The Communications Committee (CC) has three members: Shannon Tully, Carol LeBlanc and Joel McClung. As of June 1st, Joel McClung has taken over as chairman of the committee from Jim Joyce. Leslie Johnson resigned from the Communications Committee on July 13th to take care of personal business. She WILL be missed!
The CC has not met in person; all business has been coordinated via email.
We had a successful garage sale on Saturday, June 25, 2022. It was reported that access to the PARC section of the HOA from the rest of the subdivision is problematic because you have to turn around at the Rt 50 intersection. Going forward, maybe we should advertise that people should visit that section first, and then go into the Kensington Square area next. I’m looking for other suggestions on how we can be more inclusive for the PARC section.
Domain information
I established the following domains:
- KensingtonSquareHOA.com
- KensingtonSquareHOA.site
- KSHOA.site
Another alternative is KensingtonSquareHOA.org. KSHOA.org is being used by another HOA, so that isn’t available. The board and I agreed that KensingtonSquareHOA.com is the preferred domain for us, so we are moving forward with that one.
Typing domain #2 or #3 into your web browser automatically redirects to #1.
Web domains #2 and #3 will expire in a year. Right now, we are not planning to renew them mainly because of the cost – about $15/year per domain.
Web Site
The CC manages the HOA’s current web site http://www.KensingtonHomeowners.com, hosted by GoDaddy. Our account is paid until March 2025. Most of my work has been focused in this area. Accomplishments:
- The domain registrar information was under Jim’s personal GoDaddy account, and we transferred it to my personal account. Should something happen to Jim, and now me, the HOA could be negatively affected as the HOA might have to coordinate with heirs to regain control from our/my personal account. Therefore, I set up a new generic GoDaddy account and transferred all 4 domain names, all email configuration information, and the new web site to this account. I will share the account information with other HOA management TBD (for sure, at least Rich) so the HOA does not have a SPOF – Single Point of Failure.
- Created a new web site, https://www.KensingtonSquareHOA.com/. Copying the data from the old site to the new one is taking up the bulk of my time. In the interim, I will maintain both web sites.
- Set up https instead of http. This encrypts web traffic and is in keeping with standard good practices for modern web sites.
- I configured it so that each Committee Chairperson can edit their own section of the web site, should they desire. This also contributes to the elimination of a SPOF. Of course, the Chairperson can always continue to send their reports to the CC and we will incorporate it on the web site for them.
- Lots of ToDos for the new web site:
- Add a calendar
- Add the Nest Cameras output.
- Add the Twitter Feed to the web site
- Add more FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions
- Add web-based forms to:
- Request access to the Basketball Court.
- Allow homeowners to submit a change request electronically if the ARC approves electronic submissions.
- What else?
- Transition plan:
When we deem the new website ready for launch, I plan to:- Inform everyone via the google.io mailing list of the new website and email addresses. I will put a notice on the existing web site telling people we are transitioning away and include a link to the new site. We will run both websites in parallel for a few weeks. I will also update the footer on the groups.io mailing page to reflect the new web site.
- After a few weeks, we will sunset the old web site and it will automatically redirect users to the new site.
- email to the old addresses will continue to work until the domain expires in March 2025.
Email
The intent is for all HOA management personnel to have an email address that ends in @KensingtonSquareHOA.com. This looks more professional and shows it is coming from someone on the HOA management team. To that end, I have
- Set up Office365 email addresses for all HOA management personnel and configured it to forward to their regular email addresses. Login information for everyone has been shared with their respective owner.
- Set up email aliases for Board, CC, FC, GC, & ARC, so we can send an email from them. For example, we might want to send an email that appears to come from the Board; the message will show From: Board@KensingtonSquareHOA.com. It is already configured so that if you send an email to one of these addresses it gets sent to the members of that group.
Groups.IO
The groups.io communication system continues to work well. We have 290 email addresses registered. There were 33 messages in June and 7 so far in July and 209 YTD. For the July 20 HOA meeting, I put an calendar entry in and configured it to send a reminder 1 day before and 10 minutes before. Let’s see how that works and if attendance goes up with the extra reminders.
Ownership of the group has been transferred from Jim to the HOA-owned one. The account is valid until Oct 26, 2022.
Twitter
So far, I have done nothing with Twitter. It is still on my ToDo list.
Nest Cameras & Flock Safety System
I have administrator access to the Nest Cameras and Flock Safety system but have done almost nothing with them. I will share all of the information with the new Security & Maintenance Committee that is being formed. As the first order of business, either they, or I, need to spend some time addressing the 2 non-working Nest cameras.
Submitted by Joel McClung, CC Chairperson