Important Announcements: Alfa has a new name and Senior Housing Forum now has a podcast channel!

By Steve Moran

ALFA is now Argentum

ALFA has been working on creating a new name for the organization as the senior living industry has expanded and grown. On September 29 they rolled the name out to the public. You can read the entire Press Release Here.  But the short version looks like this:

  • Since ALFA was first formed, the industry has gone through a massive evolution. The products and services provided by members were not adequately represented by the ALFA name.

  • The name is more consumer friendly and forward looking.

Thoughts on the New Name

I had three immediate reactions:

  1. I have no idea how to pronounce the name . . . and that bothered me.
  2. I have no idea what the name means . . . and that bothered me.
  3. It could be a brilliant choice

Why it Might be Brilliant

When I picked the coffee cup logo for Senior Housing Forum I had a choice of 8 logos. I put those choices out to the readership and it was not the leading choice, but I picked it anyway. Since that time I have had a couple of really smart senior marketing people, that I like and respect tell me it was too simplistic and not professional enough for me to grow Senior Housing Forum to it’s full potential. They were trying to be helpful and I appreciated their taking the time to provide feedback. They were, in my view, simply wrong.  

I am pretty sure they would have thought an Apple with a bite out of it would have been a dumb idea too.

Six months from now we will all know how to pronounce the new name, we will figure out how to use it in conversation, and hardly remember that we all went “huh?” Perhaps the best benefit is that it is one less set of letters that we have to turn into a word to have conversations.

The last reason it might be brilliant is that everyone is talking about ALFA’s new name and you can’t buy that kind of publicity.

Senior Housing Forum Podcast

Many months ago a reader suggested that we podcast our articles. His idea was that we would read the articles so that they could be listened to while commuting or otherwise multi-tasking. It’s a great idea and we are not quite there yet.  But . . .

Many of the articles we publish start as a conversation with someone or some group of people. Those conversations are, on occasion, as short as 15 minute and can run to an hour. Even with a 15-minute conversation there is more goodness than can be covered in a typical Senior Housing Forum article. We got to thinking we should share those conversations with you the reader. You might think of these podcasts as getting to dip into a senior living conference.

There are three ways for you to access this new content:

  1. The podcasts when available will be attached to the article when it is published. A good example of this is Still Working in Senior Living.
  2. You can go to the podcast hosting page, which you can see HERE.
  3. You can find them on iTunes. You can find them by going to the podcast section and search for Senior Housing Forum.