Rainbow Housing: Transforming Resident Services from Within 

For most organizations, radical shifts in market strategy and company makeup generally come after crises. For Rainbow Housing Assistance Corporation (Rainbow), that radical shift came not as a result of significant challenges, but as a way to leverage successful internal practices to better serve the affordable housing industry. Though only two decades old, Rainbow has already undergone a massive transition from life as a typical housing provider into an organization that continues to seek the leading edge in the utilization of technology in resident services.

Founded in 2002 by industry veteran Joseph Sherman, Rainbow initially started as a company that wholly owned affordable housing assets with a particular focus on resident services distinct from contemporary peer organizations. According to Flynann Janisse, Rainbow’s executive director, this social services component largely focused on “ensuring that there was resident retention, how to sustain occupancy, how to reduce the criminal element in communities and how to navigate the expense associated with turnover.”

In short order, Janisse says that the process of constant internal evaluation and learning led to “a platform of services that were starting to change the dynamics of communities.” Shortly thereafter, Rainbow realized that “this is something we should offer the industry as a whole.”

This led to a company-wide transition away from wholly owning assets to focusing solely on providing social services in affordable housing (though Rainbow does still enter into General Partner (GP) roles when they are the guaranteed social services provider). By the early 2010s, the company had pivoted from whole ownership towards a core operation of third-party resident services.

Throughout this transition, Rainbow realized that although its service offerings were strong, it was far from reaching its potential. Towards 2009, Janisse says, Rainbow took a hard look at its numbers and realized that small tweaks could vastly improve outcomes for tenants. “We had what we refer to as a low penetration rate. We were not reaching anything more than about 26 percent of the tenant population in any community that we were serving.”

Through various efforts—namely a ‘National Call Center’ in which Rainbow reached out to residents directly through direct calls at a time when most residents still used landlines—the organization was able to strategically raise its penetration rate to over 70 percent.

This innovation was not only important for its direct impact on the number of residents served, but it also represented a critical step in Rainbow’s embrace of technology in the resident services space. “That’s when we really started to see ourselves pull away from the standard level of operations in tenant services,” Janisse says.

Buoyed by the success of the call center, Rainbow continued to seek innovation toward delivering a more efficient and successful social services model. This eventually led to a realization that they could more equitably serve communities by providing off-site specialists catering to multiple developments, rather than one on-site resident services coordinator serving multiple roles for one building alone.

Thus, well before the COVID-19 pandemic hastened the worldwide shift towards virtual platforms, Rainbow found itself pivoting towards technology-driven connectivity: “direct, one-on-one, face-to-face services to people in multiple environments, whether we call them, text them, email them or video call them,” says Janisse. While still retaining on-site services for “very qualified events,” like youth enrichment, chronic homeless assistance or senior populations, this strategy allowed Rainbow to advance its strategy of connecting with the most residents possible on a level those residents were most comfortable with.

This evolution eventually led to the platform Rainbow relies on today, which it calls Leveraging Innovative Netted Knowledge (LINK).

A Wide Platform of Direct Connectivity
Rather than one proprietary app or discrete technology platform, LINK is a wide approach to casting a “net of opportunity and creating a space of access to the digital world of learning, socializing, employment, health and wellness and really basic daily life skills.” In other words, it is more a company-wide embrace of technology towards ultimately helping residents more effectively improve their lives.

LINK is “not an app, it’s a concept,” says Janisse. “It is part of a mission-centered conceptual design that says we’re going to link individuals to innovative, netted knowledge and internally, build the infrastructure to do so.”

Janisse spelled out one example of LINK in a young resident in Georgia who was having difficulty accessing resources for utility allowances. Through LINK, the tenant was able to call Rainbow directly and have someone on staff walk him through the online resources offered by the state for utility relief, ultimately allowing the tenant to “interface, connect and learn how to access the resources that had the capacity to provide financial assistance.”

