HOA communication best practices help to keep your residents informed and content. Having open communication with everyone in your community improves the quality of life in your community. If you have consistent, open, honest communication in your HOA, then residents, board members, and your property manager should be able to reach each other. 

Communication is at the heart of everything Vinteum does, we believe that it’s the bedrock that a happy community is based on. 

But the theory and practice can be two very different things. Here we layout three HOA communication best practices are guidelines that you should follow. They will help to join up the theory and practice and increase resident satisfaction.

Have a policy

Who sends out important messages in your HOA? Is it whoever remembers or do you have a person in charge? And how do you send it? If the board creates an HOA communication policy and sticks to it, then residents know how to expect information. However, if sometimes the board emails information, other times they call and occasionally they put up a notice on a billboard, it creates uncertainty. 

Using Vinteum, you can have a policy. You can control who can send information out to residents, to create consistency. 

So if there’s information that everyone needs to know, you can post a notice. This posts in-app, it sends an email and a push notification to residents. This message should have a concise subject line, and the text should be written in simple language, without abbreviations. That way you can let them know if bikes have been stolen, there are snow plows coming, or a member of the community has passed away. You can also activate automatic text messages so that everyone with a cellphone can get the subject of the notice by text. 

If there’s an emergency, for instance, a tree has fallen and cut some power lines or the water needs to be turned off, you can use smart calls. This sends a call to everyone in the community so they can be instantly notified.

Having more than one channel of communication is a best practice because not everyone has emails. With Vinteum, residents can choose how they want to receive information. If they don’t want texts, then they can remove that. And the board doesn’t have to keep track of everyone’s preferences, the system does it automatically!

Be consistent

If you have a portal, then that creates consistency. Part of your HOA communication best practices needs to be having one place for the community’s needs. So residents know that when they need to submit a maintenance request or an ARC, they can go to Vinteum. 

It’s also where you can post all your HOA’s documents, so when residents need the bylaws or a reminder on how to pay their dues, then they can check Vinteum. 

For an HOA portal to be successful all stakeholders need to know how to use it. This is why we offer comprehensive onboarding and training. We sit down with property managers and board members to show them how the system works. Then we provide them with two manuals: one for administrators and one for residents.

Profile-based access is very important for HOAs. Property managers and board members need to know how to post documents, notices, and events. Then residents need to know how to access the platform and find the information they need. So Vinteum has 12 different profiles that can be customized to fit your community’s needs. This creates consistency so that everyone has the same information, and there isn’t any favoritism. 

Have contact information

Your HOA communication best practices have to include clear contact information. At least once a week a resident calls looking for their board member’s contact information, and we have to explain that we sell HOA software, and we can’t help them. 

When you sign up with Vinteum, we create a personalized website for your community. On your website, you can include the names and contact information of all your board members so that residents know how to find them. Each website also includes a contact form, so that even if residents can’t log in to the portal, they can get help.

Then, inside the secure portal, residents can send chat messages to their board members. 

In the community directory, everyone has the choice of what information they share with the rest of the community. We recommend that board members share their email addresses so that residents can get in contact with them outside of Vinteum as well if they need to.

With Vinteum, no resident has to desperately google ‘who is my board member’, because they know where to find them. 

Having HOA communication best practices improves the consistency of communication, which in turn improves resident satisfaction. We should know, Vinteum has 97% resident satisfaction! If you’re ready to find out more, schedule your free demo here.