One thing to take into consideration is that seniors like to learn. This means that one can draw in seniors via educational opportunities. Recently the financial services industry capitalized on this attribute by attracting seniors through seminars. The medical industry also uses seminars in order to gain new clients. Seniors go because they want to learn about issues that they feel are important in their lives. Seminar offerings can be expanded into a lot of fields as a way to take advantage of senior's desires to learn (Marketing to Seniors, 2006). Along these same lines, seniors like to read. They have the time to do so and recent research has shown that the senior audience is the main reader group of daily newspapers. It appears to be clear that if one wants to market to seniors, the newspaper is a marvelous place to put advertising. It has been shown that a larger number of readers are seniors than ever before. Seniors make up a devoted group of radio listeners, mainly to talk radio stations. Good marketers either buy the time or convince the station they can bring in advertising dollars. There's plenty of room in this market for almost any company to gain advanced reliability with a radio show (Marketing to Seniors, 2006).

Working people soften go through their mail over the trash can in order to toss out as much as possible. They don't have time and don't want to be bothered with any mail that does not demand their attention. This has been found not to be true with seniors. They take the time to look at their mail and think about each piece as they go through huge amounts of junk mail and are hesitant to throw out anything (Marketing to Seniors, 2006).

Implementing this type of senior assistance program can be faced with some obstacles along the way. One such thing is a lack of consumer education and resistance to change

Denial -- it is often thought that there is a stigma of being thought of as a frail or disabled, and often seniors are reluctance to think of themselves this way.

Lack of knowledge to the rigorousness of situations. Circumstances often come about gradually, and seniors incrementally accommodated themselves to the situation, and thus do not have a realistic view of the actual situation or is convinced that they are handling it very well.

Resistance from seniors who refuse to use essential ambulation devices

Opposition to change.

If a change requires home modification or repair, people do not have the appropriate information of who does this work, and they do not know where to find out this information.

Fear of being detached from one's home if a problem arises.

Resistance to exercising, especially after injuries.

Higher levels of impairments and weaknesses that severely effect capability to perform activities of daily living.

Shortfalls that include problems in short-term memory, planning, problem-solving and judgment.

Chronic mental issues, particularly paranoia and hoarding.

Mounting prevalence of nervousness and despair.

Problems with isolation -- older people who are homebound because they can no longer negotiate stairs or who cannot converse with others due to lack of communication tools (Obstacles to Home Safety and Independent Living, 2000).

The Senior Housing Consortium will be staffed by case managers who will assist the seniors in determining what their needs are and how these needs will be met by this service. On the other side there will be construction experts who will be employed in order to screen and certify construction companies so that it will be possible to offer the best providers possible to the clients who need them. These employees will be required to attend an intensive training program that specifically is oriented to working with seniors.

A business Owner or Supervisor must be able to train employees effectively to accommodate the business structure. A person can use a number of employee training techniques in order to accomplish this. Whatever methods are chosen, it is important to use consistency and evaluate often in order to refine an employee-training program. It is important to supply new employees with reading material. The most important part of employee training and development is maintenance of training information. A new staff member often has a great deal to take in. The capability to refer back to printed information can help an employee to retain information. Custom-made worksheets that outline procedures and expectations are an effective way to support a training program (How to Train Employees, 2010).

It is also important to walk through procedures...

Each step should be explained thoroughly and questions should be encouraged. When a new employee is ready, they should perform tasks as they are watched. Mistakes should be corrected kindly and it should be remembered that it takes time to learn a new set of procedures. Trainers should explain the reasoning behind step-by-step procedures. New employees can learn procedures faster when they recognize the logic behind them. Giving credit where it's due will encourage new employee to master job skills. A feeling of admiration can go a long way in employee training and growth (How to Train Employees, 2010).
In order to make sure that the Senior Housing Consortium program is successful it will be important to evaluate the program along the way. This will allow for the program to be looked at on a regular basis in order to make sure that it is providing the objectives that have been set down for it from the beginning. Program evaluation with an outcomes focus is more and more important to business. An outcomes-based evaluation facilitates your asking if the organization is really doing the right program activities to bring about the outcomes that people believe or better yet, have verified to be needed by clients, rather than just engaging in busy activities which seem reasonable to do at the time. Outcomes are benefits to clients from partaking in the program. Outcomes are usually in terms of enhanced learning or conditions like increased literacy and self-reliance. Outcomes are often confused with program outputs or units of services, like the number of clients who went through a program (Basic Guide to Program Evaluation, n.d.).

The general steps to accomplish an outcomes-based evaluation include to:

1. Identify the major outcomes that you want to examine or verify for the program under evaluation. One would want to reflect on their mission or the overall purpose of their organization and ask yourself what impacts you will have on your clients as you work towards your mission. If their overall mission is to provide shelter and resources to abused women, then ask yourself what benefits this will have on those women if you effectively provide them shelter and other services or resources.

2. Choose the outcomes that you want to examine prioritize the outcomes and, if your time and resources are limited, pick the top two to four most important outcomes to examine for now.

3. For each outcome, specify what observable measures, or indicators, will suggest that you're achieving that key outcome with your clients. This is often the most important and enlightening step in outcomes-based evaluation. However, it is often the most challenging and even confusing step, too, because you're suddenly going from a rather intangible concept, like increased self-reliance, to specific activities, like supporting clients to get themselves to and from work and staying off drugs and alcohol. It helps to have a devil's advocate during this phase of identifying indicators, like someone who can question why you can assume that an outcome was reached because certain associated indicators were present.

4. Specify a target goal of clients, like what number or percent of clients you commit to achieving specific outcomes with

5. Identify what information is needed in order to show these indicators. One will need to know how many clients in the target group went through the program, how many of them reliably undertook their own transportation to work and stayed off drugs. If your program is new, you may need to evaluate the process in the program to verify that the program is indeed carried out according to your original plans. Researchers have suggested that the most important type of evaluation to carry out may be this implementation evaluation to verify that your program ended up to be implemented as you originally planned.

6. Decide how information can be efficiently and realistically collected. It is important to consider program documentation, observation of program personnel and clients in the program, questionnaires and interviews about clients perceived benefits from the program, case studies of program failures and successes (Basic Guide to Program Evaluation, n.d.).

Seniors are an ever growing group of people who have special needs because of their age. One of the biggest needs that these people have is to have their homes modified so that they can live in them independently for longer periods of time. The Senior Housing Consortium program will help these seniors by connecting them with qualified home contractors that will help them to make the needed changes. This service will help seniors to enhance their quality of lives while…