In our community of 30 apts and 2 retail tenancies, our founding vision was for intentional community i.e. we would be good neighbours to each other and work collaboratively together. Luckily we attracted a number of owners who are committed to both this vision and to effective communication. We set up a Slack forum even during the build stage so that we could share info and concerns. We ask owners and tenants if they want to be in it, and they supply their email addresses for that. It was quite disappointing when Slack changed their business model and now (unless we pay an exorbitant amount for a bigger plan) our exchanges “time out” at three months old. Once we moved in we started producing and distributing regular community newsletters as well.
This year the management committee drafted a comms plan so that we could see where our communication gaps were. As people have widely varying needs and styles of communication, we wanted to make sure we had enough “channels” to reach most people with most messages, and also that we were safely storing information for future reference.
This is all driven by active owners, as the strata manager keeps only the official and financial records and issues only terse legalistic messages. They are also subject to staffing changes, and the corporate memory is lost with every replacement.