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Free guide
The Community Rollout Guide
A practical guide to bringing your residents onto the Hub and sending each notice to the place or the topic it concerns. It covers how to map your community, which place audiences to create, the universal topics, starting with the email relationship you already have, where the invitation fits, who sends what, the first messages, the two starters, what stays in your existing systems, and how to measure truthfully.
Written for the community manager, on-site manager, association manager or management-company administrator who will run ResidentBlasts for an apartment, condominium, HOA, townhome, build-to-rent or manufactured-home community, and for the maintenance manager, the office and the board secretary who will send from it.
Map how your community is organized
Before you create anything, draw the community the way residents describe it. A stacked community is a set of buildings, each with floors or stacks; a horizontal community is a set of phases, streets, sections or neighborhoods; many communities are both, with a couple of buildings and a row of townhomes. Write down every part of the community you would ever address on its own: the building whose riser fails, the phase that gets paved, the street the landscapers work, the tower whose elevator is out, the section on the lake.
Then write down the parts you would never address alone. Those do not need an audience. An audience nobody sends to becomes a stale audience, and a resident faced with twenty choices on a preferences page ticks none of them.
Decide which place audiences you need
Place audiences are the community's own data, created by name in the Hub. ResidentBlasts seeds none, because every community is organized differently and the Hub does not know where anyone lives until you or the resident say so.
Stacked: buildings, then floors where a riser or an elevator cuts that way
Building A, Building B, Building C, North Tower. Nest Floor 3 inside Building B with Inside audience only if you would send to Floor 3 on its own; a message to Building B reaches every floor under it.
Horizontal: phases or neighborhoods, then streets where work happens street by street
Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, East Neighborhood, Lake Section, Townhomes. Nest Birch Lane inside Phase 2 if the paving contractor works one street at a time; a message to Phase 2 reaches every street under it.
Both: a community with buildings and a townhome row
Building A, Building B, Building C and Townhomes, side by side. The riser notice goes to Building B; the driveway sealing goes to Townhomes; the pool reopening goes to Amenities and never needs a place at all.
A message goes to one audience. If you regularly need the Building B residents who chose Amenities, create that audience; the Hub does not combine a place and a topic for you.
Choose the universal topic interests
Onboarding seeds the topics any residential community has, whatever its shape. All Residents reaches everyone connected and asks for a step-up confirmation; it is not a choice on the preferences page. The others are open interests residents tick themselves.
- Maintenance & Property Notices: planned utility work, property and grounds work, inspection windows, scheduled vendor access, common-area work.
- Amenities: the pool, the clubhouse, the fitness room, the dog park; hours, closures and reopenings.
- Community Events: gatherings, community days, seasonal activities, meetings that concern everyone.
- Parking & Access: parking, gates, entrances, roads, garages where there is one, temporary access changes. Not every community has controlled access; keep the audience anyway for parking and roads, or archive it.
- Owner & Association Updates: association and owner information, governance summaries, meeting information. Seeded for communities with owners or an association; not pre-checked, and an apartment community usually archives it. It is not the board, and it is not every owner by default.
- Anything else residents would choose, created by name: Pet Owners is the usual first one.
Staff, vendors and the board are not resident audiences. Team members have Hub roles; a closed list the office curates, such as the board, is set to the office assigns and never appears on a preferences page.
Start with the resident email relationship you already have
Most communities already hold an opted-in email list: the residents who agreed to hear from the office, the owners on the association's list, the newsletter. Export it as a spreadsheet and import it on Residents. The file needs an email column; the Hub also recognizes name, phone, household and an interests column, which is where a building or phase column places each household at the same time.
Tick the opt-in box for people who already agreed to hear from you and they join as email subscribers right away, receiving your messages by email from that day. Everyone else is invited, checked on Blasts and spread out at up to 200 a day, so it never reads as cold mail. When a resident later connects the Blasts app, the Hub notices and moves their delivery to Blasts on its own.
