In late 2016, leaders of the Tellico Village HomeOwners Association were looking for a way to better manage membership.

That management tool has grown far beyond expectations.

Tellico Life, www.telli colife.org, was launched a little more than a year ago with five organizations on board — HOA, New Villagers, the Tellico Village Computer Users Club, STAYinTV and neighborhood watch.


“The origin of it was we really just wanted something to manage our membership,” John Bordelon, past president for the HOA, said. “… We wanted to know who was in the club, what their addresses were, how they joined.”

Marsha Herzog took the reins of the project and formed a team that included Sue English-Kovar, current HOA president. Herzog and English-Kovar soon realized they had something bigger than just a tool for the HOA.

“We just thought this is such a great tool,” English-Kovar said. “Besides being efficient for us to do our membership and event management and things like that, wouldn’t this be great if the whole Village could be involved in this.”

What launched was a website that offered each club a way to manage membership, add events to a calendar or simply have a web presence. In the first year it has grown to include 26 clubs and organizations in Tellico Village.

“The response I think has been terrific,” Herzog said. “When we get a chance to talk to clubs and organizations we’ve got a really high close rate. Yeah, there’s some that have their own web capabilities and don’t need it, but most of the clubs and organizations say several things.

“One is the Village needs something like this, the common calendar so we can have one place to go to find out what’s going on because everybody is so active here,” she added. “Then the next thing that we get is for particularly the medium and smaller clubs … we get a reaction of, ‘Wow, this is going to make it easier for me to manage my club,’ because they don’t have to have their own website and own tech capabilities to do that.”

The calendar has been the No. 1 draw for the website, which has been something of a surprise.

“We’ve learned that more clubs just really want to use the calendar and have visibility than to have some of the higher end member management stuff,” Herzog said. “The member management stuff that we’re using for HOA, New Villagers and Computer Users Club is great for those clubs, but I’m surprised how many of the mid-sized and smaller clubs we’re attracting.”

Bordelon hopes the calendar can eventually include every event in Tellico Village on any given day.

Another surprise has been the traffic Tellico Life has seen, with 25,000 page views per month and more than 5,200 individuals registered.

“We were thinking very naively that it would just be a little bitty old site,” Bordelon said. “Here we are a year and a half into it and we’re up to 25 different organizations and the potential is just phenomenal. … The reality is, if we can reach more than half of the Village in a short period of time then we did something right. I think that’s the key.”

The site has also seen some traffic from outside Tellico Village, which Herzog credits to potential residents researching the Village. While users have to sign in to manage accounts or sign up for events, viewing the calendar or club information can happen without an account.

Clubs interested in joining the site can contact info@tellicolife.org, which reaches Herzog and the website’s administrative team. From there they can schedule a meeting to help get things set up.

“I don’t want to bring anybody on without meeting with them because I’ve learned there’s so many ways to use Tellico Life to fit the needs of the unique club or organization that really that interview of what it is you’re trying to do and how can we help you (is important),” Herzog said.

The site is also continuously looking for volunteers to help keep things running smoothly, which can also be done by contacting info@tellicolife.org.

“To keep this thing sustainable, we don’t have a Human Resources office where we give people big salaries to do this,” English-Kovar said. “We need to get people who are excited and love doing this stuff to come join us.”