Voting and Surveys- How are they different and how do they work?

Voting- Your HOA may/may not hold meetings where voting determines who will serve on your next HOA board. Some HOAs also hold formal and proper votes for other decisions such as changes to the CC&Rs when needed. The EasyHOA voting tool allows you to formalize any and all voting processes to give you accurate and real-time results.

Surveys- Your HOA may/may not conduct surveys from time to time to get a pulse on what the community thinks about certain topics. For example: Your HOA may want to see the interest level of all the owners in the community on whether they want to spend HOA funds to build a new playground in the common area. Surveys are used in HOAs as a less formal method of gathering interest and that is how surveys typically differ from Voting.

Voting: How to setup a voting campaign?

Click on “Add Voting Campaign” and then a page that looks like this will appear:

You can title your new campaign. Example, if you are looking to elect a new board member, you would title the new campaign “Election of New Board Member”. Then, you can select from a dropdown which form you would like each owner to fill out by clicking the dropdown arrow next to “Form”. If you need to create a new form, click on “New Form” and create a new form that you would like owners to fill out as their “vote”. You can select when you want the voting to start and when you want the voting to end. If you select “Shared” from the sharing access dropdown menu(located under the start date field) it means that all team members that have access to voting/surveys can see all information about that voting campaign such as who voted and what they voted for. If you select “Anonymous” from the dropdown instead of “Shared” the team members that have access to the HOA dashboard can only view the results of the vote in real time and individual information of who voted and what they voted is not shared.

On your new campaign, you can select how you would like to make owners aware of the campaign. There are three options, Email, Text and Owner App. Owner app means that when the owner logs into their online account, they can complete the vote and fill out the necessary form from within the owner portal. To chose who you would like to be notified or the “Recipients” you can select from the dropdown and it will populate the results of the filter on the page and you can select or deselect certain recipients. If you want to create a custom group of who you send the campaign to, you can click on “New Group” and create a group of individuals you would like to participate in the voting campaign.

Recipient Filter options that are hard coded into the dropdown are:

• All owners- This means that all owners(primary and secondary) will appear on the list below to send the campaign to if selected
• Board Members- This will pull up a list of all active board members that have been added in under Tools>Boards
• Authorized Voters- This will pull up a list of all authorized voters within the HOA. You can manage who is authorized to vote by going to Reports>Primary/Authorized Owners

When you are ready to send the campaign out to the appropriate list of people, you can click “Save and Send” down at the bottom left hand corner of the “New Voting Campaign” page.

The email and text verbiage that is used when sending the campaign via email and/or text is managed in the main menu under “Templates” in Automatic Templates>Survey Verbiage. Make sure that the verbiage is worded how you would like it before clicking on “Save and Send”.

After your campaign has been sent out for the owners to vote, you can view and track the results of the vote by going to Voting/Surveys on the main menu and then clicking on the campaign and then there is a button in the upper right hand corner of the campaign page that says “Preview” which will show you a preview of the campaign and if you click on “Results” it will show you the results of the campaign and you can print the results off.

You can also export the list of users and whether they participated or not in a pdf or in a csv file to upload into a spreadsheet.

Surveys: How to setup a survey campaign?

See above steps for setting up a voting campaign. The process is identical

Note: The EasyHOA software is equipped with an Autosave option when owners are filling out the form when they are logged in to their owner portal and are completing a form associated with a voting or survey campaign.

Related: Check out support articles on how to setup voting/survey groups and also how to build and create forms to go with a voting/survey campaign.