- Files are limited to 5,000 rows and 2 MB, with a preview before anything is sent.
- A lease or an association membership is not consent. Only import residents who opted in; everyone else is invited, never added. A purchased or scraped list never qualifies.
- There is no property-management, work-order, payment or access-control connector, so the spreadsheet, the inbound webhook and the Zapier app are the doors.
Put enrollment into natural resident touchpoints
Open Residents and click Sync connections once to publish your enrollment code; the printed kit and the QR come from the same screen. The code is issued by the platform: never make one up. Then put it where residents already are, and give the office one sentence to say.
Move-in and the key handoff
The code and the preferences link in the move-in packet, beside the parking permit. The person handing over the keys mentions it once. Add the new resident to the New Resident Welcome the same day.
The closing packet and association onboarding
For a condominium or an HOA, the same code in the closing packet and on the association onboarding form, so a new owner joins before the first assessment notice.
The welcome email and your website
Paste the code, or the standing enrollment link where it is enabled for your Hub, into the welcome email you already send, and point your website form or your move-in form at the Hub's inbound webhook so a resident who asks joins by email the day they ask.
The office, the notice board, and the lobby or mail area where you have one
A card at the office counter, the kit on the community notice board, and wherever residents stand still with a phone: a lobby, a mail area, the clubhouse door. A community without a lobby loses nothing.
Entering the code creates a connection request that your community accepts, unless auto-accept is on, in which case the resident is connected the moment they join. A resident who joined by email is already receiving either way. Move-in is the best moment, not a requirement: a resident who joins two years in gets the same connection.
Explain what residents gain
Residents join when the office says plainly what will reach them and what will not. The printed kit already does: what's happening where you live, sent to you. Say the rest in the first message and on the notice board.
- Notices about your building or your street, not everyone else's.
- Amenity hours, parking and access changes, community events and the weekly update, if you want them.
- A reply that a person answers.
- Your choice of topics, quiet hours, a mute for a day, and the ability to disconnect without asking anyone.
- Email until you connect the app, and your phone after that. Nothing to install to start.
Decide who on the team can send
Roles keep All Residents sends and the billing with the owner while each manager reaches their own places and topics. Be clear about one thing from the start: a Blast shows the COMMUNITY, not an individual manager or technician. Team members are operators with per-audience send grants, and ResidentBlasts does not decide who at your community is authorized to send a particular notice; your grants do.
- The community or the management company holds the community-controlled Blasts account (a mailbox on your own domain, not a manager's personal address), the passkey and the credit purchases.
- A regional manager or the association president is an Admin: every audience, the team, the settings.
- Each on-site manager is a Leader granted only their own community's places and topics. The maintenance manager is a Leader granted Maintenance & Property Notices and the places. Office staff are Leaders granted the amenity, parking and weekly audiences, and reading and answering replies.
- Where there is an association, the board secretary is a Leader granted Owner & Association Updates. A board member who connected as a resident and then asks for Hub access appears under Access requests until an admin approves and picks the role.
- A bookkeeper who only reads along is a Viewer.
- Sending to All Residents, changing roles and removing people ask for a step-up confirmation, and the audit trail on Home records who sent, approved, invited or changed what.
Establish approval and auto-accept separately
Two settings decide how the Hub behaves on day one, and they have nothing to do with each other.
Leader approval decides whether a Leader's Blasts wait for an administrator before they go out. A new community starts with it off, so the maintenance manager's shutoff notice goes out when they send it. Turn it on in Settings while a new manager learns the tone, or if the board wants a second pair of eyes on owner communication.
Auto-accept decides whether a resident who enters your enrollment code is connected immediately or waits for the office to accept the request on Residents. Most communities turn it on so a resident who scans the kit is connected the moment they join. Either way, a resident who joined by email is already receiving.
Send the first useful messages
Send something ordinary before you ever need the channel for a shutoff. A welcome to All Residents (it asks for your passkey): what this channel is for, how to pick the notices they want, and that the sign on the door is not going away. Then the weekly community update, then the next real notice to the place it concerns.
