3 Promises to Make to Your HOA Membership—and How to Keep Them

Homeowners associations can bring order to the potential chaos of important aspects of neighborhood life, enabling communities to retain their essential character even as residents reshape them to reflect their families’ unique lives. HOAs that engage, involve, and connect with their residents reaffirm community identity and encourage deeper connections within their neighborhoods. But how can HOAs maximize their opportunities to accomplish these goals? To build and foster these kinds of strong connections, make and keep three promises to your HOA membership, promises that can transform your interactions with residents and your significance in the life of your community.

Promote and provide communication clarity

If your HOA is like most, you’ve promised your residents clear communication that presents and explains all the details of covenants and responsibilities. All too recently, HOAs communicated through bulletin board notes posted in clubhouses, snail-mailed dues invoices and event notifications, and the occasional voicemail message. Administrators maintained written notes of whose dues were up-to-date and whose had fallen behind. The entire process vastly exceeded the amount of time that largely volunteer administrative staffs could spare.

Digital communication made that process far easier to undertake, with e-mailed dues invoices replacing postage stamps and envelopes. But as the volume of e-mail exploded over the years, and spam frequently overtook legitimate communications, many HOAs struggled to deliver their communications into residents’ in boxes instead of their spam folders.

When social media arrived on the scene, many homeowners associations thought they had found a solution to most if not all of the problems with other forms of communication. If they established a virtual meeting place on a social platform to which most of their residents already subscribed, they figured that they had a built-in way of attracting attention to the periodic necessary business of an HOA. But those platforms’ identity dominates the look, feel, and functionality of any page that a subscriber, or subscribing organization, develops on them.

Today’s content management systems make website design easy enough that many HOA administrators figure they’ll simply set up an online property of their own. After all, states have begun to require that homeowners association maintain websites, so why not go for it? Except that if you’re not a website development professional, even an easy content management system may be a bit much, especially for an organization run by volunteers.

Maybe your HOA already has outgrown the old-fashioned methods of communication with residents that keep so many homeowners associations from achieving optimal efficiency. But communication is so fundamental to the success of homeowners association that administrators can’t afford to abandon the quest for the ideal alternative.

At HOAStart, we’ve built that alternative. When you choose us as your HOA website software provider, you can set up a site that fulfills all of your communication promises – and does so in a unique, stylish way that presents the advantages of your community in the best possible light. For that matter, with an HOAStart website, you’ll go beyond easy-to-set-up online invoicing of dues and fees. We provide complete messaging capabilities for community use, with customizable discussion areas that can maintain privacy among your residents.

Take the pain out of payments

The paper chase of old-fashioned approaches to invoicing homeowners association dues and fees makes collecting payments just as complex as the invoicing process. Who wants to chase down a resident and demand a dues payment, only to hear that an invoice never arrived or that “Oh, I’ll take care of that payment first thing on Monday”? Besides, collection activities surely rate at the bottom of the list of HOA duties for virtually all administrators, both because they’re time consuming and because no one wants to be a “money nag.” Many residents honestly do forget to take care of these dues and fees, and would do a much better job of timely payment if invoicing and reminder mechanisms were better developed and more efficient.

At HOAStart, we make it possible for you not only to promise your residents that you’ll simplify the payment process, but to keep that promise with ease. When you set up your homeowners association website through our easy-to-use platform, you automatically gain access to online payment capabilities, not only for your routine dues and fees, but also for the costs associated with events and the use of community amenities. Invoice and collect every payment through your website, with complete security and privacy for your residents and their personally identifiable information.

Remove reservations about reservations

One of the great perks of living in a well-managed community is access to outstanding amenities. From pools and tennis courts to boat slips and meeting spaces, HOAs boast a wide range of valuable features that residents can reserve for personal use and private events. But if you’re still relying on a combination of e-mail and paper signup sheets to process these reservations, you’re wasting valuable time on outdated methods.

With an HOAStart community website, you can define specific availabilities for every amenity you feature, post the days and hours for which residents can make reservations—and change those availabilities whenever the need arises. Set up fees and restrictions, including age requirements, and make your amenities available for easy online registration. Add community events to an online calendar that you can make visible to the general public or protect as a private resource available only to residents who log in to your website. Customize the entire process to make it convenient for you and your community. Now you can promise your residents that your amenities are as easy to access as they are to enjoy—and keep your promise with powerful online software.

It’s no secret that homeowners associations want to smooth out the process of interacting with residents. Now you can make communication—in all its forms—as convenient as you’ve always wanted it to be. At HOAStart, we’re confident that you’ll appreciate our community-friendly features, and to prove it, we offer you a completely free 30-day trial. Sign up without providing any payment details whatsoever, test our features, and see what a hit your website becomes with residents and fellow administrators alike.