Condo Media - September 2013 - 56

VOLUNTEER SPOTLIGHT

Harbor Towers’ Screen Saver
A High-Tech, Low-Cost Communications Solution is Keeping Residents Informed

ommunication is a priority, or
at least it should be, at all community associations. But the
determination to improve communication at Harbor Towers, a highrise condominium in downtown Boston, is a case study in what the creative
use of technology and a collaborative
effort can achieve. That effort and the
innovative communications solution it
produced earned Harbor Towers CAINew England’s “Excellence in Service
Award for Communications,” along
with high praise for the association’s
board and its management company.
Communicating with residents of
this densely populated, 624-unit, twintowered community has always been a
challenge, notes Christopher Lanni, CPP,
CMCA, AMS, residential security consultant for Barkan Management Company,
Inc. and director of security and resident
services at the complex.
The go-to method for most essential
messages had been paper notices handdelivered and slipped under residents’
doors. That was the best means at the
time of ensuring that the maximum
number of residents received the information, Lanni explains, but it was also
costly and not entirely satisfactory. Some
residents complained about the environmental impact of paper communications
and some simply didn’t like having the
paper underfoot. Others ignored the
notices or claimed never to have received
them. The labor costs also resulted in a
kind of triage to determine which messages required hand-delivery.

Need for Change

“We tried to be selective about what we
put under doors,” Lanni says. But that
necessarily relegated some messages to
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CONDO MEDIA • SEPTEMBER 2013

even less dependable venues, such as
e-mail or bulletin boards. “And because
we were spending so much,” Lanni says,
“we knew there had to be a change.”
So the board and management staff
began exploring alternatives. Increasing
reliance on the community’s recently
upgraded website was one option,
but limited and unpredictable usage
patterns (some residents visit the site

again, was a primary concern. They
had to deliver information to screens in
two different buildings, requiring (the
board thought) complex wiring and a
sophisticated system costing in excess of
$30,000, making the idea pretty much a
non-starter for budget reasons alone.
Robinson, whose high-tech background has made him, in Lanni’s
words, “the patron saint of all things
technical” at Harbor Towers, wrestled
with the problem for a while, but
couldn’t ﬁnd a solution. A high-tech
friend he called did have one, however:
Use televisions programmed (as many
are today) to access the internet via a
Wi-Fi connection.

“Eureka!”

(l-r) CAI-NE Chapter President Pete Garrett presents
Association Excellence in Service Award to Harbor
Towers’ Director of Security and Resident Services
Chris Lanni and board member Gary Robinson

regularly, some occasionally, and some
not at all) eliminated this as a primary
distribution channel.
Gary Robinson, the board member
most directly involved in the communications project, suggested placing
monitors on which information could
be scrolled in elevators. But wiring the
monitors to receive a TV signal would
have been costly and the elevator
companies would have had to do the
wiring, increasing the cost even more.
The ultimate solution — placing
computer-linked screens in heavily trafﬁcked areas — seems obvious now, but
it wasn’t embraced immediately. Cost,

If this had been a cartoon, a large light
bulb would have appeared in a bubble
overhead. Everything fell into place,
Lanni says. For the board, which
didn’t want to spend a lot of money,
the idea of “using what we had available to get us to the next level” had
great appeal. And web-enabled monitors ﬁt that bill.
The common areas in both buildings
had recently been equipped with commercial-grade wireless service; the association
had a robust website with multiple capabilities and a vendor who could design a
frame for the content and do the minimal
programming required to update the
information to be displayed.
Creating the new system was both
easy and inexpensive at about $1,500
for each building, most of that the cost
of four wide-screen, high-deﬁnition
plasma televisions (two in each building). “When you consider the cost of
hand-delivery,” Lanni notes, “it doesn’t
take long to recover that investment.”

Condo Media - September 2013

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