Why your association needs a blog.
Read on to find out how your association can use a blog to change the way it does business.
There are countless ways your association can use an HBA Blog, here are just a few:
1. Post Resources
Easily distribute important documents to homebuyers, your members, chapter and council board members or prospective members. Having documents available for download will free up staff time (your staff won’t have to keep running to the fax machine) and will make resources accessible by your members from any place and at any time. If you need to regulate who can access what, you can easily manage that with password protection measures.
2. Protect the Environment
Save some trees! A blog allows you to do away with your old hard copy paper newsletter. Post committee and council information, local statistics, area and national news on your blog instead of via an expensive, time intensive, tree-wasting newsletter.
3. Get Information to Your Members Immediately
Outside of an email blast, a blog is the fastest way to get information to all your members at one time. But we all know that members get dozens, if not hundreds, of emails each and every day and simply don’t read all the emails you send; however, a blog is an easy way to post information for everyone to see right away. Members can bookmark your blog and get updates when a new post publishes. Additionally, you can opt to do a periodic email feed that will include recent posts, so your members get just one email from you (as frequently as you deem necessary) with all of the new posts.
4. Engage Your Members
To make your blog truly interactive, set up members to blog on it. Get your members, especially your council and committee leadership, to post on your blog. You can choose to moderate their posts and approve them before publishing.
5. Take Advantage of Multimedia
Do you have a stack of videos you want to make available to your membership but aren’t sure how? With just a few clicks, you can upload videos, photos, podcasts, slideshows and more, for easy viewing by your members.
6. Get and Give Feedback
An HBA Blog is a great way to find out how you are doing. Users can comment on your blog to let you know what they think about events, publications, customer service, anything! Comments can be moderated, so you can publish what you like and take appropriate actions on those that you wouldn’t want published, but are glad to have received.
HBA Blog will also help you create an online discussion space – easier than ever before! Members can simply log in to respond to blog posts. Moderators can be set up to manage, edit and respond to comments.
7. Tie it All Together
With an HBA blog, you can directly connect your blog to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, your members can use social bookmarking on favorite articles, and more! The blog can lead all traffic back to your website. Blogs also help people find your association online faster through organic search engine results; so members, prospective members and homebuyers can get to your website right away.
