Download member contacts to smartphone
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Bwe Siteowner
Provide the ability to download individual member contacts to your phone from the resident directory.
ORIGINAL POST:
Now that you have the info, let us link to it via our smartphones so that we can automatically have a synced list of all building owners on our phones. THIS IS A BIG FEATURE MISSING FROM HOA EXPRESS.
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D’Ann Bartley
I managed a newcomer club's website, and one of the best features of all was the ability to download the entire membership directory onto smart phones. It required logging in to use the feature, so that eliminated the concern about it being accessible to non-members. Also, each member had a privacy setting, so if it was really a big concern, could opt out of having personal information available, whether on the phone app or on the website. So many people were thrilled about it, and not only was the directory there, but you could literally make a phone call from the directory! Our members were/are almost exclusively retirees, 55+ and mostly 65+.
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Bwe Siteowner
D’Ann Bartley: i totally agree. we ended up creating a shadow directory in a gmail account and letting people add that to phone but it requires maintaining two databases, is not secure and is kludgy as heck. I really wish HOA would add this obvious feature!!
Robert Mclane
I very much favor Jody Leeds comment. Since members control their privacy settings, my residential community would like to be able to print out a residents list with name, address, phone and email (assuming member allows). It's nice for a resident, especially less tech savvy neighbors, to have a hard copy residents list. Would be helpful during our power outages during hurricanes and storms as well. Also would like the smart phone option - - many of us use them extensively.
Jody Leeds
Being we are an over 55 HOA community we have many members who wish to print the Directory now that we have stopped printing one 3 years ago. Or at least download it to their computers. Can that be an option?
Meredith Owens
Jody Leeds and Robert Mclane: We have a separate post open for being able to print the "Resident Directory" page on the website! You can view that here: https://feedback.hoa-express.com/feature-requests/p/printer-friendly-resident-directory.
Jamie Kinn
This seems like a potentially big security issue...suddenly everyone's info is floating around on someone's phone? I really would NOT agree to my personal directory info being downloaded to the phone of someone I may or may not know.
Meredith Owens
We're open to considering this capability! However, rather than automatically syncing the entire directory, we'd look at allowing you to download individual member contacts. This would likely be more useful, particularly for large communities. Therefore, we've updated this post's description to align with that.
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Bwe Siteowner
Meredith Owens: Well here’s the issue. Right now to get a printable directory I have to maintain it in one place, then our building uses a the directory in the HOA website so now we have to maintain it again and then because people need to have access to the directory so that they know how to reach people in an emergency or other reasons, I have to have a third place. The rule on databases is very simple —if you have two truths, you have no truth. Forcing people to have to keep create and maintain multiple copies of the underlying data is a very poor response. Period
The current website’s limitations require you to maintain multiple copies of this data and synchronize it in a really kludgy manner and it makes for a bad scenario. You can turn on the sync functionality and allow the individual admin’s to decide if they’re going to let people do it per community. But Talking out on building what is obvious functionality is a really bad answer.
Meredith Owens
Bwe Siteowner: The particular request we're looking at on this post is to be able to download individual contact profiles to your phone from the resident directory. If you'd like to see other features implemented that would help your community maintain your member information, we encourage you to create separate posts for each of those features. This way, we can review each one of them.