One of the primary Duties of an Association is to keep all Residents INFORMED.
Primarily this happens via various Announcements from the Association Office, sending of Official Documents such as Invoices, Receipts, Meeting Informations, Minutes of Meetings etc.
Without a Reliable Communication channel for the above, the Association’s operations can break down.
In earlier decades this communication channel used to be Hand-Delivery of Notices, Notice Boards or Postal Mail.
Now, it is Email.
It is very Important for any Association to have the most Robust and Reliable Email Communication Infrastructure.
These are essentially bulk emails, where with a Click of a Button, the same Email gets triggered to hundreds or thousands of Owners/Tenants in a Community.
Currently there are two challenges to the Bulk Emailing infrastructure:
- Too many emails that go to Owners and Tenants. These can be for Essential as well as non-essential information.
- Email Service Providers have become exceedingly cautious about bulk emails and can stop email deliveries that seem spammy to them (by their parameters).
The above two together, can put the Email Channel of Communications at risk – where official emails may get dropped from delivery, get marked as spam etc. Then you have Owners who will rightly claim of never having received an Invoice Email or an AGM meeting notice etc.
With the Laser Focus on protecting the Official Email Communication channel of each Community, ADDA is taking the below steps:
1. For Owners/Tenants who have never ever activated their Account on ADDA (by simply logging in) only the ESSENTIAL emails will reach
Logging into ADDA verifies the email id of users, as well as records their consent to receive ongoing emails.
Until they log in at least once, they will continue to receive ESSENTIAL email such as Invoices, Receipts, Admin Announcements, Association Meeting information.
After they log in once, further email notifications can seamlessly keep going – Helpdesk updates, Forum Digests etc.
2. Changes to Forum Emails
In 2009, ADDA’s communication module primarily started as a replacement of yahoogroups and googlegroups.. these were email based groups.
ADDA even brought the email group + Forum functionality together.
As you know, such email groups are now extinct, so is the technology outdated.
The current private social network technology is that of an Online Forum, supported by Email Digests.
ADDA is moving towards the same.
This means NO CHANGE for Communities who started using ADDA from 2017.
However Communities that have started using ADDA before 2017, may have become habituated to using the forum entirely via email. They used to start a Forum post or respond to a post entirely from their Email Inbox. This will stop effective Nov-2023.
We understand habit change is inconvenient, but that’s the fallout of evolving technology.
So below is how the ADDA’s Forum (or Community Buzz) will work:
- For Users who like to participate in the Forum, please log into the ADDA app or Portal and post/respond.
- For Users who just like to stay informed of the goings on in the Forum, they will receive a Daily Digest with ALL posts and responses. They do not have to log in to ADDA at all to read these.
Building a Holistic Communication Strategy
ADDA has always been a pioneer when it comes to Community communications. While some product changes are being made to abide by the best practices being recommended by the Email Providers, rest assured that the ultimate goal – to ensure Convenient Community Communications, will not get compromised.
Presently, a holistic strategy covering different communication channels like Email, App Notifications, etc. with the intention of providing the best Community Communication experience is being worked on.
Quite a few product changes related to this, are being rolled out.
From ADDA, we would like to urge users to try adopting the ADDA App. Today App based conversations, among all age groups, have become the norm. Social media and conversation platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, have seen widespread acceptance across age groups.
Through the ADDA App, everything related to the Community, including Conversations, can be easily accessed. One would only find information related to their Community in the App. No Spam.
With the ADDA mobile App, participating in conversations becomes easier, as users get access to multiple advanced features – for example: Tagging neighbors, Replying to specific comments, edit/delete of posts, etc. These are not possible through emails.
For some critical functions like Community Announcements, which also send out bulk emails, active discussions are in progress with the email providers to make an exception.
Emails for other transactions like Invoices, Facility Booking updates, Helpdesk Request updates will continue to function as usual.
While necessary justifications are being provided to ADDA’s email providers to make sure critical email notifications do not get stopped, your kind cooperation is requested, to help reduce the non-critical emails from going out.
As always, the goal is to make sure that the best Community Living experience is achieved through use of ADDA. Thank you for your patience and support. For any questions, issues, or feedback, please write to us.