Snowbrook Owners Association

Transcription

1 Date: March 22, 2013 Report: Communication/Technology Report Contact: Scott Irving Snowbrook Owners Association Technology Opportunities This report looks at ways we can improve owner involvement and enjoyment of Snowbrook Village and the condo association through the application of technology. There are several issues currently 1. Attending board meetings is both expensive and time consuming for board members. For a board member living in Portland it requires 5-6 hours of driving at a cost of $100- $150. Participating in association committees and board positions would be more attractive to owners if the cost and time commitments were less. 2. Getting sufficient owner attendance for the annual board meetings has been a problem. As above it is a lot of driving and expensive for a meeting. 3. Committees has similar issues to those for the board. Owner willingness to participate on committees could be improved by lowering costs. 4. Geographic locations owners, and therefore board members are spread out over several states, and Maine itself is extremely large. 5. It is difficult for owners to get to know one another during the ski season. At this point the technology needed to overcome or improve these issues is easily within reach of most members. There are a large number of technology solutions that could be implemented. However, only a small number is required to solve the most pressing issues. While a number of items will be discussed below, we should focus only on those solving critical needs. User owned computers We have owners who use Windows, Macintosh, Linux, as well as tablets, and smartphones. Our technology solutions should work with all or most of these. There are a large number of possible tools. What follows is a brief discussion of some of these. A short list of recommendations follows at the end. Voting Owner participation for voting has been noted as a problem. However electronic voting should be able to help with this.

2 Online voting would operate in a manner similar to proxy vote systems do for stock holders. An owner login can control the number of votes a user has. Since the system knows who has or has not voted, reminder s can be sent to those needing to vote. An online voting system should eliminate the need for proxy cards and the associated printing and mailing costs. If we have any remaining members without or internet connection we may need to send a few hard copies, but that should go away within a few years. An electronic voting system can be utilized with the meeting broadcast system to allow those attending a meeting remotely to vote. A number of electronic voting system providers exist and we need to build a requirements specification and then select one. At the simplest level a online survey system can almost fulfill this need, however a good system will provide systems to insure owners can only vote the appropriate number of times and would provide audit capabilities. Meeting Participation Web based software can help the board, committees, and for the two annual owner meetings. It is likely that many owners have already used this type of system at work. Committees/Board Web meeting software can reduce the amount of traveling required while allowing work to move forward efficiently. Usage may include Two board members getting together for a discussion A committee working on their project A full board meeting with owners present via the web. A virtual board meeting with owners present via the web. Etc. The first two items should easily be possible using a free tool like Skype. For larger meetings a web meeting tool should be used. There are several possibilities that would need to be evaluated. Tools such as GoTo Meeting and Citrix are known to work, but they are relatively expensive. Anymeeting is available both as a paid subscription and as a free ad supported version. Owner Meetings Web meeting software can be used to increase owner participation. While many owners are not able or willing to drive to Sugarloaf for a two hour meeting, web based meeting software can be used to allow them to participate. These large owners meetings would require additional setup. A camera, or several cameras, allowing web participants to see would be good. Further the computer should be connected to the PA system

3 so comments from online can be heard. And those speaking will need the microphone connected to the computer so they can be heard. It will take a few tries at doing this for a larger group to get the kinks worked out, but this is not an unknown. We need to select software, sound equipment, and video equipment. We can likely use what we already own, or rent when needed. Web meeting software allows the meeting to be recorded. These could be made available via the web site. Communication Tools Snowbrook.org Webpage For any organization their webpage is the central core communication resource. It possesses the ability to deliver dynamic up to date news, and to hold long term reference information. The problem with a web page is that it is a pull type resource, owners need to go to it to get information. This can be overcome. The current snowbrook.org web page is very basic. The content is useful but fairly static. There are areas where it should be extended. To extend it may require moving it to a more capable provider. Recommendations: Move to a web page that has a login capability. This will then allow the web page to be used for several things: o Storage of sensitive documents that should be owner only. For example all board and committee minutes should be available online. Current budget reports could also be made available. o Addition of owner discussion groups o Collecting basic owner profiles. Why this is useful will be discussed below. o Addition of outgoing Add a discussion group to the web page. There currently exists as a Yahoo group. The Yahoo format works but could be better. The discussion group can include questions and answers about the area, suggestions and feedback. Outgoing - We should look into using a tool such as Constant Contact for s. This is fairly low cost and provides attractive s and feedback on the success of s such as the number of people who opened them. Optimally this is tied to the discussion groups. Include owner interest profiles. Nothing extensive, hobbies and expertise. The hobby information is good for people getting to know each other, i.e. who else golfs? The expertise would be useful for the board when questions arise. Who as expertise in law, mechanical systems, construction, etc. We have 200+ units, and likely a broad set of skills.

