Keith, As you may have noticed, Community123 owns and runs this HOATalk.com website. We offer it as a free service to HOA and condo leaders and use it to reach out to potential customers like yourself.
Some advice for you is below along with how we implement that advice on our service. Yes, this is a sales pitch but it also has advice you can use whatever route you choose:
We have been building and hosting Community websites since 2004 so we've learned a lot about how to make them work.
SECURITY? Our sites have multiple levels of security because we (and industry attorneys) don't recommend that internal HOA/Condo docs be published outside the association membership. Your Association is a corporation and it's internal docs should be kept internal just like any other corporation (public docs like CCRs, Articles, etc can be open to the public on your site).
FORUMS? As to forums, most of our Board customers choose not to have one, even for members only as it tends to require too much oversight work. What we normally use instead is an online Suggestion Box that all members can see, but there are controls on posting and the posts are not emailed to all members.
EMAIL? Lastly, we find that email is an important partner to the website. You have to push important information to members via email if you want them to see it. People will not check the HOA site too often on their own. It's used more as a 24x7 library when needed.
So what Community123 does is this: We have an Automatic Email Newsletter feature that reads your website once a month and sends a summary email with links back to the site for any upcoming events on your calendar, new documents posted (like minutes), new news articles posted, etc. This keeps the members up to date, brings them to the site for more details and the site becomes your permanent repository of Association information.
FREE SERVICES? Should you use a free service for your HOA/condo website? Of course you would expect us to say no, but here's why: Frankly, your community's image on the Internet is your website. Do you really want random ads popping up on your site? Imagine your front entrance sign having ads posted on it by the road. That would look cheap and so does a free site with Google ads or the like all over it. You need a real, professional website to represent the $millions of real estate in your community. It makes your community appear solid and well run to prospective Buyers and Realtors....Yes they are looking since 85% of all buyers search for community info on the Web.
DIY VOLUNTEER SITE? If you have a technical person in the community it sounds great to have them build your site for you. That may work OK until that person moves, leaves the Board or has a conflict with the Board. We have seen more than one community have their site taken away, taken over or let die in this situation. Many of our customers tried this first, then came to us when it failed. Other issues are that only one person can update and control the site, so the site is not updated often and the Board really has no control over it. Again, your site represents $millions in real estate and should be taken seriously as it is your Internet front gate to the world.
We offer a 2 month no hassle free trial if you want to see how it works.
Our company site:
www.Community123.com See our demo here:
http://demo.community123.com/ Get a free trial site here:
Click Here to request a no obligation free trial (takes 1 minute) Best Regards,
Community123 & HOATalk