According to a recent survey we ran, 95 percent of the respondents confirmed that communication is a key issue in their communities. This is not so surprising knowing that only a few have an HOA communication strategy in place. Typically, board members are overwhelmed and try their best. But that’s rarely enough to satisfy all residents.
Effective and efficient communication plays a huge role in the well-being of an HOA. That’s why it is crucial to develop a strategy and implement it.
The great news for you, we have prepared 5 simple steps to make it easy for you.
Ready to learn more?
1. Refer to your state law and governing documents
A good HOA communication strategy is a compliant one. As you may know, homeowners associations have to comply with state laws. Regulations around communication in HOAs already exist in some states. So when developing your plan, make sure that you follow the existing guidelines thoroughly. Sometimes, the goal of creating a strategy isn’t to reinvent the wheel completely. Instead, it is to find the right way to implement a certain process and to make it work.
2. Define your goals and metrics
As per its definition, a strategy is a plan designed to achieve a goal. So one of the initial steps is to ask the following question:
What do we want to achieve?
In this way, it may be a good idea to call an HOA meeting. This can be a good opportunity to brainstorm and reply to that central question. That said, make sure to involve both residents and board members. You could for example have an open meeting first, where residents can attend. After that, you can have a meeting restricted to board members in order to summarize the ideas. If you have enough volunteers, you could also create a communication committee. The committee could meet regularly to overview the whole project.
Keep in mind, your goals should be realistic and attainable. Basically, in this first phase, you should agree on three main things:
- What are the goals?
- Are the goals attainable and realistic? How will they be achieved?
- How do we measure the success of the goals?
The last point may be a bit difficult to address. So here are a few ideas that can help you assess the success of your communication goals:
- Running an HOA survey asking residents if they feel satisfied and informed
- Checking if HOA events participation rate or meeting quorum has increased
- Compare the number of questions the board used to receive before implementing the strategy and now
These metrics ideas will help you assess the success of your strategy after implementing it
3. Select HOA communication tools and create a policy for each one of them
An important aspect of such a strategy is knowing how and when you will be communicating. So in that phase, you will have to select the channels you will use to convey information. Right after, you will have to create a set of guidelines for each of them. Nowadays, many HOA communication tools exist. They are specially designed to fit the needs of community associations. Some of these tools include:
- HOA Email
- Events Calendar
- Smart Call
- Social Media
- Text Message
- Phone call
- HOA website
As a board member, your role is to define which channel is the most effective for your community. If your community has a lot of seniors, then maybe text messages and smart calls may be more appropriate. On that note, we strongly recommend choosing more than one mean. Especially if you have residents of all ages. Relying on only one or two mediums is often the reason behind uninformed residents. After choosing the proper tools for your HOA, it is time to create a policy for each one of them. Your policies should include guidelines such as:
- What is the main purpose of using this particular channel?
- Who is responsible for sending board messages on this channel?
- Are residents allowed to send messages on this channel?
- Who can see messages on this channel?
4. Use HOA Communication Software
Years ago, there probably wasn’t software that integrates all of these channels in one single place accessible to the whole community. In today’s increasingly digital world, communication should not be an issue anymore since many HOA solutions exist.
Logging into many different platforms and wasting time inserting the same information is not necessary anymore.
This has helped many board members thrive in their roles. Mostly the ones that did not have a management or administrative background.
When it comes to choosing the proper HOA software solution, communities have a variety of options at their disposal. Again, here it is important to choose the one that fits your budget and that best serves your HOA’s needs. Be careful with free providers. Free is never completely free. This probably means a lack of customer support and no integration.
5. Use an up to date contact database
Here is the last but not least point. Consider the fact that your actions will only be effective if you have the correct residents’ contact details. If you don’t have their email addresses or phone numbers, all of your efforts will be in vain. Besides, if you don’t update your list regularly, new homeowners are probably not receiving your messages. Even worse, you may be sending information to people that don’t live in your community anymore. That is highly unproductive. Without an updated contact database, board members are tiring themselves out for poor results. On the other hand, residents are getting frustrated because of the lack of interaction.
Key takeaways
That’s it, now you are ready to create your own HOA communication strategy. By now, you probably realized that it can be a long process. Especially if you are a small HOA with hardly a few board members. But you should know that any strategy is meant to last over time. So you are laying the foundation of good communication in your community for the years to come. The whole point of having a strategy is to build something valuable and that matters. So it is definitely worth it in that case.
Communication is at the heart of everything Vinteum does, we believe that it’s the bedrock that a happy community is based on.
Now that you know all about communication strategy, how about learning more about HOA software for communication?
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