Great News! You now get more from EX Service. We lowered the price and increased the benefits of EX. Now receive 500 free monthly minutes to use on the virtual phone and 100 free fax pages/month. Phone Blasts are now only 5¢/min and SMS Blasts 3¢/text.

Our standard service is free and includes all the tools for your community to meet, organize and communicate.

EX Service provides more options to organize and share information quickly. Stay connected on and offline. Equip your group with the tools of a formal organization. Powerful features, ideal for community groups, home owners associations, and emergency management. For a full comparison of features see how it works.

To upgrade your group to EX, login to your i-Neighbors account and visit the shopping cart.

Abstract:

The Internet offers opportunities for informal deliberation, and civic and civil engagement. However, social inequalities have traditionally meant that some communities, where there is a concentration of poverty, are both less likely to exhibit these democratic behaviors and less likely to benefit from any additional boost as a result of technology use. This paper argues that some new technologies, such as i-Neighbors, afford opportunities for communication that bridge this divide. Using temporal topic modeling, the authors compare informal conversational activity that takes place online in communities of high and low poverty. The analysis is based on anonymized data collected through i-Neighbors, a community website that provides neighborhood discussion forums. To test the hypotheses, the authors designed a novel time series segmentation algorithm that is driven by topic dynamics. They embed an LDA algorithm in a segmentation strategy and develop an approach to compare and contrast the resulting topic models underlying time series segments. The authors examine the adoption of i-Neighbors by poverty level, and apply their algorithm to six neighborhoods (three economically advantaged and three economically disadvantaged) and evaluate differences in conversations over a one year period for statistical significance. Their findings suggest that social technologies like i-Neighbors may afford opportunities for democratic engagement in contexts that are otherwise less likely to support opportunities for deliberation and participatory democracy.

Want to read more, you can find a copy of the paper here:

Gad, Samah, Naren Ramakrishnam, Keith Hampton & Kavanaugh, Andrea (2012). Bridging the Divide in Democratic Engagement: Studying Conversation Patterns in Advantaged and Disadvantaged Communities. 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Informatics, Washington D.C.

While many homeowner associations (HOA) and other civic groups use i-Neighbors to send electronic notifications, there are usually some local residents who have not joined the site, and some important documents that still require paper delivery. i-Neighbors Postal Blast, part of our EX Service, allows postal mail to be sent from within the i-Neighbors website and delivered by the United States Postal Service. No manual printing, folding, inserting, sealing, stamping, or delivering - we do it all! Compose and send one or hundreds of letters. All letters are mailed using first-class postage and delivered via the standard postal service.

What can I send using Postal Blast? And how fast is it delivered?

You can send any document up to 64 single sided pages or 128 double sided. You can include a return envelope and have the bottom third of the first page perforated (i.e., if you want to include a payment stub or coupon).  Any document less than 8 pages is mailed in a number 10, double window envelope, larger letters are mailed in a flat envelope. All mail is processed and transfered to the United States Postal Service the same or next business day. Once transferred to the postal service, standard delivery times apply.

How much does it cost?

A single letter, one page in length, mailed to a U.S. household is $0.99 - including postage, paper, envelope, printing and processing. The longer the letter, the less greater the savings. For example, a newsletter that is eight pages would cost $2.74 per letter (less expensive than what many HOA management companies charge for the same service).  A full breakdown of Postal Blast pricing can be found here.

Who can I send a letter to using Postal Blast?

Letters can be mailed to any household in the United States or Canada. Letters can be sent to any group member who has an address in their profile, or group administrators can upload a list of local residents into the i-Neighbors website. Uploaded information is private, it can only be viewed by administrators and is not included in users' profiles.

i-Neighbors helps identify local residents who are not receiving electronic communications. Each group has a neighborhood directory that lists registered users. Our bounce detection feature identifies any member who has joined, but is not receiving messages sent through the system (e.g., if they changed their email address but did not update their i-Neighbors profile).

How do I send a letter?

Group administrators, and those they authorize as EX Administrators, send letters by navigating to "Postal Blast" on the EX toolbar.

Use the text editor within the i-Neighbors website or upoload your letter as a PDF. The i-Neighbors text editor gives control over formatting, allows for the inclusion of graphics, and has the option to cut and paste from a Word document that preserves formatting.

