How might we harness residents’ talents to address neighbourhood needs?
Bringing about Amazing Neighbours
My team of Squares put our heads together to come up with a potentially disruptive digital solution. We put forth our pitch in a short 5-min video above. Please feel free to leave us some feedback to improve our idea.
TL:DR below.
The Problem and Opportunity
People in Singapore hardly interact with their neighbours. According to surveys done by Singapore Kindness Movement, only 3 in 10 have casual conversations with neighbours, more than once a week. About 5 in 10 greet neighbours, once or less a week only.
On the other hand, volunteering hours are on the rise in Singapore, doubling from 2014 to 2016., especially informal volunteering. E.g. neighbours banding together to form community networks to look out for seniors. Or, people rescuing injured stray dogs and cats on their own.
Our Disruptive Digital Idea
We would like to highlight our concept’s Unique Value Proposition, which is the ability to create opportunities for neighbours to be more involved in their community — by posting & matching requests quickly via our online platform. This allows neighbours to be more aware and participate in the initiatives in their neighbourhood, thus fostering greater engagement and trust neighbours.
Target Customers
Customer segments that we will target are students, young professionals, and retirees. We will focus on younger residents who are more tech savvy to be our early adopters — faster take-up rate.
- Students spend a lot of time online and will be keen to explore new stuffs and the neighbourhood. They can also be the one introducing their parents who are less tech savvy to come on board.
- Young Professionals have technical expertise to offer to help others. But often they are also stuck at work and might need some help at home.
- As for older residents, we will be looking at hosting lessons to involve and onboard them to join our online platform over time. These retirees have a lot of life skills that will come in handy to help others.
Our Brand Mission & Values
Brand Values: Trust, Integrity, Knowledgeable . These are the values of amazing neighbours and these values govern the communities so that everyone build trust together.
- Building Trust.
- Integrity — we don’t abuse this initiative
- Care — caring for one another in the neighbourhood
Our Business Model
So far, we have covered the Problem, Solution, Unique Value Proposition, and Customer Segments aspects of the Lean Canvas. To further develop our business model, we use the Lean Canvas to structure our thinking around other business aspects.
As for our cashflow planning, for a start, we have identified our costs to largely comprise of development and server hosting costs, and marketing-related expenses to acquire and retain users. To establish our revenue streams, we plan to raise funds through various channels; government, corporations, foundations, and individual donors.
Key metrics that we would be tracking, especially during the starting-up phase, are: 1) No. of user sign-ups, and 2) Monthly Active Users — as we believe that having a large, active user base is essential to keeping the platform vibrant and encourage user stickiness.
We think that we will obtain an unfair advantage by tapping on the rise of informal volunteerism in the community, which would create heavy involvement among residents in the neighbourhood.
Mobile-First Strategy
Mobile is crucial to our strategy, because almost everyone has a mobile which they carry around all the time.
We are building a mobile app, as we believe that users are more engaged in-app than on a web browser, as an app allows us to tap on the device’s capabilities and integrate better with other platforms to open up more opportunities to increase user engagement and drive branding.
Key Mobile App Features
Here are several ways which we can use mobile to enhance user experience.
- Firstly, best-practice app design to ensure usability.
- Secondly, tapping on GPS capability and camera functions to enrich user-generated content, making them easily discoverable and shareable on social messaging services such as WhatsApp, and social media, to expand organic reach, especially in dark social.
- And lastly amongst others, project management features for organisers and participants to manage time. And, rich user profiles, for everyone to get to know each other.
Engaging Customers Through Social Media
To engage our users on social, we will perform social listening through the top three social media channels in Singapore i.e. Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram.
Instagram: Paid posts by influencers participating in neighbourhood projects, or generate organic content by creating opportunities for volunteers to create Instagram Stories.
Facebook: Facebook Groups could also be created for each neighbourhood to build community togetherness and social capital.
Youtube: Teens love reality TV shows, gain their trust and attention through the authentic neighbourhood stories.
Scaling Up
Currently, the online platform aims to connect skills and resources within a local community to address problems within the community. The main social implication of this is a more cohesive neighbourhood. To scale up our idea, we could bring our online platform to the region to address community problems overseas. For example, to Germany which is helping to take in large numbers of refugees and could do with some help to promote social integration in their local communities.
To expand the scale and scope of our neighbourhood activities, we can also work with established Non Profit Organizations to widen the variety of projects on our platform. We can establish partnerships with learning institutes to upskill our residents such as the Social Service Institute that provides soft-skill trainings, like communication, leadership, etc.
Further down our product road map, we can add additional features, such as matching with overseas volunteer projects, and through the data we have collected about our users, help them build up their CVs and even match them with internships and job opportunities through referrals by neighbours.
Further Readings
- Singaporeans prefer privacy to mingling with neighbours (Goy, 2017)
- Importance of neighbourliness (Goy, 2017)
- Volunteerism in Singapore almost doubles from 2014 to 2016: Survey (Lim, 2017)
- Graciousness Index shows further improvement (Singapore Kindness Movement, 2015)
Please feel free to leave us some feedback to improve our idea.
