Candidates Sending Postcards For HOA Elections

Postal Mail Your Candidate Material Background If you are hoping to get a seat on your association’s board of directors, you need all the help you can get. Unfortunately, most of that help will have to be done on your own!

One approach to great publicity is mailing out a postcard to all (or some) of the members of your association. The easy way to do this is to simply mail one to “Resident” at each of the addresses in your community, but if you have a lot of renters and absentee owners, this won’t get you very far… and who actually reads anything addressed to “Resident” anyway?

The better approach is to request the names and mailing addresses of all association members. If you want to send your postcard to a select group, get the whole mailing list and extract what you want.

Disclaimer None of this is “legal advice”, though I will point you to several Arizona statutes in support of my general methodology. If you need legal advice for your specific situation, consult an attorney.

How Do I Get Mailing Addresses?

Obtaining the addresses relies on making a request, which should be fulfilled without question based on two Arizona statutes: 1. ARS 10-11601, which states that a corporation1 “shall maintain a record of its members in a form that permits preparation of a list of the names and addresses of all members”.

2. ARS 33-1805 (HOAs) or ARS 33-1258 (condos), which states that “the association shall have ten business days to provide copies of requested records”.

Note that I said “should”. You might get some pushback from the association – either directly from an incumbent board member, or possibly from your management company. Read through this entire document before starting, and you’ll be prepared to stand up for yourself if you get questions.

Your association (in the form of the management company, generally) may charge you for copies, especially if they force you into coming to the office to “examine” the records first (they can’t charge you for examination of records). In my experience, an association will probably just send you a PDF document electronically in response to your request.

Note: Don’t let your association claim that they are not required to give you this information. There is a paragraph in ARS 10-11602 that says, “This section does not apply to any … condominium … or … planned community”. I read that to mean that the restrictions states in this section do not apply, and that an association member can request this information any time without restriction. (But play nice.)

Very few owner associations are not incorporated. If yours is an unincorporated association, get an attorney’s advice on how you might still obtain the list relying on ARS 33-1805, which should apply to all associations, whether or not they are incorporated.

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Also: Don’t forget your obligation to comply with ARS 10-11605, to not use the list for commercial purposes, among other things. Be a good community citizen, and use the list only for the purpose of mailing your candidate information to the membership.

How to Ask But if your association insists they’re not obligated to give you this information, you’ll need to be prepared to send them relevant references to the statutes mentioned above. More on that below.

Don’t Make “Members Addresses” Your First Request If you are not already friendly with staff at your management company, I recommend getting to know them. Making an “unusual” request – which this will be perceived as – seems to go smoother if you are asking someone you’ve already established a (good!) relationship with. If you’ve never made any sort of documentation request before, I suggest that you find something you’d like to peruse (good educational material for your freshman board term), like the current budget and last year’s financial report.

Find out the email address of your community manager, or if your association is self-managed, then the address of your association secretary or president. Send them an email request with a small bit of explanation similar to this: Hi, Mary.

I’m Joan of 123 West Arc Drive in the Villa Orleans community, and though I’ve lived here going on 10 years now, I have to admit that I haven’t kept up very well with the state of the association. With some time on my hands, I thought I’d request a couple of documents to get back up to speed and stay more informed.

Would you mind sending me a copy of the current year’s budget, and the financial report of last year? If last year’s isn’t available yet, I’d like a copy of the one for the prior year, please.

Let me know if there is a specific request process I should be following, or if this email will do. I’m happy to receive the documents in PDF or another electronic format if they’re available. If hardcopy is all that is available, please let me know the cost in advance of printing.

Thank you for your assistance.

Obviously, tailor this to your situation or come up with your own approach, but use the friendly-butfactual tone. Expect some sort of response in a day or two… maybe with the documents attached, though in some cases they may have to locate and scan the documents (hopefully not – but be reasonable… it happens).

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Asking for the Addresses Assuming that you’ve received the material you asked for previously and have an established relationship now with the association staff 2, you can proceed with asking for the addresses.

I would suggest an email like the example here, customized to your situation. It’s still in a friendly tone, but does get a little more “technical sounding”: Hi, Mary, Joan of 123 West Arc Drive here again. Thanks so much for your help on my previous document request. After reviewing that information, it’s feels good to get a sense of what’s happening in the association.

I have another request, perhaps a bit unusual. I’m considering running for the board, and would like to send some of my own material to the owners that don’t know me.

