Our Board of Directors communicates with homeowners by letter and bulletin board postings as it has been doing since the start. In other communities homeowners could post things to a bulletin board to communicate with each other but here we have a locked bulletin board controlled by our board. That reality moved us in different directions.

One of The best Ways to Communicate Today

Today with the Internet so prolific and email easy to use we have an amazing opportunity to enhance this communication and get issues resolved by majority opinion and not at the whims and imagination of the Board of Directors.

The business world has brought us a very unique communication item. With a need to discover what their customers thought about services and products, the online survey was born.

Today online survey companies are enormous. We like the one with the funny name surveymonkey.com.

Here’s what surveymonkey says about themselves:

“Every day, 3 million people around the world use our platform, whether it’s to ask 10 employees about a company barbecue or 10,000 consumers about the next big product. That’s because we’ve built a platform that’s simple for a survey novice to use, but powerful enough for a pro.”

It’s FREE for us. Their Basic Plan is a free service that is limited to 10 questions per survey and 100 responses. The number of surveys is unlimited. We don’t need more than the 97 property owners to respond.

Surveymonkey can be used for specific voting. Their system allows surveys to be set up for email invitation only. This ensures each respondent can only vote one time per email address. The votes are anonymous. The link to Surveymonkey's anonymous results will be posted to this website under "Current Surveys"

Trust us with your email address. We hate spam and fraud too. If we have every property owner’s email we can invite-you-by-email to take a survey as soon as a new survey is available. There would be a link to the newest survey at our account at surveymonkey.com in the email. There would be a link on this website under “Current Surveys” for you to view the results in real time.

No information will be collected from this website. This is an informational website only. Information other than anonymous answers-to-survey-questions will not be stored at surveymonkey.com. Once we can invite property owners, using their email address, all the information stored will be anonymous question answers at surveymonkey.com.

We have set up a gmail account at sugarhillconcerned@gmail.com The email addresses are kept with our webmaster (a Sugarhill homeowner) and will never be used for any purpose other than inviting owners to take a survey and for owners to submit questions to upcoming surveys. Property owners will have the option to unsubscribe from the email survey invitations. We're not sure why anyone would. It would be like locking yourself out of the voting booth.

So what is the potential of these surveys? One might say what good are they? Let’s do a hypothetical. Let’s say our POA Board came up with a weird idea and decided to implement it like they did with Signature Property Management. If we ran an email-invited-survey with yes/no answers and if the vote was overwhelmingly against the idea, a few significant things could be done with the results.

The board could be shown the results and asked to cease-and-desist the action. Reasonable people would stop, confronted with overwhelming results. If they refused, a simple legal petition could be run to stop the action or dispose the instigators off the board.

The other great potential of the online-survey is to collect direction during something as important as the long-overdue revision of our covenants and bylaws. Again, based on survey results, compliance from our board in the face of overwhelming results would be their burden and possibly their undoing if they refused the majority decisions.

There’s a lot of confusion around the concept of a management company being needed to prevent neighbors from suing neighbors. This idea is actually a complete misconception because management companies follow the direction of the board 100%. It just adds a potentially ruthless management company into the mix causing further resentment.

With a survey vote for an action as serious as a lawsuit being presented to the entire community the likelihood, once the neighbor realizes he is completely overwhelmed by a majority vote, could be no need for a lawsuit. But if it proved necessary then it wouldn’t be one neighbor suing a neighbor it would be majority.

Makes you wonder how many Board presidents would love to have a majority rule document in their hand when they went to discuss a problem with a neighbor. But then if the issue prevents the president from gaining a majority...well, that's why we like surveys.