You can mail merge information from users' profiles or from an uploaded membership list (such as first and last name). There is also the option to customize two fields of information to mail merge for each contact (e.g., the amount of overdue HOA fees).

Postal Blasts are sent using the same procedure used for sending Phone Blasts and SMS Blasts. Simply, select who will receive your message, choose any letter options (such as a return envelope, or printing in color), and press "send". The price of any letters that cannot be processed, because the address is incomplete or cannot be verified (we use CASS verification that includes DPV) is returned to your account.

Return for our next blog when we will review how to use our new conference calling system.

SMS Blasts are text messages sent to members' mobile phones, while Phone Blasts are recorded voice messages sent to home or mobile phones.

SMS and Phone Blasts are two of the most powerful features of i-Neighbors' EX Service, they can be used to send meeting reminders, neighborhood watch updates, crime and weather alerts, and for emergency management.

Who can receive SMS and Phone Blasts?

Access to Phone Blasts and SMS Blasts is controlled by the neighborhood administrator(s) and group members that they authorize as EX Administrators. To receive Phone Blasts, group members must provide their home phone number as part of their member profile. Members can also provide a mobile phone number and opt-in to receive Phone Blasts on their mobile phone. To receive SMS Blasts, members must provide a mobile phone number and opt-in from their profile.

Phone Blasts can be used to share information with local residents who are not on i-Neighbors, including those that do not have Internet access. The "membership" link on the EX toolbar allows administrators to enter an individual's contact information or to upload a spreadsheet of names and contact information (such as a list of HOA members). The uploaded membership list is private; it is not added to user profiles and it is not visible to other i-Neighbors users.

How do I send a Phone Blast?

Select Phone Blast from the EX toolbar. Use the checkboxes to select names and numbers to receive your message, or use the drop down menu to select all members or a specific committee. Schedule your Phone Blast to send immediately or at a future time. Record your message using your computer's microphone, or type in the message and have it converted using our text-to-speech system. Text-to-speech can play your message using a male or female voice and your choice of an English, Spanish, or French accent. The final step is to press "send".

After your Phone Blast is sent, you can review the results to see if any calls failed (e.g., a disconnected number). If an answering machine picks up, your message is left as voice mail.

How do I send a SMS Blast?

SMS Blasts are sent the same way as Phone Blasts. Simply, select SMS Blast from the EX toolbar, select the members who will receive your message, type in your text message, schedule a time to send the message (optional), press "send", and view the results of your broadcast.

How long will it take for my Phone or SMS Blast to be sent?

Your message is sent immediately or at the scheduled time that you request. To ensure the fastest possible delivery of your message, our system makes many simultaneous calls. For example, If your i-Neighbors group has 300 members, it will take about 5 minutes to call or text all members of your group.

We hope that you are as excited as we are about the potential for Phone and SMS Blasts to be used to share information locally and to build stronger, smarter communities. Return for our next blog when we will discuss how to send a Postal Blast using i-Neighbors.

The Virtual Phone & Fax can be accessed from the "phone & fax" menu on the EX toolbar.

What happens when someone calls your group's virtual phone?

The neighborhood administrator(s) controls access to all EX features and can setup the virtual phone to:

If you choose to use the i-Neighbors' voice mail system, you can personalize the message callers' hear. You will receive an email with a link to any message callers' leave (or you can check messages from within your i-Neighbors account).

What if you want to make an outgoing call?

If you are making a phone call on behalf of your organization, you may want the caller ID to display your group's phone number, rather than your home or cell phone. Unlike a traditional telephone, the Virtual Phone has no handheld receiver. However, if your computer has a microphone and speakers you can place an outgoing call. Simply enter the number you want to dial, and click the "call" button.

How do I send a fax?

With the Virtual Fax, neighborhood administrators, and other members that they authorize, can upload files to the i-Neighbors website to be sent as a fax.  The virtual fax accepts doc, pdf, xls, tif, jpg, odt, txt, html and png files. Upload the file you want to send, enter the number to dial, and the file is faxed (if the number is busy, it will retry up to 5 times over the next 10 minutes). As soon as your fax has been sent, we will send you an email update.

How do I receive a fax?.

You can receive faxes too! When a fax is sent to your group's number, we send you an email with a link to the fax (we keep a private archive of received faxes for you on the i-Neighbors website).