It is my understanding that I’m permitted to request and obtain a list of the members of the association and their mailing addresses, based on recordkeeping requirements of ARS 10-11601 (C) and the records request process of ARS 33-1805 [or 1258 for condos].

Again, if possible, I hope to receive the information in an electronic format (PDF, Word, or Excel). Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this request.

Thank you again for your assistance, Mostly simple and to the point, with a brief reference to Arizona statutes for good measure. The second sentence of the second paragraph – the part about why you are interested in the material – is helpful to your cause in my opinion, but if you feel that mentioning this would be a poor strategic move, you can eliminate it. But here’s my thought: leaving it in shows you are being open and transparent – something you will aspire to do when elected to the board – and keeping your candidacy a secret doesn’t help you in the least. Let the word out!

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” and as long as you are forthcoming and honest with your neighbors, they will believe you (and believe in you). Anyone loyal to the incumbents is not likely going to be swayed by anything you have to say… it’s everyone else you are looking to for support. If the incumbents start to badmouth you for announcing your intention to run for the board, the people who may, would, or do support you will be even more supportive.

How Can I Get Postcards?

Personally, I get my printing done though VistaPrint. In my opinion they are reliable and produce quality printed products of all kinds. If you get on their mailing list, you will regularly receive notices of sales and discounts, reducing your out of pocket costs.

And by “staff”, we mean whoever it is you end up dealing with. It could be a management company representative, or a board member, or for large associations, an association employee or officer.

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I have a number of graphics tools at my disposal, but it doesn’t have to be extensive or gorgeous. See the attachment for an example of what I put together, with a more detailed explanation.

Choose your message and the words used to deliver that message carefully. Make sure to allow time for printing and assembling your postcards with postage and address labels (or you can print directly to the postcards).

I chose 4” x 6” cards, and there was a “price break” at the 300 quantity. With 345 homes, I knew a few people didn’t need postcards, and there were a few instances where I knew that a postcard would be wasted effort. I bought 300 first class stamps (smaller postcards can use the postcard rate; these required first class postage).

Should I Make a Web Site?

That’s mostly a personal style question, and should depend a lot more on how Internet-savvy your neighbors are. You don’t need a fancy web site, just a couple of pages, like the ones available from Wix.com. You can get just as much publicity with a Facebook page, or even an Instagram account. The hard part is making people aware that you’re a candidate! For me, that’s why sending a postcard is important – if you can afford to.

But beware of Facebook and other social media. You’ve seen what a chaotic circus social media can turn into! If you have no social media skills and are not blessed with “thick skin”, I’d say you might be better off asking a friend to do it for you – someone who hopefully has some skills, and can shield you from the potentially mean things that can happen. Still… it’s doable, and as long as you present yourself as “the people’s candidate” – with their interest at heart, not your own! – then let the hater’s hate, and just rise above it all.

Welcome to politics. You don’t have to swim in it! Smile, and wave.

HOACoach.com The HOA Coach is here to help guide you through all sorts of HOA issues. Whether you’re already on the board, aspiring to get on the board, fighting with the board, or just doing your best to ignore the association altogether and live in peace… send an email to Ray@HOACoach.com for more help, guidance, or encouragement.

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Attachment – Sample Postcard

The Front image is from a PDF file, and the Bottom image is a scanned version of what was printed by VistaPrint and some addition printing I did with an inkjet printer. The top/front has mostly information about the annual meeting and general information about the election and ballot material. I included the last names of the candidates I supported on the example ballot. There is also a note stating that this is not mailed at HOA expense, and a link to a web site I have which had information about the election and my recommended candidates.

The bottom/back has some pre-printed information (red, blue, brown, and the large black letters on the left). The other parts were printed by my ink-jet printer, which was really the most time-consuming and labor-intensive part of the whole process – which I would now avoid by more extensive planning in advance! You can see the mailing address at the bottom (the name and street are hidden), and I put a post office box as the return address. Note: I did not have a single card returned for bad addresses or wrong names.

Tools I used Microsoft’s PowerPoint tool to create two “slides,” one for the front and one for the back. The text and most of the graphics were manually created. I got a public-domain picture of a woman at a mailbox, and scanned in the miniature image of the special envelope.

Results!

Our 345-home community has a 10% quorum requirement (members present plus absentee ballots received), which means we needed 35 ballots + not-yet-voted members present. Though the actual attendance was low (most of the board member candidates, and only 2 non-candidate homeowners), our “attendance” including absentee ballots was 48 – way more than historically voting.

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