What is Neighborland

Neighborland is a public engagement platform designed for government agencies, developers, and civic organizations. Our software is the only solution designed for planners to collaborate with their stakeholders in an accessible, participatory, and equitable way. Over 3 million people have participated on Neighborland, and our partners’ projects have yielded over $3 billion in social and economic impact.

Our mission is to empower people to shape the development of their neighborhoods. We exist to improve the way city agencies, local organizations, universities, and real estate developers collaborate with their communities. Technology should help governments and developers deliver radically more efficient and responsive services. Our vision is a world where everyone works together to create the places they want to live in. It’s an ambitious goal, but we like working on problems that matter.

Why Neighborland?

Over the past decade, we’ve developed software and a lightweight community-centered process that helps our partners define and achieve their engagement objectives. Our partners reach ten to one hundred times the level of participation compared to traditional outreach methods, at one tenth of the cost. Most importantly, we help our partners achieve their goals — 100% of plans we have supported have been approved.

We have extensive experience working directly with local, state, and federal agencies. Our new Citywide solution is built for cities, counties, special districts, and regional commissions who want to administer multiple projects on one platform. Partners can now host projects on a single website with a custom domain, control email communications, set privacy and terms of service, and integrate with your CRM of choice. We provide continuous product improvements, security updates, and technical maintenance at no additional charge.

We are experts in partnering with urban planning and facilitation consultants on project teams. We offer expertise in supporting transportation, economic development, parks, and resilience planning projects. We have also supported public private partnerships between government agencies, real estate developers, and neighborhood organizations and helped implement community benefit agreements.

What does our software do?

Our public engagement platform will enable you to:

• Easily publish and manage project websites (no web design or development skills are necessary, cloud-based, domain/hosting included)
• Quickly publish text, images, video, documents, and events to project pages
• Collect, curate, and publish stakeholder feedback (ideas, votes, comments) on maps and scenario renderings
• Upload stakeholder feedback from workshops and events in public space
• Provide a simple, easy-to-use discussion forum for residents
• Moderate stakeholder engagement with project administration tools
• Publish single- and multiple-choice surveys, and collect stakeholder input
• Map resident ideas, insights, and solutions to specific locations and categorize by topic
• Notify residents on project milestones with automated email notifications
• Visually theme pages with each project’s visual identity
• Collect insights with SMS, voice phone calls, and/or Twitter
• Analyze project and participant data (including optional demographic data) with a real-time project dashboard, Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics integrations, and an automated sentiment analysis tool
• Provide government and enterprise level security and reliability (99.99+% uptime)
• Provide consumer grade site performance (2 second or less page loading times)
• Enable residents to easily share feedback on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google)
• Meet ADA and W3C requirements
• Support the current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge
• Engage with residents in any language supported by Google Translate
• Collect donations via Stripe
• Access project data via our JSON API (API Documentation)

How is it different?

As with any technology platform choice, our partners’ decision comes down to features and pricing. First, we have the most comprehensive and configurable platform on the market. Our software is designed to help planners with their key engagement tasks: delivering information, collecting insights, facilitating dialogue, mapping, surveying, prioritizing, sharing resources, integrating with existing workflows, visualizing data, and reporting. Our modular CMS allows project managers to create project sites quickly and to adjust them as needed throughout the timeline of their project.

Second, we are the only platform on the market that connects real-world, SMS, Twitter, and web-based participation into one unified database. This makes Neighborland the most accessible, equitable platform for public engagement. That’s why we were chosen to be a platform partner in the 100 Resilient Cities program, pioneered by Rockefeller Foundation.

Third, we handle the maintenance. Our partners avoid costly design, engineering, and maintenance fees, as they are built in to our monthly services agreement. We are continually improving and modernizing our product to insure that we have the simplest, easiest to use technology on the market.

Finally, our internal analytics tools are the best on the market. We measure every interaction on Neighborland and display it on an internal dashboard. Because Neighborland is a public space, residents are not required to sign up/in to view content. Therefore, we leverage Google Analytics best in class measurement, demographics, and visualization tools. We can also export all activity on Neighborland into our partners’ Google Analytics account, for a unified look at all of the data collected on a project.

Success stories

The City and County of San Francisco, led by the Planning Department and the City Administrator’s Office, have engaged over 117,000 residents (14% of the total population) on a variety of plans and projects over the past few years.

