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Behind the Scenes of a Citywide Social Community
Posted by Matt Rajkowski on March 23, 2015, 2:00 PM EDT
Earlier this year SWLA Connected was launched with one of our partners. SWLA Connected is a citywide private community for residents, city officials and law enforcement representatives of Southwest Louisiana. Residents sign up through a verification process and based on their home address they are auto-subscribed into one of the 50+ private areas within Southwest Louisiana. City officials and law enforcement representatives are invited into separate collaborative areas which push data into the residential communities.
Residents can share events, blogs, classified ads and issues across their broad area or within their own neighborhood. Residents can also form ad-hoc collaborative social groups which can be discovered and joined by other residents.
City officials and law enforcement representatives broadcast announcements into areas and neighborhoods to share information as it becomes available. Residents in these areas and neighborhoods can receive these updates as push notifications.
From an application perspective, similar functionality is available whether you use the iOS and Android mobile apps, or the website. The backend uses a customized edition of Concursive's ConcourseConnect. In this case the partner provided geographic shape files of all the areas in Southwest Louisiana, and a resident's geolocation is used to identify the particular shape area in which the resident lives.
As for the business model, there is a lot of technology and most organizations don't want to jump in on their own from scratch, so Concursive does partnerships with media companies, cities, churches, fraternal organizations and chambers to quickly pilot and deploy custom communities.
Concursive has an extensive platform for deploying community software, while the partner has a genuine interest and leadership in promoting and managing the community.
