First quarter recap

We hope you and your community are enjoying lovely spring weather right now! Even though much of our team's focus has been on wrapping up the modernization of the community sites (more details in the previous recap blog post), we released quite a few high-impact new features last quarter. We're eager to showcase them, so let's dive right in!

🗓️ Duplicate calendar events

Communities often hold similar events that may not occur on a specific recurring schedule. For these, you can now duplicate an existing calendar event to make creating a new event quicker & easier! Duplicating an event prefills the “create event” fields with the same details as the existing event, allowing it to still be customized before publishing.

🖋️ Formatting for invitations

When sending an invitation to join your community website, you can now format the message in the same manner as a blast email! This allows your invitation to be more expressive with bolding, italics, links, bulleted lists, tables, images, and more. These formatting capabilities apply to the default invitation message as well.

✉️ Custom text in What’s Happening emails

Because of their frequency and engagement, What’s Happening emails make a great place to put useful reminders, contact info, announcements, etc. With our new feature, that's now possible! You can place "custom text" sections anywhere within your community's What's Happening emails—whether at the top, bottom, or somewhere in between. You're not limited to just one section, either; add as many as you need! Get started by adding a new custom text section in the “Content” settings for What’s Happening emails.

📣 Support for longer text messages

You can now send text messages up to a whopping 1,600 characters in length! While texts remain best suited for succinct messages, the ability to write longer messages when needed is helpful. These longer messages will appear as a single text message from the recipient's perspective, making it easy to read; however, behind the scenes, they're actually multiple messages stitched together, which is why they require additional credits to send.

💬 Custom notes in welcome emails

Two "welcome" emails—one welcoming newly-imported members and another welcoming newly-approved accounts—now offer the ability to include custom notes from your community! This is great for sharing tailored information that would be helpful for new members. These notes can be formatted with styling, links, etc., and are previewable within the larger message before they're saved.

🧾 More detailed letter receipts

A small but nice improvement: going forward, mailed letter receipts will show a detailed breakdown of the price with the elements that factored into it, like the number of pages and whether it was printed in color.

➡️ Improved “continue” button verbiage

We improved every "continue" button throughout the Admin Portal to ensure its verbiage indicates which step you’re continuing to, further clarifying that these “continue” buttons are moving you to the next step rather than submitting the form.

🌍 Expanded international support

From time-to-time, we add support for new countries, giving communities the ability to set their location within these countries, and giving members the ability to store addresses within these countries. Last quarter, we added support for the following countries:

• Ecuador 🇪🇨
• Italy 🇮🇹
• Romania 🇷🇴

Wrapping up

The conclusion of the multi-year effort to rebuild our software using next gen technologies is nearing, so keep an eye out for future communications from us regarding the promotion of the beta community sites out of beta! Our whole team is excited about the completion of this ambitious project, and especially how it will further accelerate the release of new features and improvements.

As always, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn and Threads, watch our changelog, and read our blog for all the latest happenings here at HOA Express.

Until next time.