Can You Prove Your Resident Engagement Strategy Is Real?

The Building Safety Regulator is calling in buildings for Building Assessment Certificates, and the categories are widening. If your building is over 30 metres with more than 11 residential units, you are already in scope. The 18 to 30 metre range is following. When the direction arrives, you have 28 days to submit.

One of the three documents you must produce is your Resident Engagement Strategy.

The strategy has to demonstrate how residents have been engaged and informed about building safety decisions - not how you plan to do it, or how you intended to do it when the document was written. How you have actually done it.

That is a different thing entirely.

Resident Engagement Strategy

The gap most property managers have

Most buildings have a Resident Engagement Strategy document. Far fewer have evidence that it reflects what happens in practice.

The BSR's assessment looks at whether the required content is present and reasonable. That includes information about how residents are told about safety decisions, how concerns are raised and responded to, and how communication reaches all residents - including those who may not engage through digital channels.

If your strategy says residents are kept informed and your evidence is a folder of sent emails and a portal that a third of residents have never logged into, that is a gap. Not because the intention was wrong, but because the record doesn't demonstrate reach.

Why the usual channels leave you exposed

Email requires residents to have registered, to receive the message, and to open it. Portals require login. Paper notices go unread. Community meetings reach the already engaged.

None of these channels create an automatic, retrievable record of what was communicated, to which building, on which date. And none of them reliably reach the full building population - particularly residents who are elderly, digitally excluded, or new to the country.

When the BSR assesses your Resident Engagement Strategy, it is looking for evidence of genuine, continuous, accessible communication. A communication channel that works passively - present in the communal spaces where all residents already are, requiring nothing from them to encounter it - is the only one that can honestly claim to reach everyone.

What a defensible record looks like

A Resident Engagement Strategy that stands up to BSR scrutiny has three things:

1. First, it describes communication that actually happens, not communication that is theoretically available to residents who take action to find it.

2. Second, it covers all residents - including those who are hardest to reach - not just the ones who are digitally engaged.

3. Third, it is documented. Every notice, every update, every building-specific communication, timestamped and retrievable. If you are asked to demonstrate that residents were informed about a safety decision six months ago, you can show exactly what was displayed, in which building, and for how long.
   

Where 30Seconds Tech fits

This is exactly what our platform was built to do. Property managers across hundreds of buildings - including those managed by RMG, JLL, Greystar and Rendall & Rittner - use 30Seconds to publish and schedule building notices to digital screens in lift lobbies and communal areas. Every notice is automatically archived, timestamped, and tied to specific buildings and screens.

The screens sit where residents already are. No login. No email address. No action required. The communication happens whether or not the resident has ever engaged with a portal.

When a BAC direction arrives, the record is already there.

What to do now

The Resident Engagement Strategy is an ongoing duty, not a submission exercise. That means the time to close the gap between your strategy on paper and your strategy in practice is now - before the direction arrives, not after.

Three questions worth asking today:

• If the BSR assessed your Resident Engagement Strategy tomorrow, what evidence of ongoing communication could you produce?

• Which of your buildings rely entirely on channels that require residents to take action to receive information?

• Does your communication record demonstrate reach across your whole resident population, or just the engaged majority?
  

The 28-day window does not move. The buildings being called in are getting closer to yours.

30Seconds Tech provides digital noticeboard and communication infrastructure for residential buildings across the UK, supporting property managers to evidence their Resident Engagement Strategy obligations under the Building Safety Act 2022. www.30seconds.tech | hello@30seconds.tech