What this helps you do
A municipality has no membership list and no contract with the people it serves. What it has is a set of places every resident already looks: the utility bill, the tax statement, the collection calendar, counter and park signage, the meeting agenda and the town website. Your Hub publishes an enrollment code and QR code you print in those places. A resident who wants town notices enters the code and asks to connect; you approve. After that your notices appear on their phone or desktop, clearly from your municipality, instead of waiting on a web page.
When to use it
Publish the code once and leave it published. Every billing cycle, every permit counter visit, every park sign and every newsletter is another invitation, and the list grows by itself over a season. There is no launch day and no completion point: the audience is self-selecting and always partial, so plan on it being a share of the town, not the town.
How to do it
- Open Connections and click Sync connections once so your enrollment code and QR code are published.
- Print the enrollment kit and put it at the clerk's counter, the public works desk, the library, the recreation center and the notice board.
- Add the code, or the standing enrollment link where it is enabled for your Hub, to the utility bill insert, the collection calendar, the newsletter, the meeting agenda footer and the town website.
- If you run a sign-up page where residents ask for town notices, point it at the inbound webhook on Integrations, or use Zapier, so each person who signs up is invited the day they do.
- If that same sign-up list already exists as a spreadsheet, export it and use Add many at once or upload the CSV. Invitations are checked on Blasts and spread out at up to 200 a day.
- Accept requests under People who want to connect, or turn on auto-accept in Settings so residents are connected as soon as they ask.
Example
A town of 9,000 puts the code on the quarterly water bill insert, the recycling calendar that goes to every household in January, and a sign at the clerk's counter. Four months later 1,400 residents are connected. When River Road closes for main work, public works sends the detour to the residents who chose to connect, and the counter takes far fewer calls about it. The official closure notice still goes out exactly as it always did.
Good to know
- Only a list residents joined themselves qualifies. A utility-billing file, a voter roll and a tax roll are not lists you may upload here: those people never asked to hear from you this way.
- Connecting is the resident's own act and reversible: they can mute the municipality, set quiet hours or disconnect at any time, and you are not told.
- This is not a way to reach residents who have not connected, and it is not a channel you can assume anyone is on. Keep publishing the notice of record where the law says it goes.
- Import columns: your file needs an email column. The Hub also recognizes name, first name, last name, phone, address, household and interests (a column headed audiences, tags, groups or lists works too). Files are limited to 5,000 rows and 2 MB, with a preview before anything is sent.
- The Reach funnel on Connections shows where every resident stands (known, invited, requested or connected) and how they arrived: code, import, webhook, request or Zapier.
- This is Blasts, not SMS: no per-message carrier fee, and no mobile numbers to collect or keep.