Weekly Update #4 – Waiting and Mailing Lists

I have now installed a forms feature on the site which now lets us start to collect information.

I can see reason for two different lists

MAILING LIST

Not everyone who’s interested in social housing wants to be checking in on Facebook or the web site, so a mailing list is important.

I’m also keen to understand as much about people interesting in social housing, as I can. So I’m going to propose a mailing list that also lets you tell us a bit about yourself, or not! 🙂

WAITING LIST

In last years, last council meeting, we heard that there are 830 people on the social housing waiting list, but who are you? What are you looking for, what is your situation and where do you want to live?

So I’m proposing we’ll collect the following, or as much as you choose to share with us.

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Phone number

All of these will be optional… actually everything will be optional.

My plan is that I’ll simply qualify the quality of interest based on the level of information provided. Clearly someone who wants to give you all their information is serious about wanting something.

  • Required Bedrooms
  • Required Beds – we don’t assume that people need or want a bedroom each, but we want to know how many people you want to have living in a space.
  • Current suburb – we don’t know where you actually live, we’d just like to know where your community is.
  • Desired suburb – we assume that people have been moved around as a result of the earthquakes so we’d like to know where you’d like to live
  • Schooling – do you need to be close to a school?
  • Public Transport – do you need to be close to it?
  • Work Suburb – we want to understand where you need to travel to.
  • Drug use – this one’s quite important. Right now CCC have units that people have used drugs in, they simply need cleaning. The government standards have changed and for some people, they’d sooner have a more affordable home than where they are, so there is a case to argue that these units should be made available.
  • About you – age range, gender, health – if you’re 85 and in poor health then you need higher quality housing than I do. Double rather than single glassing and better heating, for example.
  • Current housing – we’re keen to understand people who are couch surfing, those who are simply unhappy with private accommodation or other reasons
  • Reason for your interest – as above, we’d like to know why you want social housing. We understand that in some causes what people really want is help to improve their situation but just don’t know where to reach. In this journey so far, Stephen and I have learnt a lot about services we didn’t know existed.

I’ll be posting this on Facebook, so I’m keen to hear your comments before we set this alight! 🙂