Greetings! This month, we’re back with a new feature for ballot write-ins and several enhancements in partnership with Ballot Bliss to help your communities increase election administration and turnout. Keep reading to learn more about these new, exciting features!
New Features
Improve Resident Engagement with Advanced Write-ins
Residents have diverse perspectives, and sometimes the standard ballot or questionnaire options don’t capture their choices. Whether you’re gathering input on amenity improvements in a survey or conducting an election, residents have valuable ideas that often go beyond the pre-determined choices. To bridge this gap and offer residents more voting options, we’re releasing a new feature with Ballot Bliss that supports write-ins for multiple-choice questions. This means that residents can still select from original options while adding their suggestions through write-ins.
For communities that implement cumulative voting, this opens up a new way to increase engagement with your residents, as they can distribute their allocated votes among both existing choices and write-ins based on their preferences.
The system automatically captures and organizes all responses, including write-ins, which eliminates the manual tallying that often delays results. You’ll get comprehensive reporting that shows both standard selections and resident-generated options, which gives you a more complete picture of community preferences while increasing engagement.
Enhancements:
This month, we’ve enhanced several existing features to help you communicate more reliably with your residents, simplify voting administration, and increase participation in your community’s next election.
Easily identify invalid contacts and communicate with confidence
In a recent release, we introduced the new “Bad Contact Information” Report, which helps you identify residents with outdated contact information, such as invalid emails, phone numbers, and text numbers. To make browsing simpler, the report automatically defaults to showing just those residents with invalid contact information. This new enhancement makes it quicker for you to identify and resolve your HOA’s communication delivery issues. This new enhancement also gives you peace of mind that messages are being sent to the correct contacts, which is especially vital during emergencies.
User-friendly voting experience for residents
We’re excited to share some improvements we’ve made to the resident voting experience to help boost turnout. These small changes will make the experience smoother from the ballot invite to casting the vote.
- Navigate Ballots Easier – When residents receive their ballot, they’ll notice cleaner spacing between each question.
- Multi-answer questions – Multiple choice questions now show the number of current selections vs the maximum votes that are allowed.
- Ballot invite formatting – Whether your residents choose to receive paper or email invites, the improved formatting ensures that they will have clear access to their unique voting credentials and instructions.
- Community names moved to the end of ballot invites – We recently gave the email invite a big redesign. This month, we’ve moved the community name in the ballot email subject line to the end so that the most important details about voting catch your residents’ eyes first.
Streamlined ballot administration
- Compliance alert for Truly Secret Ballots – The system now provides clear notifications to HOA ballot administrators that secret ballot votes cannot be deleted or modified once residents cast them. This ensures full compliance with various HOA state laws and aims to protect resident privacy.
- Expanded unit weights/percentage of ownership – We’ve expanded unit weights to 10 decimal places based on our customers’ feedback to allow communities more precision in votes that require a percentage of ownership to calculate votes.
- Better formatting for contact information in results – We’ve resolved the formatting for special characters in residents’ names in the ballot reports, so it correctly displays joint ownership (such as “John & Jane Smith”) and business names.
Improving resident communications and engagement
As a manager or board member, you’re juggling countless responsibilities from getting important announcements to every homeowner to organizing community votes, and everything in between. We’ve added several new features and enhancements in partnership with Ballot Bliss in the release that are aimed at helping you make resident engagement and community voting simpler. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.
About Pilera
Pilera Software has been at the forefront of innovation in community association management technology with its association-focused CRM platform. Focusing on relationships over transactions, Pilera’s CRM helps community association managers and boards optimize communications, streamline operations, and enhance overall resident satisfaction, resulting in stronger, more resilient communities and increased client retention for the management company. If you’d like to learn how to build strong relationships with your communities, schedule a demo!