LINK is a critical approach for resident services providers to effectively serve tenants, says Janisse. “The organizations around us are moving to a technology space. You can’t get utility assistance or rental assistance unless you go online and fill out the application. So, we have to teach the technology component as well, so that the residents are able to work in that space to effectively move to solutions.”

Of course, the bulk of LINK is not only about connecting tenants with an increasingly technologized world but is also aimed towards bringing Rainbow’s vast resident services offerings directly to tenants. In this respect, Rainbow has set up those offerings to go beyond the baseline requirements for survival in a low-income apartment setting. “A lot of what we do is really about wants, versus needs,” says Janisse. “Where do you want to head in life and advance your skillset to move from a minimum wage to a livable wage, and from a livable wage beyond to a sustainable wage? A lot of it is about mentorship and growth.”

Janisse recognizes that, though powerful, tech-based solutions don’t hold the answer to every social service need. Though LINK is “the core element of our delivery,” she says, “we will always complement it with an onsite resident services coordinator if an owner-operator requires it, or if we believe that it is the best solution to serve the community.”

One challenge that Janisse has encountered in her work at Rainbow is hesitancy amongst some developers to embrace this technology-centric approach. “There are some incredible players that have done incredible work in this space for years and years.” However, those individuals and organizations are occasionally “absent the willingness to understand how technology can move this space forward, and they don’t necessarily desire to pull from the data that proves that you can connect with people of all ages, and in all different various geographic locations and spaces of social and economic capacity.”

Oftentimes, the solution is simply to encourage an organization to consider Rainbow’s approach, even for a short term. “We can prove this out that we are connecting with the masses versus the majority. That alone is a starting point to doing something different and having a greater degree of impact.” Thereafter, skeptical developers can often see the payoff to meaningful investment in resident services. Indeed, a 2008 study from Community Housing Partners found significantly lower operating costs at properties with resident services than those without.

A secondary challenge or opportunity has been continuing to build out infrastructure as Rainbow’s LINK platform continues to widen and innovate. Oftentimes, the organization will need to move from small-scale successful tests and innovations to large-scale rollouts that do not diminish efficiency or impact. To do so, Janisse says that the organization has honed in on “really understanding our data, [and] creating systems and processes to analyze ourselves and our effectiveness.” This allows Rainbow to “stay in front of ourselves, stay in front of our capacity to serve and analyze what we’re doing so we can continue to improve upon it.”

One exciting innovation that has resulted from this data-driven approach and in collaboration with other social service-minded organizations is a phone booth-style, in-building amenity that allows residents to connect to Rainbow at any time, allowing the organization to provide a high level of service to residents across its portfolio without the cost of a full-time staff member. Realizing that very small buildings often don’t have the space for private locations where services can be delivered, Rainbow sought a solution that allowed residents of those underserved communities to connect comfortably and set up for success.

“In really rural locations or in a community that’s 100 units or less, they generally don’t have a community or large-office space. So, we are utilizing these booths—a small booth, if you can imagine, like a phone booth, but larger—where an individual can go into a private space, close the door and there is an iPad that’s readily available to them, and they click on the icon and it immediately offers a live connection to Rainbow.”

This allows the tenant to connect straight to Rainbow’s vast offerings of social services in a very human way and provides a direct connection to LINK’s vast network of programming. “We’re creating a private space in communities that could not otherwise afford to have an on-site service provision and making that immediate connection available. In that space, we are able to connect them to telehealth, financial resilience efforts and planning, as well as to the Esusu’s of the world, all of those resources at a fingertip. To be sitting in front of them, walking with them, to connect to all these different resources and ensuring that it happens, that’s what I’m most excited about.”

These booths build upon Rainbow’s general mission with its technology-driven resident services approach, says Janisse. “We want to deploy the capacity to connect with resident services wherever you are comfortable with and however you are comfortable with, because ultimately, that provides solutions for any barriers and moves people forward. In doing that, we know that it strengthens the social fabric of communities.”