Creating a Communications Plan to Manage Your Residential Community

Communications is an incredibly essential part of any business. When it comes to managing your residential community, you’ll most likely agree that it is a core part of your operations. Whether you are managing a condo, HOA, or multi-family units, you’ll want to integrate a strong communications process in every key aspect of your business so you can continue to create enriched value for your residents, employees, and board members. Community managers that we work with find communication very important so that they can instantly connect and exchange information with residents, employees, managers, board members, and vendors. Additionally, a good communications plan helps speed the process for managing critical problems.

1. Set High-Level Objectives

   Identify what purpose communications will serve for your business and how it can create value for all the individuals you interact with.  Create goals that are SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely.  Make sure the goals resonate well with where your residential property company has been in the past and how you envision the future to be.    

2. Pull in the expertise of team members and assign roles

   Depending on the size of your company and the objectives planned for, you may choose to pull in the expertise of team members and assign them various roles. Utilize the talent around you.  Be sure to document all your processes and ensure that each individual is clear on his or her goals, tasks, and the expected outcome.

3. Create recurring tactics that align with your objectives

   Tactics will serve as mini-milestones on your journey to achieving the objectives and SMART goals. Tactics are daily or one-time tasks that roll-up to the high-level objective and should be timely and relevant.  Essentially, a communications plan should consist of several concise, relevant, and timely tactics that will help to achieve the end results.

4. Invest in software/latest technology

   A multitude of considerations must be made when planning to invest in a piece of technology or software for community and residential communications. During consideration, your energies are directed toward researching tech/software features and trying to find the best fit for your departmental/organizational needs, testing out the ones that you like, convening with other team members, creating a budget for the investment, and then selecting a vendor to go along with.  

5. Monitor and analyze

   Evaluating the results of your communication is an ongoing process and will inform you of aspects of the program that are yielding the desired results and which aspects are coming short of the objectives.

6. Revise your communications plan

   Based on what you have monitored and evaluated, it’s time to make some alterations to the plan or continue with the same objectives and tactics to keep the momentum going. So, how did your communications strategy work (we hope it did!) for you?

Creating a plan for how to effectively engage with your residential community, managers, board managers, partners, and other individuals is a first step that you can take to enhance value for your community management company. You will also be better equipped to improve community and vendor relations as well as manage problems of any level of criticality.