Over 100 Communities

This week we passed a significant milestone! Just five short months after we launched, HOAIntouch.com is already helping over 100 communities communicate more effectively. We couldn’t have done it without your support so THANK YOU! We are extremely pleased to have passed this milestone in such a short amount of time and look forward to our next major milestone – 1000 communities!

March Statistics

First of the month again – time to fire up the ol’ calculator and take a look at some stats. HOAInTouch.com is now helping 80 homeowners associations (+26.98%) create more active and vibrate neighborhoods! Below are the stats for the month of March 2008.

Application Statistics:

Number of users: 216 (+34.16%)
Number of contacts: 303 (+31.74%)
Number of groups: 27 (+3.85%)
Number of news posts: 146 (+23.73%)
Number of community events: 173 (+19.31%)
Number of documents: 201 (+11.05%)

Traffic Statistics from Google Analytics:

Visits: 989 (+20.32%)
Unique Visitors: 652 (+8.67%)
Page Views: 4,013 (+26.39%)
Pages / Visit: 4.06 (+5.05%)
Time on Site: 5:14 (+34.47%)

Wow! What a great month with strong growth across the board. We are really excited about our growth and are talking to more and more homeowners associations every day about the benefits of an HOA website. We also have some really great new features in the works that will make HOAInTouch.com even more compelling to homeowner associations looking to (re)connect their neighborhoods.

March marked the end of our first full quarter as well. Hard to believe we launched just a short four and a half months ago! Big thanks to all of our existing customers – we couldn’t have done it it without you! If you haven’t created your HOA website yet then give us a try!

Thanks and we will see you ‘round the neighborhood!

February Statistics

It is that time of month again! Below are the stats for the month of February 2008.

HOAInTouch.com is now helping 63 communities (+40%) in 62 zip codes (+37.78%) and 23 states (+43.75%) communicate more effectively with their residents and neighbors! We have also had zip code searches from 43 different states (+7.5%).

Applications Statistics:

Number of users: 161 (+26.77%)
Number of contacts: 230 (+29.94%)
Number of groups: 26 (+13.04%)
Number of news posts: 118 (+31.11%)
Number of community events: 145 (+36.79%)
Number of documents: 181 (+2.84%)

Traffic Statistics from Google Analytics:

Visits: 822 (+68.10%)
Unique Visitors: 600 (+80.18%)
Page Views: 3,175 (-0.19%)
Pages / Visit: 3.86 (-40.62%)
Time on Site: 3: 53 (-9.97%)

We continue to experience tremendous growth in our user base (+26.77%) and communities are really utilizing the community news (+31.11%) and events (+36.79%) features. We are very pleased with these growth numbers especially considering we are focused on local markets which are inherently more difficult to grow.

Not surprisingly, our site traffic isn’t necessarily following the same growth trend – and this is actually by design. When we set out to create HOAInTouch.com we didn’t want our users to have to constantly check and scour the website to stay informed. Who has time for that? Our goal was to enable them to stay current on the community without changing their current behavior.

This is why our Community News and Events features email the residents each time an item is posted. We include all the information in the email and also provide deep links directly to the content so they don’t need to login to view the news item in their browser or download the event to Microsoft Outlook.

Our visits (+68.10%) and unique visitors (+80.18%) growth supports that this is working. 80% growth in unique visitors is phenomenal and extremely exciting. More and more residents are finding the site useful and recommending it to their neighbors. We love to see this and added the Invite a Neighbor page last month to help spread the word.

Overall, February was a great month and considering it was only our third full month since we launched we are extremely pleased with our growth and how far we have come.

See you ‘round the neighborhood!

January 2008 Stats

Quick stats update for the month of January 2008.

HOAInTouch.com now has 45 communities in 44 zip codes and 16 states! Angie has been pulling together a spreadsheet containing all of the different cities and states that we have communities in and/or have searched with their zip code. It is really interesting to see where all of the searches are coming from. From Alaska to Texas and Maine to Hawaii, HOAInTouch.com has had a zip code search from 40 different states so far. We will let you know once we have hit them all.

Now on to the stats.

