What's Next for Nextdoor?

When Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000, he brought to light a trend of increasing disconnection between people, whether family, friends, or neighbors. Since then, social networking sites have exploded onto the scene, connecting or reconnecting us to friends, colleagues, and family members like never before. But Facebook and the others have never done much to connect us to the people who live around us. Nextdoor is changing that.

Nextdoor is a local-scale social network designed to connect people with their neighbors. A neighborhood’s Nextdoor network can only be joined by people who reside in that neighborhood. Users must use their real names and real addresses (which are validated by Nextdoor). There’s no anonymity on Nextdoor – and that’s the idea. I can’t anonymously chastise my neighbor’s early morning leaf blower routine when we meet on the sidewalk; neither can I do it on Nextdoor. Nextdoor’s mission is to “bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood, one of the most important communities in each of our lives.”

On my own neighborhood’s Nextdoor site, my neighbors share information on the street sweeping schedule, pass on invitations to community events, and circulate public safety alerts. Of the 7,000 or so households in my neighborhood, 130 of them (about 2%) are represented on Nextdoor, a small but not insignificant number.

Community development practitioners have been slowly embracing social media as a way of organizing neighbors and communicating with residents. Nextdoor may be the next frontier for your social media strategy, but there will be an important caveat. Nextdoor won’t let you simply blast your meeting announcement or survey link out to your target neighborhood; you’ll first have to win over a resident in the neighborhood who believes enough in what you’re doing to circulate it herself, under her real name. But when neighbors hear about your news from other neighbors who thought your announcement was important enough to share, their response will be greater. As Nextdoor membership grows, community development practitioners may find it a valuable tool, but only if they’re sharing information that those affected believe is valuable.

Read more commentary on Nextdoor in this article from Slate: Won’t You Be My Neighbor