Coronavirus HOA Communications Strategies to Residents
The rapid evolution of coronavirus (COVID-19) information disseminated from national and international health organization made it clear that boards need to update their residents about health and safety guidelines relatively quickly to help support their own well-being.
Developing a comprehensive HOA communications strategy will help your board members and management team inform the community in a timely manner.
Read on to learn how to develop a comprehensive communication strategy for your association.
Choose Your Team
Before you get started developing a communications strategy surrounding COVID-19, it’s important to have the right team in place. This team can be made up of members of the board, volunteers from the building, or you can choose to hire them. Your team should include the following roles:
Researcher: The news surrounding COVID-19 moves quickly and it’s imperative that the information you’re giving residents is accurate, up to date and relevant. Have someone on your team who monitors reliable health organization sites alert the rest of the team when any important news breaks.
Writer: Just as important as the information you’re disseminating to residents is the quality of the writing in any communication. Typos and grammatical errors undermine the credibility of your communication. Well-written communications should be grammatically correct and clearly communicate the information collected. Your writer and researcher can be the same person.
Editor: No matter how good your writer is, it’s important to have a second set of eyes on anything your board sends to residents. No one is perfect, and an editor is there to pick up any inadvertent mistakes that the writer may have made when putting the email together. The writer and editor should always be two different people.
Graphic Designer: Good design is an essential part of any communication strategy. You could be communicating vital information on a variety of platforms, but if residents don’t take notice or have a hard time reading the content due to design, your communication may fall on deaf ears. Make sure the graphic designer is comfortable working in both print and digital media.
Other possible roles of the communication team are a webmaster, social media manager, and videographer, which can be performed by just a couple of people. Make sure whoever you use has the requisite skill sets for the role.
Start with a Goal
A good HOA communication strategy should be focused around one central goal. This goal will form the foundation of any communication that you send out or post around your community. As you’re creating a strategy surrounding the coronavirus, the goal of your strategy can be something as simple as “Keeping our residents informed of the latest reliable coronavirus updates as they relate to our community.”
Once you have your goal, whenever you’re developing content within this strategy, you can always come back to this goal and ask your team whether the content helps achieve this goal. If it does, then proceed as usual. If it doesn’t, then table that content until a time when it is relevant to the goal.
Identify Your Audiences
It may seem obvious that your audience is your residents but look past that when identifying specific audiences. Different audiences require different methods of communication, from the way you communicate the information to the way the information is sent.
Develop your audience through basic demographics: age, gender, marital status, household income, etc. and if you have the information available, which will help you form a more sophisticated definition of your audience. The following are some examples of audience types:
Single, 30-something women who earn over $70K
Married, Gen X Fathers
Women who use the community amenities more than twice a week
Retired couples who frequently attended community events before the coronavirus pandemic.
Try to define at least 2 audiences for your community (it’s likely you have much more than 2 but keep it simple to start) and list the best times and communication platforms for each audience.
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