Hello housingauthorityresearch.org community!
One of the tools that our landlords find very helpful is Bitly. In a previous post we talked about the importance of having an efficient and easy to understand process for your tenants to submit maintenance service requests. And in that post we recommended using Google Forms for your maintenance service request submission process. But, once you have your maintenance service request submission process setup in Google Forms, what’s the best way for your tenants to access the Google Form you created? Well, you could simply use the URL that Google Forms provides you for your specific Google Form. The only problem with that is that the typical URL character length for a Google Form is over one hundred characters long. Let’s show you an example of what the default URL that Google Forms provides you looks like. Below is an example of what the URL looks like for a Google Forms maintenance service request document one of our landlords setup.
Don’t worry, we changed the characters in the URL above to protect the landlord who let us borrow this screenshot, so we could illustrate the point better for you. So, now that you see what the default URL typically looks like from Google Forms, you also clearly see that you definitely don’t want to do a copy paste and send your tenants a link with over one hundred characters. That’s where a tool like Bitly comes in. The beauty of Bitly is that it simply lets you take a very long and ugly URL, like the one we showed you the screenshot of, and change it to a shortened string of character or pretty much whatever you want to call it. In the screenshot below you see an example of a shortened Google Forms link that one of our landlords created. By the way, you can use Bitly for any URL you would like to shorten or rename, not just a Google Form document. But, once you do create a Bitly link for your Google Forms maintenance service request you can just copy it and send it to your tenants and let them know that anytime they have a maintenance request, they can click the link and it should take them to your Google Forms maintenance service request document. We also recommend that you encourage your tenants to save the Bitly link to their favorites, so they can find it easily when they need to submit a maintenance service request. Otherwise, you run the risk of your tenants constantly asking you to resend the link over and over.
Alright, so hopefully this post was helpful in showing you how useful Bitly can be for you as a landlord. And by the way, Bitly is completely free to use, so you know we are very big fans of free tools. We always encourage our landlords to look for free tools and use them to their full capability. Also, we found a quick video that shows you what the process looks like for creating a Bitly link. We love to hear from our community, so please contact us if you have any feedback or questions.