A send from the Hub is a typed note with formatting, photos, links and up to three attached files of 5 MB each, such as the contractor's map or the amenity rules. Pick the place or the topic, ask for a YES or NO reply when you need an answer, click Send a test to me, then Send now, Schedule for later, or Repeat weekly. One typed Blast to one resident is one credit whatever it contains.
- Leave replies on for anything that asks a resident to arrange a time; turn them off on a parking enforcement notice.
- Save the shutoff, the entry notice, the access change, the amenity update and the paving note as Templates so nobody writes them at two in the afternoon under pressure.
- Keep All Residents for the things that genuinely concern everyone. Its rarity is what makes it read.
Use New Resident Welcome deliberately
New Resident Welcome is a Journey: five notes over three weeks, timed from the day a resident connects or the office adds them. Day 0 says what can reach them here and that they choose the topics; day 2 describes the kinds of property notices they may see; day 7 shows how to choose topics; day 14 draws the boundary (maintenance requests, payments, the lease and reservations stay with the office and its systems); day 21 explains their own control over the connection.
The Hub does not know when anyone moved in. You start the welcome: add the resident at the key handoff, let your move-in form add them through the webhook, or place them in a building audience the welcome runs on. A resident who joins later gets the whole sequence, just later. Journeys are part of Hub Pro.
Use Community Project for planned work
Community Project is an Event Campaign: six messages around one dated piece of work in one part of the community. Set the start date and send it to the place it concerns: the announcement two weeks out, what residents should know a week out, a three-day reminder in the evening, the evening before, the morning it starts, and an update the day after that stays true whether the work finished or continues. When the contractor slips a week, change the date once and the pending messages move with it.
It works for paving, exterior painting, roofing, landscaping, utility work, a pool renovation and entrance work, and the same six-step shape carries the annual meeting, the pool opening or a move-in weekend. A person writes what is actually happening at each step; the Hub holds no project schedule, no crew and no completion state. Event Campaigns are part of Hub Pro.
Keep operational systems where they already belong
- The property-management system keeps the lease, the home, the balance and the resident record. There is no Yardi, RealPage, AppFolio, Entrata or Buildium connector.
- The maintenance process keeps the request and the work order. A reply is a request someone still enters where the work order lives.
- The payment portal keeps rent and dues. A charge reminder from the Hub points residents at the place they already pay; the Hub carries no payment link and holds no balance.
- The reservation calendar keeps the clubhouse booking. The access system keeps the gate, the fobs and the door codes. The package room keeps the packages.
- Required notices keep their form and their timeline. An entry notice, a habitability notice and an association meeting notice go out the way the lease, the bylaws or the law require; a Blast sits beside them, never instead of them.
- The community's life-safety procedure stays exactly where it is. ResidentBlasts is not an emergency alert system: no siren, no reverse-911, no guaranteed delivery.
- The Hub keeps residents, places, topics, sends and conversations, and nothing else. It adds a channel; it replaces none of the above, and it detects none of their changes.
Measure delivery, read and replies truthfully
Delivered counts come from the Blasts app, and read status appears where your account's sending lane reports it, from confirmed actions rather than tracking pixels. Read status helps the office see who has and hasn't opened a message. It does not tell you which homes have or have not seen it, because the Hub does not know which home a person is in unless you placed them; it is not an acknowledgement; and it is not service of notice. When you need an answer, ask for a YES or NO reply, which is the resident's own action and which the Hub counts.
The Reach funnel on Residents shows where every resident stands: known, invited, requested, on email or connected, and how they arrived. Read it monthly, and open Sent & Scheduled after a big notice to see who has not read it and may need a knock or a call.
Expand place audiences as communication patterns emerge
Start with fewer places than you think you need and add them as the replies tell you where the gaps are. If every paving note to Phase 2 draws a reply from Birch Lane asking whether it means them, Birch Lane needs its own audience inside Phase 2. If nobody has sent to Floor 3 in six months, archive it; a message to Building B was always enough.