4 Add newsletter capabilities. Be it the MVP newsletter or perhaps owner generated content a newsletter is an opportunity to keep owners informed about the association, the mountain and to drive traffic to the website. Owner placed advertisements and classifieds. The above items can be phased in, and can be driven by a website committee. Social Media There are a large number of choices available. Suggest starting simple and focusing on Facebook. If this succeeds then revisit and determine if using another platform, such as twitter, Pinterest, etc. would be useful. Facebook is by far the most popular, and many owners are already users. A Snowbrook Facebook page has been reserved. Why? Facebook can facilitate owners getting to know each other by the posting of pictures and comments. In person social events can be announced and organized via Facebook. An active Facebook page presented to others would show Snowbrook as a vibrant community. Since Facebook isn t just available on the mountain it would facilitate owners continuing to communicate with each other when home. Twitter is also heavily used, but the benefit of this for Snowbrook is less clear. I would recommend not doing anything here and revisit after Facebook and if a need arises. A Snowbrook twitter account should be created to reserve the name for us for future use. Youtube has some value as a Condo Association marketing tool. At this time the best usage would be indirect. Video s posted by either the Association or owners can be linked to either our web page or our Facebook page. Recommendation: Initiate use of a Snowbrook Facebook group by communicating availability and providing simple usage instructions. Survey s Most of the above have focused on getting information out to owners or on communications between groups. Surveys are a great tool to get valuable feedback from owners. While an can be used, the results returned are unstructured and often it is hard to get a clear result. A reasonable survey tool allows easy construction of a survey to get clear results. Inclusion of comment boxes allows access to the open ended comments that one gets when using . For example Recently we hired an expert to evaluate our association management. A survey of owners prior to this could have been done to flesh out issues that would be valuable for the expert to look into. The by- laws are being re- written. A survey could be used to test for owner preferences. For example a question could be posted asking owners to choose between two set of language.

5 Other survey questions could be simple choices or a yes/no question. By involving the owners it is more likely an acceptable set of by- laws will be generated. Collaboration A broad variety of tools exist that allow people to work together even though they are separated geographically. Platforms such as Google drive, box.com, dropbox all allow many people to work on documents together. Administration of any of these platforms should not be too complex. There should only be a small core of people using the space for collaboration, and there requiring edit capability and privileges. Possibly more people will need access in a read- only fashion. Cost Almost all of the coworking platforms provide a basic amount of space for free, ranging from 2 Gb to 15Gb. Beyond that the prices vary greatly. However for Condo association needs, it is unlikely that we would need more than a few Gb. Stability We should look for a vendor that is likely to be available for many years to avoid the confusion and disruption of moving. The license agreement with the selected vendor must insure that the condo association owns any and all data stored on the system. Recommendation Of the available tools Google drive is suggested. Not only does it provide a common storage area with 7Gb of free space, but it also provides the software tools required. This latter point Is important because it allows a person who doesn t have MS Office to work with others. Other Tools Event managers can let people know of an event and then track when they RSVP. Event invitations can be done with Facebook but they are limited to Facebook users. Tools such as Eventbrite allow an list to be loaded and therefore will reach a larger number of members. Eventbrite is free for free events. Summary The following items should be the starting point 1. Online voting software 2. Web meeting software 3. Upgrade the existing web site

6 These three items can greatly improve the association at a reasonably small cost by improving the participation of owners. A number of other items are listed and briefly discussed but we should focus on a few items, we can phase in others after successfully implementing the three above.