Posts, Polls, and Board Motions

Three Tools, Three Jobs

Boards need to do three different things, and it's worth keeping them straight:

Posts tell your community something. Announcements, updates, reminders.
Polls ask your community something. Non-binding input on a decision, gathered anonymously.
Motions record that the board formally approved something. This is the vote that carries legal weight.

A poll is not a vote of the board. If you need board approval for a budget or a special assessment, you need a motion.

Posts: Announcing Things to Your Community

Your community discussion board lives on the Discussion page. Your Building Score also links there from its "Start a Discussion" recommendation. Click New Post, give it a title, and write the body. The editor supports formatting, links, and lists, so you can write something people will actually read rather than a wall of text.

Once published, the post appears for everyone on your account, and members can comment on it. Comments are threaded, so a follow-up question and its answer stay together instead of scattering down the page. See Using Comments & Discussions.

Good uses for a post: the outcome of a board meeting, an upcoming maintenance disruption, a reminder about a rule people keep forgetting, or a summary of the new budget with a link to the reports.

Putting a Post to a Board Vote

Some announcements shouldn't go out as one person's opinion — a policy change, a statement on a dispute, anything that commits the association to a position. On any post you wrote, you can Call vote. That opens a motion on the post and gives every board admin a vote to cast. Once it passes, the post carries a recorded board decision behind it rather than a single signature.

Polls: Asking Your Members

Navigate to Governance in the sidebar and select the Polls tab. Board admins can create a poll; every member can vote in it. This is for the questions where you genuinely want to know what people think before the board decides — which of three landscaping bids to take, whether to allow short-term rentals, what night works for the annual meeting.

Click New Poll and fill in:

Title — the question you're asking, stated plainly.
Closing date — when voting ends. It has to be at least tomorrow.
Number of votes — how many options each member may pick. Leave it at 1 for a straight either/or; raise it when you're asking people to choose several, like "pick your top 3 priorities."
Description — the context. What's being decided, what it costs, what happens next. Members vote better when they know why they're being asked.

A new poll starts as a draft so you can add your choices before anyone sees it. Add each option from the poll's page. When it's ready, open the poll — every member is emailed that voting is open. When you close it, they're emailed the result.

Polls Are Anonymous

Results show vote counts only. Individual votes are never revealed, to you or to anyone else. You can see the participation rate — how many of your members have voted — which is what you need to know whether the result is meaningful, without knowing who voted for what.

Polls are for gathering input, not for electing your board. Board elections have their own process with a nomination period, one vote per unit, and a formal result — see Setting Up Board Elections.

Motions: How the Board Formally Approves Something

A motion is the record that your board voted and what it decided. In Nestingbird, motions are how three things get approved:

Budgets — a budget doesn't take effect until the board approves it. Approving the budget is what sets each unit's assessment amount for the year. See Creating Your Annual Budget.
Special assessments — a one-time charge to every unit for an unexpected cost. Invoices aren't generated until the board approves it.
Posts — as described above, when an announcement should carry the board's authority rather than one member's.

How a Motion Works

Calling a vote creates a ballot for every board administrator on the account. Each of them records a yes, a no, or an abstention. Nestingbird tallies as votes come in and shows where the motion stands.

A motion passes when at least two thirds of your board administrators vote yes. That threshold is a share of the whole board, not just of those who bothered to vote — an abstention has the same practical effect as a no. On a five-person board, four yes votes carry a motion; three do not.

When a motion passes, the thing it approved takes effect immediately. An approved budget updates unit fees and rolls owners onto the new amounts at the next billing period; an approved special assessment generates its invoices.

Only one motion can be open on the same item at a time. If a vote is already in progress on your budget, you'll need to let it finish before calling another — this stops two competing votes from producing two different answers.

Practical Advice

Discuss first, vote second. Call the vote after the board meeting where you talked it through, not instead of it.
Chase abstentions. Because the two-thirds threshold counts your whole board, a board member who never opens the ballot is voting no in practice. A quick reminder is usually all it takes.
Poll the community before big decisions, then vote as a board. A poll gives you cover and useful information; the motion is what makes it official.
Post the outcome. After a motion passes, write a short post explaining what was decided and why. It takes five minutes and prevents most of the questions you'd otherwise field one at a time.

Impact on Your Building Score

Posts, polls, and recorded motions all feed the Governance and Community Engagement pillars of your Building Score. A board that documents its decisions and asks its members for input scores meaningfully higher than one that decides quietly — and, more to the point, gets far fewer complaints.