Turnover is the one thing that quietly breaks this channel. At move-out remove the household that left; at move-in place the one that arrived. The place audience outlives the resident, and the next residents join it.
Your first three months
From sign-in to a connected community you can reach by place and by topic. Adapt the order to your calendar.
Day 1 Sign in, map the community, publish your code
Sign in at /hub/signin/ with an email code, a passkey or your Blasts sign-in; a new community sets up its Hub through onboarding. Set the name, website and timezone, confirm the community-controlled Blasts account, then open Residents, click Sync connections and print the kit. Setup is free.
Week 1 Create your places and keep your topics
Create the place audiences you mapped, nested where it helps. Keep the universal topics, renamed in your words if you like, and archive Owner & Association Updates if your community has no owners or association. Save the shutoff, the entry notice, the access change and the paving note as Templates.
Week 2 Bring in the list you have and invite the team
Export the opted-in residents or owners and import the spreadsheet, with a building or phase column if you have it. Invite the regional manager as an Admin and the on-site manager, the maintenance manager and the board secretary as Leaders with their grants. Decide approval and auto-accept separately.
Week 3 Put the invitation where residents already are, and send something ordinary
The code and the preferences link go into the move-in packet, the welcome email, the onboarding form, the office card and the notice board; the website form points at the webhook. Send a welcome to All Residents, then the first weekly update.
Months 2 and 3 Run the places, welcome the new residents, carry the first project
Every notice goes to the place or the topic it concerns. Add each new resident to New Resident Welcome at the key handoff. Carry the next paving week or pool renovation as a Community Project. Read the Reach funnel and the read status, and add the place audiences the replies ask for.
What the Hub does, and what it does not
- Sends a typed or rich message with photos, links and up to three attachments of 5 MB each to the place or the topic you pick, or to All Residents with a step-up confirmation.
- Counts YES and NO replies, and puts every reply in one conversation thread you can assign and search.
- Schedules a send, repeats it weekly, runs a Content Series on a calendar, and holds a mailing to one copy per household.
- Delivers by email to residents who joined by email, and moves delivery to Blasts when they connect.
- Reports delivered counts from the app and read status where the sending lane reports it, per person, and tells you why a message did not deliver.
- Brings residents in through the enrollment code, the printed kit, a spreadsheet import, the inbound webhook, signed outbound events and the Zapier app on request.
- Connect to a property-management, maintenance-ticketing, payment, lease, reservation, package or access-control system.
- Know where a resident lives, that a work order closed, that a package arrived, that a lease started or ended, what anyone owes, or that a resident moved in or out. A person places each resident and sends each note.
- Combine a place and a topic into one send. A message goes to one audience; create the audience that describes the residents you mean.
- Replace the community's life-safety procedure or its required notices. It is not an emergency alert system, and it satisfies no entry, habitability, meeting or other lease-required, statutory or official notice obligation; those go out exactly the way the lease, the bylaws or the law require.
- Send under an individual manager's or technician's name, or decide who at your community is authorized to send a notice. A Blast shows the community; your roles and grants decide who sends what.
- Read a home's state from a read receipt, record a confirmation on a resident's behalf, or reach anyone who did not join. A read is a read; a YES is the resident's own reply; a resident can mute you or disconnect at any time.
This guide describes only what the Hub sends. Blasts, the platform underneath, carries sender features of its own when a message is sent from the Blasts app rather than from your Hub.
Open today
There is nothing to apply for. Sign in to your Hub, set it up through onboarding if you are new, and buy credits on BlastCredits at standard pricing when you are ready to send. The community documentation covers every screen this guide mentions, in places, topics and residents.
See it in action at Everfield Property Group (a fictional example organization created to show the product, not a customer)
Product facts on this page reflect published Blasts.app information as of September 24, 2026.