Making community impact measurable

Name: Wanaka Partners
Price range: $

28 Oct '26 Sustainability

A building’s community can influence how people experience it, how connected they feel and whether they choose to stay. But a lively atmosphere or positive feedback alone does not show whether a community programme is making a difference. To understand its impact, we need to track what is happening and how people respond over time.

At Wanaka Partners, our Social KPI framework gives us a consistent way to do this.
It helps us understand how tenants experience a building, what they value and where community management can improve.
It also allows us to consider social performance alongside the wider performance of an asset.

Why measure social impact?

A Community Manager is the on-site contact who brings a building’s social activation programme to life.
They organise activities, share useful information, listen to tenants and connect the building with its surrounding neighbourhood.
Depending on the site, this can include initiatives that support wellbeing and safety, encourage people to connect, or make better use of shared spaces.

The aim is to improve the day-to-day experience of the people who use the building. For owners, that experience matters too.
Tenant satisfaction, relationships and retention can all offer useful insights into how a building is performing.

Measuring them helps us understand what people value and where the programme can do more.

What do we measure?

Our framework covers six areas.
We monitor social KPIs quarterly and bring the results together in our annual reporting. The annual User Satisfaction Survey provides a deeper view of tenants’ experience.

→ How tenants experience the building
The annual survey measures overall tenant satisfaction and how safe people feel in the building, using a five-point scale.
Our target is an average score of at least 3.5 out of 5.
We also track the Net Promoter Score and look at how it changes over time.

Together, these measures help us understand whether tenants value the experience the building offers.

→ Health, wellbeing and belonging
We look at tenants’ reported sense of wellbeing, the number of health and wellbeing initiatives offered on site, and feedback on those activities.

This helps us assess whether the programme responds to the needs and interests of the people who use the building.

→ Events and participation
For each event, we track attendance, the share of building users reached and participant satisfaction. We also record how many events tenants organise themselves and how regularly shared or previously underused spaces are used.

These measures help us see who is taking part and whether tenants are becoming more involved in the community.

→ Communication and digital engagement
A community programme also depends on clear communication.
We monitor newsletter subscribers and open rates, social media growth and engagement, and visits to the building’s events page.
These channels help tenants find out what is happening and how they can take part.

→ Tenant relationships and retention
We use leasing data to track tenant retention.
Alongside this, we record structured conversations between the Community Manager, Asset Manager and tenants, as well as complaints and points of friction.

We also track partnerships with organisations in the surrounding neighbourhood. Together, these measures give us a broader view of tenant relationships and the building’s place in its local area.

→ Green spaces and biodiversity
The framework also covers outdoor areas.
We track tenant satisfaction with these spaces, biodiversity initiatives run or supported by the Community Manager, and whether an ecological management plan is in place.

This recognises that the environment around a building can be part of the experience for the people who use it.

How do we collect and use the data?

A framework is only as good as the data behind it, which is why measurement is built into the delivery role itself rather than bolted on afterwards.

The Community Manager records information on site: attendance, feedback and engagement after activities, as well as relevant tenant conversations and initiatives. They also document events and report the data in a structured way.

The Social Activation Manager oversees KPI reporting for each asset and consolidates the results for the annual ESG progress report.
This means the information comes from the people closest to the building and its users, and can inform how the programme develops.

From tenant experience to retention

The framework is deliberately built to explore one relationship above all: the connection between how tenants experience a building and whether they choose to stay in it.

Satisfaction, participation and retention each tell us something different.
None of these measures on its own proves that community activities cause tenants to stay. Tracked together over time, they help us examine how tenant experience and retention relate at each asset.

Retention can affect vacancy periods and reletting costs. A building’s reputation and the experience it offers may also matter to current and prospective tenants. This analysis gives Asset Managers, investors and clients an evidence-based way to assess how community management may contribute to an asset’s performance.

A shared approach across our portfolio

The framework gives our teams a consistent way to monitor social performance across different assets and share what they learn.
The results also feed into each asset’s annual ESG Action Plan and follow the same reporting cycle as environmenx&dtal performance.

For Wanaka Partners, community management is part of how we manage real estate: by paying attention to the people who use a building and tracking how they experience it.
The Social KPI framework helps us make that work visible, learn from the results and report on it clearly.