What this helps you do
Audiences group connected residents so a notice reaches the people it concerns. You always have one All Residents audience that reaches everyone connected and cannot be deleted. Onboarding seeds a small civic starter set you can rename, archive or replace: Public Works & Utilities, Sanitation & Collection, Parks & Recreation, Meetings & Notices, Emergency & Urgent Operations, and Municipal Staff. Residents pick the open ones themselves on their preferences page, which is how a coarse, self-declared list stays useful.
When to use it
Use audiences whenever a notice fits part of the town and not the rest: a paving schedule on one side, a collection change on one route, a pool closure for the families who use it, an agenda for the residents who follow the council, a shift note for staff.
How to do it
- Open Audiences.
- Keep the seeded service audiences that match how your departments actually split, and archive the ones you do not own.
- Create your own municipal data as audiences by name: a neighbourhood, a ward, a collection route, a water district, a downtown business group. Those are yours, not something the Hub can know.
- Choose how people join each one: residents choose it themselves, the municipality assigns them, or either. Leave the service audiences open so residents self-select, and set Municipal Staff to municipality assigns.
- To group audiences inside a service, set Inside audience to a parent, for example Route A Collection inside Sanitation & Collection.
- Decide per audience whether replies are allowed. Leave replies on for anything a resident would reasonably ask a question about.
Example
Public works creates one audience per collection route and one for the water district on the north side. When the north-side main is shut down for six hours, the notice goes to that district and to nobody else, so the residents on the south side do not learn to ignore messages from the town before the next real one arrives.
Good to know
- Emergency & Urgent Operations is an audience residents opt into, and sending to it asks for a step-up confirmation. It is not a badge, it is not an alert system, and it does not replace the emergency notification your municipality is required to use.
- Sending to All Residents also asks for a step-up confirmation. Keep it rare, because rare is what keeps it read.
- There are no rule-based or dynamic audiences, and the Hub does not read any municipal system. If you want a route or a district, create it and assign people to it.
- A resident can sit in several audiences at once, and can change them at any time without telling anyone.
- Department leads can be limited to their own department's audiences on the Team screen, both for sending and for reading replies.