will take effect across the entire APFM online platform publicly in June.
“We wanted to increase the usability of the reviews, make it better for our families,” Kutscher told SHN. “And at the same time, make it better and easier for our communities to take advantage of those reviews.”
The review scores are slated to show prominently on listings for senior living communities and will also help determine where communities rank as families search for them using the platform.
The new score also only takes into account reviews logged in the past 24 months.
For operators, the new enhancements offer a greater sense of control over reviews and potentially more tools with which to tout their strengths and solicit feedback, according to APFM leadership.
Using a newly enhanced “reputation portal,” APFM partners have a new way to request new family reviews in email, Facebook, and WhatsApp, order postcards to distribute to residents to prompt new reviews, and better display their award recognitions.
The new review portal also gives operators a better way to view their review scores across the company’s entire operations, rather than by each community.
On the resident side, the review score is meant to reflect a more accurate snapshot of a community’s current quality. The 10-point rating scale is also meant to provide some transparency to a process that can seem opaque to some users.
The rollout is powered with technology tools built in-house with help from Tomorrow’s Guides, a UK-based marketing and reviews software as a service (SaaS) provider that APFM acquired about four years ago.
The rollout comes amid new APFM data showing families are six times as likely to move into communities with recent reviews, and that three-quarters of all move-ins are to communities with reviews that are less than six months old. With that, APFM is looking to build upon the 45,000 reviews that the platform’s users log annually.
“Reviews are a real signal to families that we’re engaged with them, we know the communities, and they can take comfort that this is the right decision,” Kutscher said.
It is also occurring as other companies build tools that are helping funnel prospective residents to senior living communities, including the new community rankings U.S. News and World Report launched in 2022. Those rankings, operators have said, have helped to attract residents from farther away and energize online engagement avenues.
At the end of the day, Kutscher said the newly revamped online platform is aimed at APFM’s core mission: To get senior living communities more move-ins.
“We see a direct link between having more recent positive reviews and communities getting more move-ins — and therefore more revenue,” Kutscher said. “And that’s the message I want to get across.”
Companies featured in this article:
