How Cities Can Really Use NextDoor Social Network

By Gavin | July 11, 2019

Hi everyone, Christian goth girl, I'm really excited because I'm in a Google hangout with Sarah Leary, she's a co-founder of nextdoor.com, now next door is the private social network for neighborhoods. Hi Kristy, good to be here.

It's as I said a private social network

I actually just installed next door app on my phone a couple of days ago, and I'm really excited about it because it's as I said a private social network for neighborhoods and it was easy, I just installed the app and no one had selected a neighborhood in my area.

So I was able to easily draw the boundaries of the map and automatically see what addresses would fall into my neighborhood, and I didn't even have to go door-to-door asking people to come and sign up for this service. A neighbor, what have you learned from government agencies about how they want to use or how they are using next-door?

When we started next door back in 2011, we were originally focused on helping neighbors talk to each other about the issues that matter most, so one of the things that surprised us was just how many public agencies wanted to be on the next-door platform.

What we learned was that most public service agency staff are doing great work, and most residents don't know the details of the work that's being done, and so they turned to us and said we want to have a two-way dialogue with these public agency staff members, because together we think we can build stronger safer communities.

This is really just a natural evolution of Nextdoor

This is really just a natural evolution of next-door, and what we've been piloting over the course of the last two years is allowing large cities across the country to create pages for their Police Fire and Department of Emergency Management agencies.

And today what we're excited to announce is that power to be able to allow local agencies to communicate with residents is now available to every city every town in every county across the country. So are they looking at what you're writing with your next-door neighbor about feeding a babysitter or crime in the neighborhood? Are they get all those details?

It's important to understand that city officials cannot see the conversations that are going on among the residents themselves, those remain private, instead city officials can send out important posts, and residents can respond to them and thank them, and give them the feedback that they need to continue to improve the services that they provide.

Let's get into how much this product is going to cost

Let's get into how much this product is going to cost, government agencies, I know from experience that public sector agencies get frustrated with products, where they invite them to interact with the citizens in this space, but they charge a premium to the government agency.

So can you talk a little bit about how the next-door model is different? One of the great things about next-door is that is free both to members who join as well as to the public agencies that use the platform. Let's say that I'm a public information officer for a government agency of what are some of the ways you can think of, where I could use next-door.

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Let me give you kind of three categories, one of them is around crime prevention, we see police departments turning to next-door really offering like a virtual neighborhood watch platform, the second one that I'll call out is around really community building.

There's a lot of great work that is done by city officials, that often time local residents don't even know about, the third one that I'll call it is around emergency preparedness, we've seen that this is one way that people are using next door to send out important information.

Do you know your neighbor's names? I do now. When we started next door I actually only knew one neighbor on my block, amazingly and I lived there for four and a half years, and thanks to next-door I now know over a dozen of people who live on my block as well as dozens of more people who live in a five or six block radius.

For participating and a little Google hangout

For participating and a little Google hangout to talk about next door for public agencies and real quick, if agencies do want to get on board with next door, what did they do? Public agencies can sign up for next-door by visiting nextdoor.com.

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And clicking on the link for cities that will take you to nextdoor.com, agency just fill out the form will verify that you are who you say you are, and that you are a public agency, and from there you'll be able to immediately start communicating with next door members that live in your city within a few minutes.

Let's see if there's anything good going on in my neighborhood, and I get in, I would have loved to have gone to a Lord of the Rings wedding, some very sound buddy, you're having a conversation with the friends, everybody, it's for the kids.