Improving the visibility and understanding of community housing is an ongoing challenge in Canada. While support is strong, knowledge of how it works remains limited.
A survey conducted by Abacus Data for the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada highlights this dynamic. The results show strong support for community housing once the model is explained but also point to a gap in public understanding. Increasing awareness and knowledge of community housing is therefore an important part of the broader effort to grow the sector toward 20% of the housing market.
Digital channels are now one of the main ways organizations share information, connect with partners, and make their work visible. At the same time, many organizations face similar challenges when it comes to using these tools, particularly in contexts where time, staff capacity, and resources are limited. The Centre’s work on digital communications is part of a broader commitment to knowledge sharing within the community housing sector.
Over the past two years, the Centre has explored different ways of strengthening its digital communications. This experience reflects the Centre’s own context and approach and is shared as one example of how an organization can develop its digital practices over time. Each organization has its own capacities, priorities, and communities, and ways of working will vary accordingly.
The approach: a “drive to web” strategy
The Centre’s digital strategy follows a simple principle: drive audiences to the website.
As a national organization working with partners across Canada and without local offices, the Centre relies heavily on digital channels to reach organizations across the country. Concentrating information, expertise, and resources in one central place makes them easier to access and to manage than dispersing content across multiple platforms.
Social media, digital ads and newsletters are effective for attracting attention, websites are effective at converting attention into action. Digital channels also offer practical analytics tools that help evaluate what attracts attention, what performs well, and where adjustments may be needed.
Making the value for audiences clear
Once this drive-to-web approach was adopted, improving the website experience for users became a priority.
Given the breadth of services provided by the Centre, content organization needed to be reconsidered so visitors can more easily discover what is relevant to them. This meant making sure visitors can quickly understand:
- How the Centre can help them
- How they can easily find what they are looking for
- How to discover complementary programs, funds, services, or resources available
- Where to go next based on their needs
In other words, the goal was not simply to describe who the Centre is and what it offers, but to show how it can make a difference in the user’s everyday life. As a growing and evolving organization, the Centre also aimed to ensure that its website could accommodate new programs, services, and funding opportunities over time.
This required structuring information in a way that supports both navigation and future development. For example, broader categories were defined to remain specific enough for users while allowing for different types of content. As part of this process, the term “fund” was replaced with “funding,” both as a category and as a descriptive term, to better reflect a wider range of financial support, including not only grants but also loans.
The digital tools used
To support its digital communications, the Centre has used a range of tools and channels to capture attention and share information.
These include:
- Newsletters, which are used to share updates, opportunities, resources and sector news
- Social media channels, to highlight publications, share upcoming activities, and communicate in a more immediate, responsive way
- Online campaigns, including the use of Google Ad Grants, which provide access to free search advertising and can help increase the visibility of specific content.
To organize and monitor these activities, the Centre has also relied on several tools, such as:
- Analytics tools, which help better understand how visitors interact with the website,
- A social media management platform, used to support content scheduling and facilitate performance monitoring.
- Service Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, to support website content. These tools can suggest keywords and phrases that are more likely to perform well in search engines, helping improve the visibility of certain pages. At the same time, this work has highlighted the importance of balance. While SEO can support visibility, content is still developed with a focus on clarity and usefulness for readers
- TechSoup validation, which provides access to a range of professional software and digital tools at reduced cost, or sometimes for free, by confirming an organization’s non-profit status.
Clarity and transparency are key
People often access information quickly, on different devices, and within a limited amount of time. Content therefore needs to be easy to find, easy to read, easy to scan, and easy to navigate.
In a crowded digital environment, many organizations try to stand out by increasing their visibility across multiple channels. The Centre has taken a different approach. Instead of trying to capture attention through novelty, it focuses on clarity. Content is presented in a way that allows audiences to quickly understand what it is about and decide whether it is relevant to them.
Titles and opening paragraphs aim to clearly signal what readers can expect. Not every piece of content will be relevant to everyone, and that is part of the approach. The objective is not for audiences to read everything, but to remain connected so they can engage with the content that matters most to them.
In practice, it means:
- Using clear and accessible language
- Structuring pages so that key points are easy to identify
- Making it easier for the audience to quickly identify what is relevant to them, while staying connected to the Centre.
An ongoing process
A key lesson from the past two years is that digital strategy requires ongoing monitoring, some testing and continuous adaptation to algorithms.
This is not always easy. Many organizations in the sector have limited resources to experiment extensively, particularly with paid advertising. In this context, low-cost tools, careful prioritization, and regular monitoring become especially important.
Digital communications continue to evolve, as new tools emerge and audience habits shift. The Centre’s experience confirms that digital strategy is not about following every trend, but about building a clear foundation, learning from results, and adjusting over time.
