We are excited to announce that the new ForgeWorks Marketing & Sales team serves non-profit retirement communities by providing affordable marketing and sales support. We are offering this new line of services because as a non-profit, we have often found that marketing and sales professionals without a non-profit perspective tend to believe non-profits can easily afford to pay commercial agency rates.


We understand the economic pressures that drive your budgeting and we are here to help you find affordable solutions that result in increased sales.


Scott Miller, ForgeWorks Brand Warrior, joined Garden Spot Village as Director of Marketing 15 years ago. At the time, Garden Spot’s Director of Marketing was also responsible for sales. As a result, Scott needed to drive leads and convert leads too.
Marketing and Sales are two entirely different disciplines; each require a lot of focus and attention. As many organizations do, Scott hired agencies to do the marketing so he could focus on sales. As a marketing professional who had previously worked at a two billion dollar, high-tech company, he fully understood not only sales but marketing as well. He quickly became frustrated with the marketing agencies.

Because he had both the vision and the background to oversee marketing operations, over time, he worked with Garden Spot’s finance department to reduce his expense budget by eliminating the agency cost and replace the expense with an in-house creative team. In effect, he created his own in-house agency. Two things happened. First, the level of output increased geometrically. An in-house agency provided the opportunity to radically focus on the Garden Spot brand and add unique approaches. Destination Garden Spot Village, a 90-page high-quality magazine that tells the stories of people who live and work at Garden Spot Village, has been produced twice a year since 2009.


Second, the in-house team began to support the entire organization, lifting the level of professionalism in all in-house materials as well. On a sales level, Garden Spot increased occupancy and refined the wait list. Today, occupancy ranges from 98-99%, even in the midst of the COVID pandemic and people anticipate waiting two to four years to move to the home of their choice at Garden Spot Village.


Scott recognized the need to embrace emerging advertising opportunities like a robust website, online advertising, geofencing and geotargeting as well as email marketing and online lead generation. He recognized early on the power of Google and the need to view Google as the primary online customer, with the potential future resident as a secondary target.
“When it comes to our online presence, our customer is not our customer. Google is our primary customer. If we don’t earn Google credibility with our webpages, blogs and SEO our customers will never see our messages. We need to dance the fine line between promoting our brand in a way that resonates with our real customers while earning Google credibility,” Scott says.


“That dance has become more intricate over time including not only Google but Facebook, Instagram and all the online social media platforms,” Scott continues.

Scott looks forward to connecting with non-profit retirement communities to share his sales and marketing experience.
Learn more about the ForgeWorks Sales and Marketing Services or connect with Scott.