HOA Meeting Reminder & Messaging System

Getting the Whole Community Involved in Your HOA Meetings

One of the biggest hurdles facing an HOA board or property manager is figuring out how to involve the whole community.

A productive meeting requires input from as many people as possible. With little information to guide them, most will either convene at the wrong times or will allow too much discussion without anything being accomplished.

In order to get the most benefit from your HOA you first must learn how to get your neighbors to participate.

HOA Meeting Agenda Guidelines

Try adapting these guidelines to your next HOA meeting to improve the positive impact it can have on your community:

• Get as many residents as possible involved. You can do this by making the effort to find out when the majority of them are available for meetings.
• Use the DialMyCalls phone polling feature and send the residents a message asking them to choose a day of the week that is most convenient for them. The broadcast report keeps track of the responses which you can then review to help you pick the day.
• Once you have a date set, send an automated call to all of the residents urging them to participate a week ahead of time. Mention one or two of the items to be discussed in the HOA meeting agenda and stress how important their presence means to the community.
• Revamp your original message and resend the night before the meeting. Make sure you sound upbeat, positive and genuinely interested in hearing their thoughts at your meeting.
• Have an agenda prepared for the meeting and stick with it. This helps to keep the meeting from going off on tangents and running too long. If your neighbors remember the last meeting as being lengthy and chaotic, they are not likely to turn up for the next one.
• Allocate time on the agenda for community concerns. You might not realize that a large tree is blocking an intersection on the next block, but your neighbors know. You need to have a set amount of time put aside during your meeting where the community members can bring items to the board’s attention.
• Take a break at the midway point and serve refreshments. There may only be time for a 15 minute recess, but during those 15 minutes your neighbors are able to socialize and get to know one another. Adding an element of socialization along with snacks to the meeting will encourage people to return to the next one.
• Using DialMyCalls’ SMS text message broadcasting, follow up with the community a day or two after the meeting. Thank them for their participation and highlight the points that the HOA will be working towards improving with the HOA meeting agenda in mind.
• Invite them to text you back their thoughts on the meeting and ways it could be improved upon. The more involved the community feels in the HOA, the more inclined they will be to keep participating.

The purpose of your HOA is to keep your neighborhood a clean and safe environment for the residents and their families. With a specific HOA meeting agenda and increased participation in your group meetings, reaching and exceeding those goals will become a reality.