A user just asked me to clarify who gets Announcements notifications via email. The short answer is: all of the homeowners and admins (and optionally renters) listed on the Community Members page.

But at the core of the question was some understandable confusion about the difference between the Directory and the Community Members page. I’ll try to break it down.

Community Members

Admins have access to the Community Members page. It can be found under Settings in the main menu. Community Members can be thought of as the source of truth. The Community Members pages lists all of the people who have access to your community. For every member it shows which home (or homes) they own (or rent). The email address by each person’s name is the one that person uses to sign into Our Little Community. It’s the email address where they receive Our Little Community notifications. Community Members also highlights who the admins are and allows you to give and revoke admin privileges. If you want to remove someone from your community so they can no longer sign in (maybe they moved out?), you can do that here. If you want to add and invite a new community member, you can do that here as well.

The Directory

The Directory, on the other hand, is a community-facing list of everyone who lives in the community. All community members, not just admins, can view the Directory. Homeowners have the ability to edit the info associated with their home. And while a homeowner could add an owner or renter to their Directory page, that won’t actually invite that person to join Our Little Community. Only admins can invite and give new members access to the community.

If an owner really wanted to, they could delete their name and email address and phone number from the Directory. But that wouldn’t be very neighborly 😅

It’s worth emphasizing that each person in the Directory can have a mailing address associated with them, but that piece of information is considered private and is not available to the community at large. Only admins or owners of that particular home can see someone’s mailing address in the Directory.

A slightly technical explanation

As far as the Our Little Community app is concerned, there isn’t really a one-to-one relationship between a member of a community — what’s shown on the Community Members page — and a person listed on a home’s page in the Directory. While in most cases someone’s name and email address on the Community Members page will be identical to their name and email address as it appears on the Directory, they don’t need to be. If a user changes their email address in the Directory, that won’t change which email address they use to sign into Our Little Community. Similarly, if they do change which email address they use to sign into Our Little Community (which they can do by clicking on their name in the main menu), that change will be reflected on the Community Members page, but their email address on the Directory will not automatically change.

For years I wanted software to help manage my small HOAs. Something private, affordable, friendly, and easy to use. Something that would make life easier and better for everyone. I never found what I was looking for, so I built Our Little Community.

There are a lot of solutions out there for large HOAs. The kinds of HOAs that are often managed by professional companies. These products consider 300-unit complexes to be “small.” And price? You probably need to call their sales team to find out.

No thank you.

I built Our Little Community for the 32 home development where I live. And it’s what I would have wanted at my previous 12 unit community, where I also served on the board for five years.

Before Our Little Community

At my first 12 unit condo, the closest thing we had to a community website was someone’s personal Google Drive to hold some of the community documents. But mostly we did everything by email. Which meant that pretty much everyone was in the dark. And community members had no idea how much work was getting done behind the scenes by the board! 😅 Oh, and that Google Drive that held the important documents? Yeah, that went away when its owner moved.

My second (and current) HOA was using Sharepoint as a community website when I arrived. That was better than nothing and actually had some nice features! People to send requests to the HOA board, for example. But it was ugly, it barely worked on a mobile phone, and, most importantly, it was difficult to use and update.

Eventually the guy who was maintaining it moved. When it came time to renew the Sharepoint subscription, the board and community didn’t want to keep paying for it. So I volunteered to build a new website. I looked at a few options and ended up cobbling something together with WordPress. People thought it was an improvement over the old site. It looked nice and clean and worked well on phones! But it had plenty of issues. Making updates, like adding documents or adding/removing community members was finicky. If someone reserved the shared common area, I had to manually update the site to reflect that. WordPress is great for some stuff, but it wasn’t really designed for what I was making it do. Frankly, I was annoyed every time I had to upload meeting minutes,

Something better

I finally buckled down and built something from the ground up that was focused on the needs of small HOAs and easy for anyone to use and update. The reaction was universally positive. The HOA board was happy with it. People liked using it. And, unlike the old WordPress site, I even liked working on it!

While I built it for my own community, from the beginning I knew that I was going to want to allow other people to use it. And that’s what I’m doing. If this is something you are interested in, feel free to sign up and check things out. It will be a paid service, not more than $30/month. But I’ll let you in on a secret: I haven’t even built in a way for people to pay for it yet 🤣.

It’s very early days over here at Our Little Community. Existing features will be improved, new features will be added. I’d love to have you along for the ride. Let me know what you think so far!