How to… Get your tenants' attention … and keep it

All social landlords have a duty to communicate with their tenants, but it's no use merely bombarding them with information if they don't bother reading it. An imaginative approach is vital to make the information tenants receive from their landlord stand out from all the other stuff they get everyday through their letterbox, TV, radio and so on.

Testway Housing, a Hampshire registered social landlord, won last year's CIPFA PriceWaterhouseCoopers Public Reporting and Accountability award – a national customer communication award – and is therefore well-placed to give advice on how other RSLs can use innovative ways of communicating with their tenants to make sure the message gets heard.

Keep it informal
Marie Spanswick, Testway Housing's public relations and communications consultant, says: "Communicating with tenants is like creating a giant jigsaw puzzle. It comes in many bite-sized chunks; you never expect people to get the full picture in one go.

"The best way to communicate with people is to get inside their heads and see how they live their lives. If we know what interests them, we know how to get the message across.

"We take care not to be too 'corporate'. It's important to get the right mix."

Testway's imaginative communication methods include printing its annual report as a calendar for tenants to use, publishing a leaflet aimed at teenage boys in a 'graffiti' style, and recording tapes for people with hearing problems.

Invest in a professional look
It publishes a quarterly newspaper and takes pains to make it look good. It's a full-colour, A3-sized paper with a mix of stories and information, and Testway plans to expand its content to include money-off vouchers, a garden makeover programme and giveaways exclusively for tenants.

Spanswick says: "In many ways, we approach our quarterly newsletter in a similar way to producing a local newspaper. Local papers are highly successful in circulating information and we often try to emulate their approach. We try to make all our publications look appealing. We use professional designers and photographers for them all and we invest: printing an A3 full-colour glossy newspaper is not a cheap option but tenant feedback tells us it is the right one."

A recent National Housing Federation survey found that, out of the 63% of Testway tenants who replied, nearly nine out of 10 read the quarterly tenants' newspaper, and more than eight out of 10 said they found it interesting.

Make it interesting
Testway also has a website. Like the newspaper, it includes regularly updated, non-essential information that is intended to make it more interesting for tenants to use, such as gardening tips from estate services manager Ivan Gurdler. Publications such as the repairs handbook can be downloaded directly from the site.

"If we can interest and entertain as well as put out our message, we will be heard," says Spanswick.

Involve every member of staff
The association also encourages tenants to talk to staff and it works hard to keep those staff informed so they can answer questions without having to send tenants to different departments to find out what they want to know. Spanswick says: "We encourage a flow of information up, down and across the board. We want everyone to feel that they are up-to-date.

"We have 160-plus employees and see each one as an information point. We want them to share information with tenants about planned improvements, developments and innovations and we want them to feed back comments and suggestions from tenants that we can use to format future policy."