Admin: Send a Society Broadcast

Admin: send a society broadcast

A broadcast reaches residents across the channels they actually read, with delivery recorded per person — so "was notice served?" has an answer rather than an assumption.

Before you start

• You are a society admin or committee member
• The member roster is imported with current phone numbers and emails
• You know whether the message is a notice, an announcement, or conversation (see below)

Step 1: Decide what kind of message this is

Societies get into trouble by treating these as one thing:

• A notice has legal consequences — a general body meeting, a special resolution, a demand. It has a prescribed manner of service and you must be able to prove it was served.
• An announcement is operational — water off tomorrow, lift under maintenance. Time-sensitive, no legal weight.
• Conversation does not belong in a broadcast at all.

Step 2: Match the channel to the message

Keep an SMS path working for genuine emergencies and test it once a year. It is the only thing that reaches a resident with no data, an old phone, or full storage.

Step 3: Compose and send

Go to /admin/comms.

1. Write the message. Put the essential fact in the first line — "Water supply off tomorrow 9am–2pm, B and C wings", not three lines of greeting.
2. Choose the channels.
3. Choose recipients — the whole society, or a wing where only they are affected. Targeting is what stops residents tuning you out.
4. Send.

Recipients are addressed individually, not in a shared thread, so no resident's contact details are exposed to the rest of the society.

One message, one subject. Bundled notices get half-read.

Step 4: Check the delivery report

This is the part committees skip. Sending is not the finish line.

Each channel gives different evidence:

• Push — accepted for delivery to a device. You do not know the phone was on. Weakest.
• WhatsApp — sent, delivered and read receipts per recipient. Strong, but only for residents who opted in.
• SMS — operator delivery reports. Solid, and independent of any app.
• Email — delivered or bounced. Best for anything that must be retrievable later.

After every statutory send, reconcile. Look at who was not delivered and chase those flats individually. That list is usually short, and it is exactly where a later challenge comes from.

Step 5: Respect consent

Consent is tracked per resident per channel.

• Residents may opt out of social and event messaging, and that must be honoured immediately.
• Residents may not opt out of statutory notices. If they have opted out of your channels, the obligation does not disappear — it falls back to email and physical service. Keep that path alive for every flat.

Keep the two categories separate in your head and in the system.

What not to do

• Do not run society messaging from a personal WhatsApp number. Mass messaging gets personal accounts banned, usually at the worst moment, and when the secretary changes the society loses the channel, the history and the list.
• Do not send a bill or a personal reminder to a group. Individual financial matters go to the individual.
• Do not treat a WhatsApp group post as service of notice. A third of residents are not in the group.

Retention

Delivery reports are retained against the notice. This is the whole reason to send through a system rather than a phone: three years later you can produce the notice, the recipient list, and who it reached.

Frequently asked questions

Is a WhatsApp group message valid service of an AGM notice? Treat it as insufficient on its own. Serve by the method your bye-laws prescribe, keep the delivery record, and use WhatsApp as an additional channel.

Can we message residents who have not opted in? For statutory notices the society has an obligation and a right to serve them. For anything else, no.

Why can't we just use our existing WhatsApp group? Roughly a third of residents are not in it, tenants often are not added, and muted members see nothing. Fine for chatter, unsafe for notices.

How do we prove a notice was served three years ago? Retain the notice, the recipient list and the delivery report together — which is what sending through the system does automatically.

What about residents with no smartphone? Email, SMS to a basic phone, and the physical board. Every society has some, and the process must not assume otherwise.

When is the best time to send? 7–9pm on weekdays for non-urgent messages. Emergencies obviously override this.

Related: Resident: set your notification preferences · Reaching every resident reliably · Admin: set up notices