• Number of users: 127 (+35%)
• Number of contacts: 177 (+42%)
• Number of groups: 23 (No change)
• Number of news posts: 90 (+50%)
• Number of community events: 106 (+125%)
• Number of documents: 176 (+107%)

And from Google Analytics

• Visits: 489 (-38%)
• Unique Visitors: 333 (-42%)
• Page Views: 3,181 (-33%)
• Pages/Visit: 6.51 (+8.92%)
• Time on Site: 4:19 (+30%)

First the good news. Community Events and the Document Library are taking off in a big way with both experiencing over 100% month over month growth. WOW! This is really exciting to see and hopefully it continues. Also of note, the average time on site increased by 30% which is also encouraging.

Visits and page views, on the other hand, went entirely in the wrong direction. However, it isn’t really as bad as it seems and was entirely expected. For one week in December we tried advertising on StumbleUpon and, while it certainly generated the traffic we expected, that traffic didn’t translate into new communities so we have pulled it – for now anyway.

Thanks to everyone for all of their interest and support. We finished 2007 building some great momentum and I am really looking forward to what 2008 will bring us!

See you ‘round the neighborhood!

First Week Stats

Whew! Week one is over and what a week it was. I really didn't expect to get the level of response we have but it has been great. Nearly everyone one we have talked to about HOAInTouch.com has said something to the effect of "oh, well yeah, that just makes sense".

It is truly rewarding to be talking with someone about your product and have them immediately come to the realization that this is something they didn't even know they were missing but definitely need. It’s fun to watch the wheels start turning and listen to them spin off five or ten different ways this would have been useful to them at some point in the past. Makes all the work worth it.

So, back to the stats. Drum roll please… After the first week we already have 15 communities signed up in 15 different zip codes! After slicing and dicing the database a bit, there are some other key stats listed below as well.

• Number of users: 19
• Number of contacts: 32
• Number of groups: 5
• Number of news posts: 34
• Number of events: 17

Definitely not bad for week one - especially considering I really just expected to get my own HOA setup.

For the fellow computer geeks out there (or anyone otherwise interested), we use Google Analytics to track our number of visitors, page views, etc. and I have included some of those statistics below as well.

• Visits: 172
• Unique Visitors: 137
• Page Views: 975
• Pages/Visit: 5.67
• Time on Site: 2:59

A few observations immediately come to mind. First our number of users per community is anemic but that is to be expected out of the gate. Many users were signing up simply to see what the product is all about. Our focus over the next few months is to help these early adopters evangelize the product and get better adoption in their respective neighborhoods.

Second, about 20% of our visits were from repeat visitors. If we can increase the adoption in existing neighborhoods this number should go way, way up. I think this is one of the most critical statistics for this type of a product. We want repeat visitors to be hitting the site frequently checking up on or adding news, upcoming events, posting comments, etc.

Lastly, users, on average, spent almost three full minutes on the site. To me this is surprising and actually seems relatively high. My guess is this will trend downward over time as most users will be popping in to their community dashboard for a quick update and moving on. Which is great. It shouldn't take 10 minutes to figure out what is going on in your neighborhood or to lookup John's phone number.

I am planning on posting these stats again after the first month and then after each subsequent month. Should be interesting to see the trends. Feel free to let me know if there is an interesting statistic I am missing.

Thanks for a great first week everyone! We will see you 'round the neighborhood.

Enhanced Support

Wow! We have been live for just over two days and the response has been terrific! It has honestly exceeded my expectations - which is really saying something - and I am tremendously excited about our potential.

I will post some statistics after we have been live for a week, again after the first month and then each subsequent month. It should be interesting to see the growth.

Also wanted to make you aware of a few enhancements and tweaks to the system that we released tonight.

1. We have received a number of great questions from users and potential communities. In order to provide you with better support we have added a FAQ page and answered the most common questions to date. We will definitely continue to augment these as we receive more questions.
2. We revamped the Help page and now also display it on the marketing site instead of waiting until after you log in. With all of the tutorials on one page, every once in a great while IE would get cranky because of the number of simultaneous requests to YouTube. Now each video tutorial is displayed in a nice modal window when requested and there is far less scrolling to find the tutorial you are looking for.
   
3. Lastly, we had a few reports from users indicating that our generated emails had a minor display quirk in some email clients. We heard you and apologize for that. We did test over a variety of clients but clearly missed one or two. Getting rich email design is a surprisingly difficult task so we took a few steps back and decided to greatly simplify the email templates. The end result is we think they still look great and should play nicer with the email clients out there.
   

Keep the feedback coming! We definitely want to know what you guys think and how we can serve your community better. Thanks and we will see you 'round the neighborhood!