Melby: Your community's street team is paramount to the success of your grassroots strategy. Thus, keeping them motivated is important to continue to have successful outreach and campaigns. Establishing goals with associated incentives is a great way to keep your street team motivated. Students are naturally competitive, so creating a fun challenge that is tied to your grassroots efforts is another great way to keep them driven. Also, promoting all efforts on social media will encourage students to take photos while street canvassing. This will also ensure that you are able to track where they are outreaching and the success of each campaign.

GlobeSt.com: How are you leveraging vendor partnerships?

Melby: Off-campus vendor partnerships are equally important for the success of your grassroots strategy. Establishing cross-promotional plans with the local food vendors for events, with the local bars to host promotions like “Pint Night” and the local boutiques for sorority sponsorships will allow you to position your community as the place to be in the market. Most importantly, get creative when you cross-promote. Is there a local restaurant that will allow you to bring a co-branded Instagram frame to their location? Offer a free drink to students who take a photo in the frame and tag your community and their restaurant.

GlobeSt.com: Should you be practicing grassroots efforts even over the summer?

Melby: While the market may quiet down during summer, your community's grassroots efforts should still remain strong. Targeting those students taking summer classes and freshmen attending the various orientations will enable your community to have the upper hand. Also, creating a specific campaign to attract students living at competing communities will allow you to capture last minute leases with those who want to make the switch to your community.

GlobeSt.com: How are you optimizing your efforts across social media?

Melby: Establishing a cohesive plan to tie your traditional grassroots efforts into your social media efforts will optimize your community's digital reach and also allow for you to reach the students from all angles. For example, promoting a "Spot the Mascot" scavenger hunt grassroots campaign should include sharing clues on social media and sharing photos of where your street team is canvassing around the community. Also, when cross-promoting with a local vendor, your community should be creating unique graphics with their logo and tagging the vendor on social media as well, to increase your reach and digital presence.

GlobeSt.com: Which tools are you using to capture contact information?

Melby: Each time that your street team is out promoting in the community, there should be a direct plan in place for how they are collecting contact information and where that is being stored for your leasing consultants to follow up with. Utilizing iPads with the Chimpandeedoo app allows for your community to automatically import prospect information into Mailchimp, which will then allow for your leasing consultants to follow up the same day and segment the prospect lists based on where they were obtained and which special was being promoted.

GlobeSt.com: Are you effectively creating a virtual grassroots program?

Melby: In addition to your traditional grassroots strategy, your community should have a virtual grassroots strategy in place to complement and optimize all efforts. This includes email campaign cross promotion with banner designs, social media cross promotion with unique branded graphics for the vendors to share on their pages with a CTA for your community and a custom UTM code that is driving traffic to your website. This custom UTM code will allow for you to track all efforts and see which virtual grassroots campaign is driving the most traffic and leases.