Community NameScore is an interactive tool our development team designed to help apartment communities define their identity. Whether you're a new community or rebranding, the task of choosing a name that's unique, memorable, and easy to spell, can be difficult. Community NameScore allows you to enter in potential name ideas and have each of them scored based on a series of metrics aligned to achieve your best community name.
In this how-to blog, we'll go over the Community NameScore tool's features to help you to discover your community's new name.
Upon gaining access to the NameScore tool page, you'll be presented with an empty form prompting you to enter in a proposed community name, as well as that community's location. Once you've filled in the 'Community Name', 'City', and 'State' fields, click the 'Search' button.
After submitting your initial community name, these two cards will appear below the search bar on the NameScore tool page.
The card on the left provides a complete breakdown of the proposed name you've just entered. At the top of the card is a letter grade, a meter graphic, and the name. Then there are three separate headers labeled uniqueness, memorability, and location—the metrics from which the Community NameScore assesses a grade for your proposed name. In order to achieve a high grade, the name must:
1. Be Unique
The name isn’t shared by other apartment communities, and there’s no ambiguity with other business or landmarks.
2. Be Memorable
The name doesn’t include any made-up words or unusual spellings.
3. Not Include a Location
The name has better search visibility because it’s not tied to a specific city or geographic location.
Underneath each header is information on how the name measured against that specific rubric. If a name needs improvement in any of those categories, there's a group of suggestions in bold that are intended to show you what changes you can make to improve the score.
The card on the right side of the page will continue to expand as you enter in more potential community names. It will serve as a reference throughout the search process, as you'll be able to review all of the names you proposed and compare their scores. Below is a "Reset All" button that gives you the option to clear your search history and start the process over.
When you click on any of your previously proposed names from this section, it will show the complete breakdown of it again on the left card.
In the example above, "Prarie Vue at Lincoln Parque Apartments" earned a C grade. The gauge icon allows you to quickly see that there's a few things that need to be fixed in order to obtain the optimal grade of A+ (or dark green color). In this case, the name didn't score well in both memorability and location. The suggestions show that "vue and prarie" were not found in the dictionary because they've been spelled incorrectly. The suggestion also states to change the word "Parque", because the tool understands it to be an uncommon spelling of park, and all names are based on the English language. Finally, because the proposed name includes the city of Lincoln, it scored low on the location metric. Community names that also include the name of a geographic location hurt its chances of being found by potential residents in a Google search.
To enter in another proposed name, simply return to the search bar at the top of the page and delete the previous name, city, and state.
After reviewing the score and suggestions from the first example, here's what an ideal outcome should look like in the Community NameScore tool. Spelling words correctly, avoiding uncommon words, and excluding geographic locations all meet the expectations for an A+ grade.
Click here to try the NameScore tool for yourself!
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