Here's an idea

Swansea housing association was looking for a way to attract more people to rent homes from us, to break the stigma of social housing. So we came up with the idea of advertising our properties on beer mats.

We deliberately kept our name off the mats and instead focused on the type of accommodation we could offer by highlighting living in the city as a lifestyle, much in the same way that private housing is advertised.

We wanted to appeal to anyone who lives and works in the city and those who currently rent from the private sector, where they will be paying higher rent but not living in very good accommodation.

Advertising in this way is relatively cheap and we distributed the mats in 21 bars around the town centre.

We used the banner City Living and there was a photo image of one of the properties with the rent and contact details. We used a new development in which a post office was converted into flats as the tag for this. The aim was to get 50% of the tenants to be working people, not just families or the elderly.

Leaving our name off was a good move because you always get people stereotyping the kinds of people who live in social housing. They all say, “I don’t want them living next door to me”, but at the end of the day, the people living next door are likely to be better behaved than private-sector tenants because they will have a housing officer to whom neighbours can complain if there are problems.

The beermat scheme was a great success and it generated a lot of interest. The next challenge for us is to come up with a marketing ploy that is as effective.