From Building To Brand: Communications Strategies For FMs

 

Facility management today encompasses more than maintaining buildings after opening; it also involves taking an active role in shaping the perception of a space, from concept to execution. With rising pressure to proactively activate new facilities, public relations and marketing strategies offer an effective route to influence early perception, create community connections, and drive occupancy.

There are several ways facilities professionals can leverage communications strategies to build buzz for their projects and create long-term value during every phase of a facility’s lifecycle.

Not A Building, But A Brand

The process of creating visibility for a facility starts long before the groundbreaking. Every project needs a driving narrative—one that informs the public of your mission, vision, and intent. Aligning early with stakeholders to determine this driving narrative and associated messaging lays the foundation for future efforts. The goal here is to turn your building into a brand: one with a strong name, logo, and clear story beats that are consistent across digital assets, signage, and on-site experiences.

It’s here that public relations efforts can help to begin positioning an asset within the broader market, whether it’s a new cultural anchor, luxury residential property, or a sustainable repositioning. This allows facility teams to hone in on key target audiences, and develop early outreach plans to maximize engagement and visibility.

Renderings and vision decks from associated design teams can also go a long way in providing both local audiences and media with a visual component that ties your messaging together. Sharing key renderings with journalists, potential tenants, and brokers builds early credibility and generates excitement for a given initiative. These preliminary efforts are essential for creating the groundwork for long-term perception, and to ensure that a project is not only seen, but talked about and embraced by both the community and the market in which it exists.

Creating A Plan Of Action: Media Outreach And Engagement

With these assets and efforts in place, the next step is identifying your key project milestones, determining tentative dates, and developing a plan of action for each phase. The aim is to maintain sustained press momentum throughout the life of the project, from early design and pre-construction to groundbreaking, topping-out, and eventually the grand opening.

Depending on the nature of the building, and perceived levels of interest from the public, an early media alert detailing collaborators can function as a means to drum up initial buzz. During this pre-construction phase, the groundbreaking will be the keystone event for building early press interest. Here it might make sense, depending on the role of the project in the local community, to engage civic leaders, relevant community groups, and the media for press opportunities and interviews surrounding the project and its implications for the surrounding area.

Before the event and afterwards, a press release announcing the groundbreaking can be shared with a wider group of media (especially those who were unable to attend any initial events) to put the project on their radar, preparing them for future outreach and updates surrounding other milestones. From here, maintaining regular correspondence throughout subsequent phasing can build on the existing media narrative surrounding the project.

As a facility nears completion, a ribbon-cutting ceremony or grand opening activation can act as a final draw, adding a more tangible layer to communications efforts while firmly establishing your property as a mainstay in the community.

Avoiding The “Launch And Leave” Trap

Any comprehensive communications strategy should continue well beyond a facility’s opening day. Many fall into the trap of launching a property and immediately stepping back from PR and marketing efforts. At this stage, keeping your foot on the gas is essential to maintaining the momentum you’ve created, as well as meaningfully influencing short and long term leasing decisions.

So what stories can you tell after a facility opens? To start, monitoring and regularly updating your media contacts with statistics like post-occupancy studies, leasing progress updates, and tenant case studies can breathe additional life into your campaign. Broadening your perspective to include potential thought leadership opportunities, often in collaboration with design and construction teams, also allows you to approach the facility’s story from various angles, and these perspectives open up the potential for coverage in a wider range of publications.

Activation & Reframing Assets

Subsequently activating the space, whether through installations with local organizations, pop-up events, or public tours, can further drive in-person engagement to foster awareness and bolster leasing efforts. You can position these experiential events as community stories tied to revitalization and local engagement, creating a more compelling reason for the media to take an interest in your project.

Creating additional post-occupancy press materials, including drone footage, before/after transformations, or “behind-the-scenes” tours can also help to keep the narrative fresh and visually engaging. These assets provide media and stakeholders with more dynamic options for experiencing the property, exploring both its evolution and impact. Treating the facility’s opening as a halfway marker rather than the finish line allows you to create a steady stream of storytelling opportunities that extend the lifecycle of your campaign while reinforcing the facility’s role as an evolving part of the community.

Closing Thoughts

Taking a proactive approach to communications at every stage of a facility’s development fosters positive public perception, optimizes leasing activity, and firmly integrates the property into the surrounding community. By working closely with communications strategists from day one, and sustaining those efforts through opening, facilities professionals can ensure that their space doesn’t just open successfully, but thrives in the long term. The most successful facilities today are operationally sound—but also strategically positioned, connected with users, and built from a foundation of meaningful, narrative-driven storytelling.

McDermott is a Senior Account Executive at UpSpring, where he partners with a diverse range of architecture and design clients to develop compelling media strategies and thought leadership initiatives. A skilled writer and essayist with a deep appreciation for history and philosophy, Marcus brings intellectual curiosity and narrative precision to each project. Since joining UpSpring shortly after graduating, he has spent the past four years helping firms building their communications strategies, articulating their stories, elevating their voices, and expanding their reach within the built environment and beyond.

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