3 Ways to Share Your HOA Administration Workload Effectively
Homeowners association administration can be a time-consuming task, one made more complicated by the fact that most HOAs are run by volunteers. Even though conducting association business online can save you an immense amount of time and hassle—more on that in a moment—you still have tasks to accomplish, members with whom to communicate, and problems to solve. The old saying that “If you want something done right, do it yourself” doesn’t take into consideration the sheer amount of work that a homeowners association administrator faces —and how much that workload can upset work/life balance. Technology can step in and make those tasks much easier to perform—if you choose the right technology.
Communication
One of the simplest ways to make the tasks of homeowners association administration easier is to foster strong, effective communication between administrators and members and among members themselves. Confusion dramatically complicates the work of an HOA administrator, who now must explain situations that good lines of communication would have clarified.
“When do I have to pay my dues?” “How can I reserve the tennis court or the clubhouse?” “Why did you refuse to grant my architectural request?” Do these questions sound familiar? Of course, members always will ask these things, even if you make the answers readily available, but with strong lines of communication, far fewer of these questions will come your way. The real question is, “How do I strengthen communication capabilities with and among members?”
Once upon a time, the answer was as simple as it was time consuming. All administrators spent way too much time on the phone, writing e-mail messages, sending out invoices in the mail, posting amenity reservation forms on clubhouse bulletin boards, and using a wide range of largely inefficient methods to communicate with members.
Today, your homeowners association can set up a website to solve these problems and improve the communication situation exponentially. If you already have a website for your HOA but it doesn’t include strong communication features, perhaps it’s time to consider a different homeowners association website software provider. Wouldn’t you rather be able to message and text members directly from a centralized online property? Wouldn’t it be easier to maintain a Community calendar online, where everyone who needed to see it could access it?
Good communication makes your job easier. It also makes it easier for you to find other members to whom you can delegate some portions of your workload. At HOAStart, we’ve built communication features directly into our website software, including private chat, newsfeeds, and messaging that you can designate as private or even make public. We know how important it is to keep in touch with your members, to provide them with timely updates, to find out what’s on their minds and answer their questions before they become problems.
Identification
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple, straightforward way of finding out which of your community members would be interested in assisting with homeowners association business—without having to go door to door, send out e-mail messages, and waste as much time as you’re trying to save?
If you choose the right homeowners association website software provider, you can answer that question through your website itself. In fact, you can ask that question during the process of signing up your members for website access privileges—or in a survey that you conduct directly through your website.
When you first set up a website, you need to enroll all your community members as website members. With the right HOA website software, you can create a custom form for residents to complete when they sign up, including optional and required questions. As you build the website membership registration form, simply include a question about involvement in HOA administration, and you’ll very quickly be able to identify all the residents who are interested in participating. To prescreen residents even further, include additional questions about the types of administrative work that appeal to them. The “Yes” answers may not constitute an enormous percentage of your community membership, but you don’t need a long list of administrative helpers to get the job done.
Delegation
Once you’ve found residents who want to involve themselves in homeowners association administration, how do you delegate portions of your workload to them? Again, once upon a time, the answer to that question would have involved the same kind of “manual labor” required for communication, invoicing, and pretty much every aspect of homeowners association administration business: e-mail, phone calls, and even snail mail.
Not today, especially not if you choose the right homeowners association website software provider. To give others partial access to the back end of your website and its convenient administrative dashboard, look for a solution that enables you to set up sub-admin roles.
The right solution gives you a easy way to set up roles that provide access to subsets of administrative features and enable you to attach the names of specific members directly to these roles. Ideally, this should require no more than a handful of clicks, plus just enough typing to name the role and briefly describe what it does.
At HOAStart, we’ve built that feature directly into our homeowners association website software. We know that when you want to share the workload with others, you don’t want the act of delegation to become complicated, time consuming, and frustrating. We’ve spent years working with HOAs, and we’ve created our software to solve the problems that we know face HOAs everywhere. Through our software, you only need a matter of seconds to create and name a role, give it a very brief description, select the administrative features you want to add to it, and apply that role to specific members whom you choose directly from a dropdown menu.
Best of all, we know that HOAs want to try out solutions before they make commitments to them. That’s why we’ve built our software to offer you a completely free 30-day trial, one for which you can sign up without providing any credit card details. Create your website, customize it extensively through our easy-to-use professionally designed templates, engage your members in the process of homeowners association administration, and find out how much a well-designed website can help your HOA accomplish its goals.
