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National Association of Home Builders |
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Plexus Consulting Group, LLC |
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Vital Stats: About one-third of NAHB's 203,000 members are homebuilders and/or
remodelers. The remainder of the membership consists of associates
working in closely related fields, such as mortgage finance and building
products and services, within the housing industry. The Challenge | The Solution | The Process |Unintended Consequences | Measurements & Results | Lessons Learned
How to enhance the home building industry's national public image and promote its longstanding commitment to good corporate citizenship? While U.S. home builders have a long tradition of good corporate
citizenship and active participation in charitable activities throughout
their local communities, concerns about growth and its impact on the
environment had taken center stage in the media and created a negative
national impression about the industry. NAHB's main challenge was
to promote awareness about the home building industry's commitment
to "smart growth" and improve the public's image of the
home building industry. To help local associations deliver the message that "Home Builders Care". Incoming NAHB President Robert L. Mitchell had served actively on the association's public affairs committee during his tenure as president of the Mid-National Capital Building Industry Association, where he established a community service foundation. Keenly aware of the dichotomy between public perceptions about the industry in local communities (positive) and nationally (negative) due to the public debate over community growth, he developed the idea of creating an umbrella program to link local community service projects. The resulting initiative, Home Builders Care, is an ongoing program launched in 1999 to generate national recognition for the industry's extensive and time-honored tradition of community service. "Bringing local credibility to the national level." For many years, NAHB's local homebuilders have routinely participated
in community development projects and shown a strong level of personal
commitment to good corporate citizenship. However, this story had
never been told on a national level, and the time was right to use
local success stories to dispel distorted national public perceptions
about the industry.
The goal of Home Builders Care is to create a nationwide database of community development projects to showcase the versatility and commitment of homebuilders to improving the quality of life in their communities. The process behind Home Builders Care 2000 involved the following basic steps:
Brand Identity While many local member companies ran advertising, the local homebuilders associations had done very little advertising on their own behalf. Most of this advertising was undertaken during biannual home shows, the major vehicle through which these associations built public awareness. Communication To begin with, NAHB fielded an in-house team of two public affairs professionals to develop the program. Currently, NAHB has dedicated four staff members to the effort. Upon developing the campaign materials, it took approximately four months of full time work to call every association and to explain how they could benefit from the program. According to Betty Christy, NAHB's Vice President for Public Affairs, the process is very straightforward: "they just need to tell us what they're doing." Communications vehicles and strategies aimed at NAHB's leadership --the association's board has over 2,000 members-- and affiliate organizations include the following:
Key steps to successful planning include:
To help members develop and implement their public relations programs, NAHB's Public Affairs Division produces:
Unintended Consequences No one at NAHB had imagined at the outset the level of time and effort that would be required to promote the Home Builders Care initiative to such a wide audience. NAHB discovered many more community service projects in the field than could be promoted given existing resources. Because of the initiative's success, the program earned sufficient credibility with the association's leadership to inspire the Executive Committee and senior officers to commit an additional one million dollars to continue the campaign. Moreover, since launching Home Builders Care, NAHB has been contacted
by numerous charitable organizations seeking donations of goods and
services. In one case, NAHB funneled unused inventory belonging to
manufacturers and service providers to the American Red Cross. In
addition, numerous companies outside of the industry have phoned NAHB
offering to donate employee time to charitable activities as part
of their in-house team-building programs. Measurements & Results As a result of the campaign, local legislators and zoning boards across the country gained awareness of homebuilder community development initiatives. By communicating their value on community outreach, local builders enhanced their credibility with regulatory authorities and were able to enhance the quality of their own business dealings.
While the target audience for this program is vast relative to the
resources available to manage it, the Internet has provided critical
leverage to enable successful dissemination of the NAHB message. The
results speak for themselves.
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