The Challenge
Good Spirit Housing Authority needed a more efficient way to communicate important notices with their tenants and quickly. With over 600 units spread between 3 different communities, they found it incredibly time and labour intensive to properly inform their tenants using traditional methods.
“A lot of the issues we deal with are immediate notices with short time frames, such as a water outages or service outages,” notes Shelley Krecsy with Good Spirit Housing Authority. “Our maintenance team will advise us that they need to shut off services within 5 minutes and we need to let people know right away. The time it took to get communications out to tenants was incredibly labour and cost intensive as we had to draft the notice, print it out, drive it over and deliver to each tenant. It could take hours sometimes.”
The Solution
Under the directive of Krecsy and her manager, Good Spirit Housing Authority adopted Voyent Alert!, a mass notification system, to streamline their operational communications to tenants as well as employees. The government run housing authority can now swiftly initiate alerts and notices within minutes and has experienced multiple verticals of savings across labour, print resources and most importantly time.
“Previously it would take a number of hours to get traditional communications ready and delivered. We’ve seen substantial cost savings and efficiencies while using Voyent Alert! In less than 2 minutes we can let everyone of our 600 people know what’s going on. And we can target down to one specific building if we need to.”
Why Voyent Alert
Knowing they needed to find a new communication tool to simplify their processes, Good Spirit Housing Authority started their search and reached out to a colleague from the Town of Kipling who recommended Voyent Alert!. In their discussions, Good Spirit Housing Authority learned the town had used a different system prior and had changed over to Voyent Alert! and was happy with the new service.
“After some additional research and cost analysis, we choose Voyent Alert! as it was much more cost effective compared to other systems,” notes Krecsy. “And the support has been amazing. When we first started, our account manager worked with us closely and proactively supported us to update or fix communications that we had sent out, so that we were utilizing the system the most effective way. And every time I have a question, she is very good about getting back to me in a timely manner.”
Harnessing the power of targeted messaging & scheduled alerts
With tenants and employees spread out across 27 different properties in 3 different towns, the ability to pick and choose which group they want to notify has helped simplify their communications. “If I just need to let Park Place tenants know about an issue I can. I can then also send a separate message to either all-staff or just staff at Park Place to advise them of the notice.”
“We were finding our communications were breaking down before. Now we have the ability to send both internal and external communications to pre-defined groups in order to keep everyone informed and on the same page.”
Scheduling alerts in advance has also freed up time and allowed Krecsy to focus on other more important tasks. “We can easily schedule and send out reminders about furnace inspections, planned maintenance outages, planned entry into the tenant’s space, Covid-19 restrictions and updates, seasonal advisories such as snow on the walkway, or garbage and recycling reminders.”
The importance of pro-active communications
Luckily the team at Good Spirit Housing Authority hasn’t had to use the digital communication system for an emergency alert yet, but they have utilized it to keep anxiety at bay and limit the number of calls or complaints to the head office by pro-actively notifying their clients of services that they are working on or towards.
“We had an ice storm here earlier in the Spring, so we sent information out to everyone that our maintenance team was working to clear the trees and branches post incident. By sending out this communication, we saw a significant reduction in calls to the office for people to report debris or submit a maintenance request; compared to past incidents.”
The future of tenant and employee communications
“Overall Voyent Alert! has been a very good program for us to communicate efficiently with our tenants and employees. We’ve seen tremendous cost and time savings since the service was implemented 9 months ago. And the pricing of the program is extremely reasonable compared to other suppliers. I would certainly recommend Voyent Alert! for other housing authorities or property management groups looking to improve their communications.”
Learn more about Voyent Alert! and how housing authorities and property management companies can implement digital communications to streamline operations and communications while keeping people informed and satisfied with your service.
