Summer is coming in HOT. Residents are excited to use your outdoor amenities and the perfect way to kick off the season is with an epic resident pool party! The idea of a resident pool party is great, but how exactly can you plan an epic pool party?
When we say epic, we mean extra fun and engaging. It’s not enough to just buy a bunch of pizzas and plug in your phone to the sound system. Residents want more than that. But worry not, busy site teams, we’ve put together a few quick tips to help you plan the most epic pool party that residents will love.
1. Music: Get a DJ (a good one!) for Resident Pool Party
No party is complete without great music. A pool party is not the exception. We recommend booking a professional DJ to make sure you get a high-quality sound system and an amazing ambiance.
Your work doesn’t end when finding your DJ though; you have to make sure this person understands what type of audience he’s playing for. Music sets the mood, so brief them and tell them about your residents. What age ranges are you expecting? Will there be any children? Is this a night party or a day party? What’s the atmosphere you’re looking to have? The more info, the better experience you can provide for your residents.
Flamingo tip: Do a survey where you ask your residents to share their fave party songs and make sure the DJ plays all of those during the party. This detail alone can generate new reviews for your community!
2. Food: Light snacks and appetizers
A good balance between junk food and healthy snacks is the best way to go about a Pool Party. Try covering your basics and then going just a tiny step further.
For example, chips and pretzels are good but pair them up with hummus, guacamole, or dip, and it’ll feel a lot more satisfying.
Other ideas could be to provide dried meats, a fruit salad and maybe even chocolate cookies. The more diverse you can be, the better.
Flamingo tip: Ask beforehand if any of your attending residents are celebrating a birthday and buy one big cake for everyone! It’ll start conversations and put a smile on everyone’s faces.
3. Drinks: Alcohol is a MUST for a Resident Pool Party
Your bar offering is where you can either elevate your Pool Party or keep it super casual.
Want to stick to a lower budget? Have one cooler with alcoholic drinks like hard seltzer, beers, or spirits (here’s a very insightful article on the best 10 canned cocktails) and another with non-alcoholic beverages.
If you’re going to go all out instead (residents always love that), you can have a bartender serve cocktails. Or take it even further and put on a full tiki bar with more fancy drinks and mixology options.
Flamingo tip: Going all out might seem unnecessary, but you can have a bigger ROI on top-produced events because more people will attend, you’ll get tagged in more Insta pics, and you can even use pictures for your website and leasing materials.
4. Combine it with another event: Go ALL in for an Epic Resident Pool Party
If you want to have an EPIC Resident Pool Party, you must do extraordinary things.
You can do this in a few ways; you could combine it with another event or bring in an entertainer.
Imagine having a pool party along with an Ice-Cream Station, a food truck, or a mixology class!
Another route you can take is to have a stand-up comedy show, a caricaturist come in and do free drawings, a magician to do fun magic tricks, or whatever you can think of that might add to the experience!
Flamingo tip: If you’re unsure what to do, send a resident survey and ask your community to pick the entertainer or combining event. It gets people excited about the party, increases RSVPs, and makes the people who voted more committed to showing up.
5. Decorations: No need to go cray cray
Trust me; if you have everything else we’ve mentioned, you won’t need decorations to have an epic resident pool party. We recommend focusing more on things that will be a bit more functional. A great example is getting a bunch of cool pool floats (you could raffle them after!) or even asking residents to bring theirs.
Think of things that will make your party more “Instragrammable”—cool pool floats, funky-looking sunglasses, etc.
Flamingo tip: If you don’t want to spend your budget on something like this, you can always make it into a contest and have residents bring their own. Best Pool Float award goes to…!
6. Games: Where the fun begins
Every resident event aims to get your community engaged and strengthen the bond between residents. Well, nothing gets this done better than games or tournaments.
If your community has a ping pong table or a billiard, get those outsides and invite people to play. If you don’t, you can always get card games, hula hoops (hula hoop contests are the best!), and my personal favorite, a frozen t-shirt contest.
How that works is the night before the party, you soak the t-shirts, twist them and put them in a knot, then put them in the freezer. At the resident Pool Party, invite residents to play for the t-shirts. The first person to completely pull them apart and put them on wins! The most committed residents will jump in the pool to melt the ice while others cheer them on. It’s a blast.
Flamingo Tip: Make a fun TikTok or Live Instagram of the party and make sure you’re showing the games everyone’s playing. It shows the type of community you are most authentically.
Bonus Tip
You’re already investing a big part of your budget in hosting an epic pool party. So you have to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success and getting ROI to show to your regional. A few things you can do:
- Give residents an easy way to RSVP: We don’t mean send out an email invitation and get people to respond. That only creates more manual tasks for you by having to gather all the responses into an excel sheet. We mean using your Resident Engagement App (with Flamingo’s, invites, reminders, and RSVPs are easy and automatic) or using an RSVP link. An easy way for you to make this happen is by creating a FREE Flamingo account and booking your event through our event marketplace. That automatically creates an RSVP link you can share with your residents.
- Have cool promotional materials: You have to create FOMO to get people excited. A cool flyer, a fun invitation email, or an announcement on your digital screens in the lobby will do just that. If you don’t have access to any of these, Flamingo can help!
- Get new reviews!: This is a big one. Imagine if you could get 2, 3, or even more Google reviews from this resident event alone. It’s not only possible; we’ve seen it happen with a ton of our customers. Right after the event, make sure to send a review request to everyone who attended. You have better chances if you use more than one channel. Our platform automatically sends out review requests after each resident event via email, SMS, and in-app notification. It’s how Greystar’s The Atworth at Mellody Farms got 2 new reviews from an Outdoor Movie event.
- Invite prospects: Not many communities do this, but we love the idea of partnering up with the leasing team and inviting a few key prospects. It doesn’t have to be an open house; you can make it feel super-exclusive by letting them know they’re only a handful of seats left for the party. They’ll be able to meet your residents, start forming bonds, and truly get a feel of what your community is all about!
