Have you got a filing cabinet that’s full to bursting? Do you ever get frustrated with all the pieces of paper everywhere? You need to modernize your HOA or condo! But how do you bring your community into the 21st century? Follow our six simple steps to have a modern community.

1 – Scan ‘em all!

Start by going through all your documents, throwing away any that aren’t relevant. When you have all the documents you need, scan them! Hopefully, you already have a copy on the cloud. If you don’t, then you should start scanning all your association’s documents. While this is a boring job, it will be an improvement for the whole community. Especially for the next board of directors. After you’ve scanned them, upload your documents to Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, or any other cloud storage.

If residents and board members can access documents more easily, you’re helping to make your community more transparent. Everyone should be able to access CC&Rs without getting a headache. Finally, it will help communication with residents, which improves resident satisfaction.

2 – Centralize requests and reservations

Have you got somewhere where people can make maintenance requests? How do people reserve your amenities if you have any? Make sure these are centralized so they’re easy to manage, and you never lose any in a mess of papers. You could create a Trello, Basecamp, or Asana board. This way all your service requests could be divided into to do, doing, and done. You could see what was going on, and invite people to be part of the board so that it would be easy to organize repairs. 

There are different solutions out there for amenity reservations. We recommend our own solution, Vinteum. It started out as just an amenity reservation tool, and we have comprehensive rules that can be personalized to help you manage all of your amenities.

3 – Update your community info

It’s very important to always have up-to-date information on your community, if there’s ever an emergency you must have their contact details. You should also have at least one emergency contact for each resident. If someone’s emergency contact is their spouse, then it would be best to have two. These should be updated on a regular basis, preferably once a year. Send them a quick form to fill by email via Google Forms so you can get all their information into a spreadsheet.

You can keep resident information in a spreadsheet that the board or community manager maintains. Or, you can use community management software that will make your life a bit easier and provide more value for residents and board members.

4 – Create a website

Your Condo or HOA website is now an important aspect of community living. It’s great to attract new residents to your community, you can upload documents and FAQs there so you never have to answer the same question again!

At Vinteum, we do the heavy lifting for you and set your website up. So all you need to do is make it better and more personal. Even if you do choose to make your own website, it can be easy to do if you use website templates to help you. Having a website is a key aspect of modernizing your HOA or condo, so make sure to bring it up at your next board meeting.

5 – Create a portal

There is one problem with all the (excellent) solutions I’ve suggested in this article. I included more than one solution. Why bother having ten different accounts when one solution does all of the above? 

By using a community portal, you can upload documents, residents’ information, add service requests, events, and groups. You can also send out notices all from one portal. You can do this by email, text, and smart calls, and everything is available to view within the system. Residents can send messages to you, and each other, view the community’s calendar, and book amenities. This creates one space to communicate, and for you to manage your community better.

6 – Get all your residents on the portal

But for the magic to happen you need to get your residents on the portal. This can be difficult when you have a lot of older members who don’t want to use an online solution. However, if the board starts to use the tool, then residents will follow. So the board and community manager should start sending emails and communicating just through your new community communication portal. At every meeting, you should mention how important it is, and how they’re missing out if they don’t use it. This can really help residents to start using your new portal.

Conclusion to Steps to Modernize Your HOA or Condo

All the tools mentioned above will help your HOA or condo to modernize. This is an important process to start, and can have a huge impact on your community.

If you’d like to find out more about how Vinteum can help modernize your community association, improve communication and resident satisfaction. Then click here to book your free demo.