3 Easy Ways to Share Information on Your HOA Website

Websites help homeowners associations accomplish many goals. In some states, of course, HOAs are required by law to create and maintain an online presence and use it to share specific categories of community information. But beyond simple legal compliance, a website can help make your administrative tasks easier, quicker, and more efficient. That’s especially true when it comes to the documentation that your HOA requires, provided that you make smart decisions about what you share and how you share it.

Do your residents need quick access to this material?

You’ve done triage on your treasure trove of homeowners association documents, so you know which ones you need all the time and which receive fewer requests. Odds are that the files you’re constantly asked to provide are the ones you’ve made sure you can find quickly rather than fumble through folders—virtual or physical—looking for them time and again. In fact, for many homeowners association administrators, the real challenge is keeping the less “popular” files readily accessible, and avoiding the dreaded “where did I put that?” moment of panic than can arise when someone needs a copy of something you just can seem to find right away.

When you archive essential documents on your HOA website, you make everything easy to locate and convenient to access. Point members to your online repository, and they can help themselves to whatever they need. The self-service approach takes one more chore off your plate—and that’s a big benefit, given that if you’re like many homeowners association administrators, you’re volunteering time that’s subtracted from other activities.

Is the information personal, private, proprietary, or protected?

Homeowners association paperwork can include a wide variety of information that must, or at least should, be kept from prying eyes. Do you really want people from outside your community reading through the stack of quotes you received for pool relining, fence repair, or snow removal? Probably not. Should you share the minutes from board and committee meetings where non-residents can read them? Maybe not a great idea. So along with the convenience of an online documentation library, you also need the ability to secure your files so only residents who log in to your website can access sensitive material—and perhaps even restrict some documents to the members of the committees that create them.

That’s why before you choose a homeowners association website software provider, you need to do your due diligence to ensure that you opt for a package that combines convenience with control. Look for customizable access credentials that enable you to determine who sees what.

Are you tired of filing, copying, and mailing out material?

Who isn’t—and if you’re still taking care of homeowners association business the old-fashioned way, you deserve a chance to lighten your workload with a secure online document repository. Of course, just because you can upload your essential covenants and other files to your website so residents and other authorized parties can access them without your intervention doesn’t mean you have fewer documents on your hands. However, it does enable you to eliminate the endless cycle of requests, copies, follow-up confirmations, and e-mail messages that seem doomed to land in junk folders, along with big file attachments that bounce back as undeliverable.

Unless a document absolutely needs notarization, or only a paper copy will suffice for some other reason, no HOA administrator should have to struggle through the burdensome hassles of manual document management. With the right homeowners association website software, you can upload your files, decide whether to make them publicly available or protect them as members-only resources, and point everyone who’s entitled to review them to one easy destination for all the files they need—whenever they need them, including nights and weekends.

Do you want to maximize your confidence and convenience?

Your homeowners association website software provider needs to offer you all the features that can make your site the ideal online destination for information and document management. It’s not enough to be able to create a document repository. You need access control, not just access—and the ability to configure your file library exactly the way you want it, with customized permissions that govern which (if any) files the general public can see and which carry specific restrictions.

Document repository flexibility is just one aspect of HOA website software, but it’s an essential part of the administrative toolkit. Save your time for more important matters than filing, copying, and mailing with the right combination of file-management features.

At HOAStart, we’ve configured our homeowners association website software to offer you a thorough, thoughtfully integrated set of features that make your administrative job easier. After all, you want an HOA website that simplifies community life, not one that takes all your time to manage. To see how well we’ve anticipated your needs and met them with a full-featured package of options and flexibility, sign up for our free 15-day trial. No credit card required; just fill in a brief form and you’re on your way to discovering the ideal home for your community website.