AtHomeNet Blog 360

Yes, I know that it is almost February, 1/12th of the way through the New Year, but I’ve always been the cautious type – look before you leap and all that and now I am ready to announce my New Year Resolutions..  all the typical 40ish year old woman stuff on the personal side, lose weight, exercise more, eat right, be nicer to the hubby, etc. 

On the business side, one of our company goals is to work with our admins to increase resident adoption of their community web sites.  Once a resident finds recurring value in the site, the community as a whole benefits by reducing their costs for distribution of information,  have greater resident involvement and a better informed neighborhood.

To that end, first item on the list is to make sure our Admins know all the amazing features we have available and understand how they can apply them to their own community web sites.  Every month we publish the AtHomeNet Gazette (find it at www.AtHomeNetAdmins.com  ) and this week AtHomeNet’s Director of Client Services, Tasha Beard, is holding two FREE online classes reviewing 2008′s enhancements for admins. In 2008 we released over 400 enhancements to our service so we understand that admins might not be aware of all of them – so this class is focused on the best of the best from 2008.  You can register today at by clicking here

Join us in making our resolution a reality!

With the nation’s financial troubles taking center stage, many HOAs and communities are trying to find ways to maximize community resources. Many already know that having a community website eliminates paper, printing, time, and distribution methods, but many communities are coming up with innovative ways to use their websites to not only save money but also to save valuable time.

For instance, using the combination of the eForm feature and the Task Manager feature for your Architectural Review Committee (ARC or ACC) you can let residents submit ACC requests directly online and they will automatically feed into the Task Manager as a new, open task.  Your ACC committee members can then use all the powerful features of the Task Manager (status tracking, automatic email notifications, notes and comments tracking) to review and debate the request online prior to the regular meeting whenever it is convenient for each committee member.  Then when meeting time shows up nobody has to wait around while everyone reviews each request and argues about it.  Your meetings become gatherings to sign requests you have already reviewed online. 

I know this from experience because I was the chair of the ACC committee in my 612 home community for several years and before we began using Task Manager our meetings could easily be 2+ hours long.  Once we implemented a policy of posting and reviewing all requests online in the Task Manager the meetings were cut down to as short as 30 minutes a month.  Now that’s a meeting I can handle!

What other ideas do you have for using a community website to save time and money for your volunteers and your community?  Share them in the comments.

An opinion piece by Stephen Wildstrom in the September 15th Businessweek caught my eye. It is about how the lobbyists for firms such as AT&T and Comcast are asking Congress to let them impose surcharges on or caps to control excess internet usage.  As our industry moves from having locally hosted management software to internet accessible software, business owners need to be closely watching this legislation or their “cost of doing business” is going to sky-rocket without them even seeing it coming. I seriously doubt the banks and other software vendors are mentioning these as possible future costs to associate with using their software. AT&T and Comcast are saying that it costs them an average of $416 a month to provide unlimited internet to each household – imagine the costs they can claim are associated with a management company’s office where they have 10 or 20 managers all day long accessing their accounting software and streaming it across the internet.  Hopefully the management companies switching to this type of software are in areas where fiber-optic access is available.

As you may have heard AtHomeNet moved into a new, larger office about 2 weeks ago.  We are very excited to be in the new space and to celebrate Imari finished editing some random footage he took during the move into an amusing little video.  So without further ado, here is a tongue-in-cheek look behind the scenes of the AtHomeNet 2008 office move.

Oh, and just for fun, here is a still shot of (almost) the whole AtHomeNet crowd the day after the move was completed.  A couple of folks weren’t around that day and we have already hired a few new folks (we really needed the larger space) so we’ll have to redo the pic pretty soon.  Take special note of the 3 members of our crack security team making a rare public appearance: Louie, Tommy, and Tuddy.  (Tommy is the rude one on the left)

AtHomeNet Crew

We recorded this video about 10 months ago but I think it is a really neat use of our community website technology to solve a problem.  This community in the Atlanta area had communication and coordination issues around handling reservations for thier tennis courts.   They decided to take their AtHomeNet community website “Reservations” feature and make it accessible via a stand-alone kiosk in a covered area directly next to thier tennis courts and thus allow residents to easily see what times and courts were available and make & cancel reservations court-side.  They even used the “eForm” feature to allow residents to easily ”Report a no-show”.  Check out the Tennis Court Reservations Kiosk video to see this in action.  I love to see innovative uses of our website service like this.  Thanks to Chip Yonkee of the Tuxford Homeowners Association who put in lots of effort to make this kiosk happen and let us come out and video interview him about it.

Great job Chip!

Greetings,

I’m very excited to be posting this first entry in the AtHomeNet blog.  This is all new for us so I’m sure we will have some growing pains along the way but the general idea is for a few of us AtHomeNet folks to occasional post about everything from general community association items to “Inside AtHomeNet” news, to anything else that we think you may find of interest.  We hope you check in with us on occasion and we hope that when you do you find it worth your while.

Sincerely,

Jeff Sanders