How to run a poll, post a notice and share community documents
Run community polls with a quorum, post notices with read receipts and comments, and keep bye-laws, minutes and circulars in the document library.
How do I create a poll, and how are votes recorded?
Polls are created in the admin console. Creating, editing, closing and deleting one needs a community admin account or a security role. Residents vote in the app.
- Give the poll a title and a description of what a yes or a no commits the community to.
- Choose the space. A poll on the community root reaches every flat under it; a poll on one tower reaches that tower.
- Choose the type: single choice, multiple choice or ranked choice.
- Set the start and end date and time. The end is required — voting stops once it passes.
- Optionally set a quorum: a minimum number of voters, or a minimum percentage of eligible voters.
- Add the options. A poll with no options cannot be voted on at all.
Each ballot is recorded against the resident's account. A resident can change or withdraw a vote while the poll is open; once it closes, nothing can be changed.
| Poll type | What a resident submits | What happens to their earlier vote |
|---|---|---|
| Single choice | Exactly one option | Replaced by the new one |
| Multiple choice | One or more options, one vote each | Kept; the same option cannot be voted twice |
| Ranked choice | Options in preference order, best first | Cleared and rewritten with ranks 1, 2, 3 |
Is a poll on AKCS anonymous?
No. A ballot is stored against the resident's account — the record that stops the same account voting twice for one option, and that lets someone change their mind. What no committee member gets is a way to read it back:
- The ballot list on a poll returns only the caller's own votes, for admin and security accounts as well as residents.
- The per-option ballot list strips the voter from every row before it leaves the server. An admin sees counts and ranks, never names, and the console has no screen that would show otherwise.
A vote is confidential from the committee, not anonymous in the database. If your bye-laws require a genuinely secret ballot for an office-bearer election, run that on paper. See also who can see my data.
When can residents see the results?
Straight away, while voting is open. There is no hidden-results mode: everyone who can see the poll sees the running tally, so do not promise a reveal at the end.
Results carry per-option counts and percentages, total ballots and the number of distinct voters. Two things to read carefully:
- Quorum. A quorum set as a number of voters is checked against the distinct-voter count and reported as met or short. A percentage quorum is recorded but not evaluated in the console, which says so rather than guess.
- Ranked choice. A ranked ballot writes one row per ranked option, so the headline count treats a last preference like a first one. Read the rank breakdown before declaring a winner.
How do we close a poll and minute the outcome?
Close the poll, then archive it. Archiving freezes the result into a permanent record: total ballots, total voters, and each option's text, count and percentage.
On that record the committee writes a summary, implementation notes and a status — pending, in progress, completed, cancelled or not applicable. Marking it completed stamps the date. Residents can read the outcome history, but only admin and security accounts can change it.
Who can post a notice, and what can it carry?
Posting to the notice board requires a community admin account. A notice carries a title and body, one image, one document attachment and one video, an optional category, and an urgency level: low, medium (the default), high or urgent.
- Where it goes. A notice on the community root reaches every flat under it. Narrow it by targeting specific roles or spaces.
- When it appears. A notice with a publish time in the future stays out of the resident feed until that time; set an expiry and it drops off the board.
- How it sits. Pinned notices stay at the top of the feed; an unpublished draft is visible only to admins.
Publishing fans out a push notification and an email to residents in the target space, and only on the first publish. Editing, pinning or unpinning a live notice never re-notifies the community, so you can fix a typo without waking everyone twice.
Categories are yours to define: three exist by default — General, Maintenance and Events — and you can add more. Polls send no notification of their own, so post a notice if you want turnout.
Can we see who has actually read a notice?
AKCS writes a read receipt the first time a resident opens a notice — one per resident per notice, with the time, so re-opening cannot inflate it. Residents can filter their feed to what they have not read.
What the console shows today is the count of residents who have opened the notice. The per-resident receipts and their timestamps are stored, but the console does not display them as a named list, so treat the number as evidence of reach at an AGM rather than a per-flat attendance register.
Comments are off by default and switched on per notice. Each comment is stored with the resident's name and time and shown in the thread; turning comments off hides the thread again. Anything that needs tracking to resolution belongs in a complaint, not a comment.
What belongs in the document library?
The library holds the community's paperwork — bye-laws, AGM and committee minutes, circulars, certificates and policies. Every document has one of seven types: policy, notice, certificate, meeting minutes, community rules, resident ID or other.
Each entry takes a title, a description, comma-separated tags and an optional expiry or review date. Documents expiring in the next 30 days can be listed on their own, so a registration certificate stops being a surprise. A superseded document is archived with a reason and a date rather than deleted, so the old version stays traceable.
Uploading, editing and archiving need an admin or security account, and files can go up in a batch. Residents get a read-only library in the app, grouped by type, showing public documents from their community. Resident ID scans sit in the same store, visible only to that resident and to admin and security accounts.
Loading the library with your paperwork is part of onboarding. To see a first poll and notice run end to end, book a demo.
Still stuck?
Email contact@shinraidynamics.com and a human replies within the same working day.