Return to our blog for our next post when we discuss SMS Blasts and Phone Blasts.

Adding EX Service to your i-Neighbors group is easy. One monthly subscription fee of $39 provides EX Service for your entire group (of unlimited members). There is no fee per user.

Once you login to your i-Neighbors account and have joined or created a local group, EX Service can be added from the shopping cart. When you order EX you also select the area codes for the three local phone numbers that we assign your group, a Virtual Phone, Virtual Fax, and conference line. We can provide phone numbers in most area codes in the United States and Canada.

Your group can also get EX for free! The goal of i-Neighbors is to build strong communities, by enabling interaction between local people and by supporting local businesses. Every month that a local business from your community advertises on i-Neighbors, we reduce your group's monthly subscription fee by one-third. Local businesses benefit from exposure to your community, and your community benefits from our advanced EX Service.

After you subscribe your group to EX, local group administrators can access EX Service and authorize other members to use EX. Authorized members can send Phone Blasts, SMS Blasts, Postal Blasts, setup conference calls, manage committees, upload membership lists, and administer the Virtual Phone and Virtual Fax.

When an authorized member signs-in to the i-Neighbors website, they can toggle between the "main view" (image on right) and "EX View". The main view is what all group members see when they sign-in to i-Neighbors.

EX View includes the additional EX toolbar (see below) and a toolbar to access content contributed by committees (another EX feature!).

On the EX toolbar, the "Committees" menu controls access to EX features. Local administrators can add "EX Administrators" or "Committees". EX Administrators have the same privileges as normal group administers to use all EX features (such as sending an SMS Blast). Committees consist of group members and each committee has access to their own area for links & files, photos, maps, polls, calendar, reviews, and discussion forum. Any group member can route a file to a committee, or start a private discussion with a committee (great for HOAs that need to send documents to a committee for review and voting).

Group and EX administrators can view all the content that committees create, with the exception of the committee discussion forums. Group administrators, EX administrators, committee members, and other designated contacts are listed on a contact section that is visible to all members from the main view.

Return for our next blog post when we discuss features of the Virtual Phone & Virtual Fax.

EX was developed to better meet the needs of our most common type of i-Neighbors groups (we host thousands of groups): home owners associations, crime watch, emergency prepardness, and community or civic associations. We wanted a set of tools that would help groups:

• improve communication with their constituents
• increase their efficiency
• lower their existing costs
• build connections locally

When local groups use the Internet, they are building connection both on and offline. When developing EX, we embraced this concept and started with a single question:

What if every neighborhood had a phone number?

The answer: Neighborhoods function more like formal organizations than loosely connected individuals.

With EX, community leaders have a local phone number that is different from their home and mobile phones. Even when local leaders change, the number we assign to their i-Neighbors group does not. Organizers, committee members, etc., can make outgoing telephone calls from within the i-Neighbors website. Officials, contractors, and even members have one number where they can always reach the person(s) in charge.

We soon realized that one number was not enough. So, EX Service includes three numbers assigned to each i-Neighbors group. One to send and receive phone calls. A second, to send and receive faxes. A third brings back a variation on the party line - a dedicated local phone number for each group that can be used for conference calling. Meetings can take place anytime and anywhere.

In addition, to a phone, fax, and conference line, group leaders can use their group's number to send:

• text messages to member's phones.
• pre-recorded voice messages to home and mobile numbers.

The on and offline connection that i-Neighbors provides does not end with the telephone. We also integrated a postal system into our EX Service. Groups can upload a membership roster (or use the list of registered i-Neighbors users) and mail merge one or hundreds of letters that are delivered by the United States Postal Service.

EX also allows groups to create a contact list and committees. Committees have access to their own area to store and share files and discussions.

With EX Service, crime watch groups have a quick way to send notifications (SMS Blast), community associations can remind residents of local events (Phone Blast), in an emergency - whether a tornado, a burglary, or the pending arrival of snow plows - residents are immediately reachable (SMS Blast), the boards of home owners associations have a phone number that never changes (Virtual Phone & Fax), and HOAs can benefit from our inexpensive postal mailings (Postal Blast).

These benefits are not limited to i-Neighbors or even Internet users. A main goal of our EX Service was to help communities bring those who are not connected into loop (Postal and Phone Blasts).

Come back over the next few weeks as we detail each of the features associated with i-Neighbors' EX Service.