10 Thanksgiving Ideas For Your Apartment Community

Can you believe Thanksgiving is right around the corner? Neither can we! With just a few short weeks until the holiday is upon us, we put together a few Thanksgiving ideas that should be simple for your leasing office team to plan and execute.

1.       Canned Food Drive

Host a canned food drive in your leasing office. You can connect with a local church youth group or shelter to distribute flyers and paper bags to your residents. Then have them bring their bag of canned goodies to the leasing office for pickup. Your residents will appreciate an easy way to give back to the local community.

2.       Friendsgiving Potluck

Build a sense of community with a Thanksgiving potluck. This could either be the weekend before the holiday, or during the week leading up to Thanksgiving. Let everyone bring a dish to pass and order some traditional Thanksgiving fixings from your local diner or Honey Baked Ham. Purchase some ziplock containers so residents can easily take home some leftovers.

3.       Thanksgiving Dinner Basket Giveaway

Especially great for residents with families, host a giveaway with all the trimmings for a Thanksgiving dinner. To enter, residents can provide your leasing team with resident referrals, or perhaps they like, share, and tag a few friends on your social media post to enter. However is easiest for your team to manage the giveaway entries is up to you! Get a nice basket and fill it with cranberry sauce, stuffing mix, and maybe some pumpkin pie (yum!). Be sure to take photos of the basket to use on your social media posts, flyers, or website event page.

4.       Fall Door Decorating Contest

While this doesn’t need to be Thanksgiving-related, you could host a door decorating contest, inviting your residents to fill their front door with themed decorations. They could tape up streamers and lights or paper cutouts and pictures. It would be a great opportunity for parents to take those paper turkey crafts from their kids and put them to work! You could offer a gift card to Amazon or the local supermarket, but really any prize would do.

5.       Gratitude Tree

In the leasing office, you could set up a gratitude tree for residents to come by and leave a little leaf-shaped note with the things they’re grateful for this year. Cut out a variety of leaf shapes with different colored paper. Provide pens and string for residents to write what they’re thankful for and affix to the tree.

6.       Turkey Trot

Sign your community up to participate in a local Turkey Trot or 5k the week or morning of Thanksgiving. You could also host your own and plan the route. Give out door prizes for a variety of categories like “best turkey costume” or “fastest runner.”

7.       Thanksgiving Craft Night

Host a night of crafts for your residents in the clubhouse or other common area. Provide various colored paper, scissors, glue, glitter, and more, for residents to create fall or Thanksgiving-themed crafts. This is a great event to host for communities with a lot of children.

8.       Thanksgiving Movie Night

Host a few nights of feel-good, family-friendly movies with the theme of Thanksgiving (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles), or thankfulness and gratitude. You could set this up in your clubhouse, or maybe even a projector screen in a common outdoor area and serve hot cider.

9.       Pie Contest

Host a pie contest leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday. Have residents invite their friends to come and taste the selection of pies. Then everyone votes on their favorite one. This could also be a great opportunity to receive some resident referrals.

10.   Parade Viewing Party

Plan to attend the local Thanksgiving Day Parade with your residents, or set up a Macy’s Parade-watching event in your clubhouse. You could serve hot cider and cocoa, have pastries brought in from a local bakery, and watch the parade bundled up in pj’s.

The Thanksgiving holiday is a time for each of us to reflect on the things we care for the most and show our gratitude. Give your leasing team and your residents a space to show their gratefulness to have a warm home for the holidays, to have a community, to have jobs, and so on. By hosting one or more of these events, your residents will develop a closer bond with their apartment homes and the community you’re creating for them.