The City of Mesa, led by Mayor John Giles, engaged over 67,000 residents in a community-driven visioning project, including the City providing micro-grants for residents to develop their ideas into formal proposals. The public approved $300m in bonds in the November 2018 election.

Allegheny County Department of Human Services has engaged thousands of stakeholders across several projects, including their $900m annual budget.

The City of Raleigh engaged 65,000 residents on the Dorothea Dix Park Master Plan. As Adrian Benepe from the Trust for Public Land has said, “Dorothea Dix Park is the most important and exciting park project in America today.”

The City of Atlanta Department of Planning, in partnership with Invest Atlanta, the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority, and Perkins+Will, completed the Turner Field Stadium Neighborhoods Livable Centers Initiative, a master plan for the 65 acre site in downtown Atlanta.

The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, with the support of Ride Nola, completed construction of the $90m Rampart St. Claude Streetcar.

San Francisco Planning has engaged tens of thousands of residents on their public realm plans in South Downtown (Transbay Terminal), Central Waterfront and Dogpatch, and Lower Haight neighborhoods. All of these plans have been approved.

In partnership with 100 Resilient Cities, the City and County of San Francisco Office of Resilience and Capital Planning developed Resilient SF, a strategic vision in conjunction with 31 government agencies and 56 NGO and private sector organizations.

The City and County of San Francisco City Administrator negotiated $15m+ in community benefit agreements with Twitter, Zendesk, Spotify, Microsoft, One King’s Lane, and Zoosk in the Central Market neighborhood.

The City of Atlanta Department of Planning engaged thousands of residents in the Council District 3 Neighborhood Master Plan.

San Francisco Planning and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts engaged over 250,000 residents in the $450m redesign of Market Street in 2015.

The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles engaged thousands of residents from 15 housing sites as part of their 20 year HACLA Vision Plan.

The City of San Francisco Planning and Public Works Departments and Mission Mercato complete the La Placita (Bartlett Alley) Redesign.

Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works partnered with City Innovate Foundation and a number of private sector technology companies (Microsoft, Cubic, Lyft, Zipcar, Siemens) to write a policy playbook that will help Miami-Dade build a multi-modal transit network.

Build Public, with the support of the City of San Francisco Planning and Public Works Departments, completes construction of the Dogpatch Arts Plaza.

Wayne State University’s Office of Economic Development engaged thousands of students, faculty, staff, and residents in the physical design of their campus in Detroit.

The City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office engaged hundreds of residents around their Resilience Action Plan, in partnership with 100 Resilient Cities, pioneered by Rockefeller Foundation.

The City of Oakland engaged thousands of residents in a collaborative placemaking project focused on activating public space for children and families on the steps of Oakland City Hall.

The City of San Jose engaged hundreds of residents in a tactical urban demonstration project as part of their Urban Villages Master Plan.

The City of West Hollywood Planning engaged hundreds of residents in the Eastside Community Plan.

The City of San Francisco’s Office of Economic Development engaged over 25,000 residents in the activation of the city’s most underperforming public parks.

Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge is a collaborative research and design project that brings together local residents, public officials and local, national and international experts to develop innovative solutions to the issues brought on by climate change that the Bay Area faces today.

San Francisco State University President Leslie Wong engaged over 10,000 students, faculty, staff, and alumni in the strategic planning of the university.

The League of Awesome Possibilities engaged hundreds of residents around the redevelopment of Ravenswood in Chicago.

The City of Houston Planning engaged hundreds of residents in the Washington Avenue Livable Corridors Plan.

For a complete list of our partners’ accomplishments, see our case studies on our Handbook.

How much does it cost?

Neighborland will always be free to use for residents. Our pricing varies based on the services needed from our partners and starts at $1,000/month for our self-service product.

Some of our partners hire us for additional services. Our capabilities include: program model definition, project management, workshop design, planning and production, community facilitator training, content creation + management, data analysis and visualization.

Questions?

Here’s a list of our frequently asked questions. Contact us and we‘ll be happy to answer questions that you have, share a webinar of our latest capabilities, and provide access to our demonstration environment.

Ready to get started?

Please contact us and we will set up a brief phone or video call at your convenience.