five five minutes or so and then really get into some questions and discussion because i think most people here are pretty familiar with our service and probably have more interesting questions than anything i could come up with  is the front porch form story starts what i guess i have to call a long time ago now two thousand my wife and i were new to our neighborhood in burlington and we were having trouble kind of breaking in socially and the neighborhoods the five sisters neighborhood in the south that is well known as being unable to place but we're having trouble just get to know folks and so we try to couple things and it still wasn't happening and  we came upon this idea of starting kind of a neighborhood email list and seemed pretty simple although pretty newfangled at the time and it just really took off and people started using it much the way  people use the richmond front porch form of the wilson front porch formentera front porch warm now and we thought wow we might really have something here so we nursed it along as a little volunteer project for several years and in two thousand  eight years ago and we've been doing it every day since and i've read a lot of lost cat postings and you know marketing is really important and turns out  invest a little bit in a catnapping venture and boy you can we thank you all the cat missing kappos things are legitimate and none of them are planted by us or we don't steal cats but know there are a lot of missing pets but thankfully most of them are found in good good shape but we've been doing it every day since and we've been in the last few years expanding to the point now where we host a front porch form in every community in the state in chiton county and in washington as in counties franklin counties the adoption rates the number of people who use it is very high it's typically more than half the households in the town use front porch form in the newer areas of the state it's ten percent or so it's just that it's ramping up just takes takes a while for people to climb on board put it to use and perhaps if you've been on from ports for a long time in your community you might remember a time when it was slower before it took off there are some exceptions huntington for example was one of those places where just try to from day one it just just rocketed up and enjoyed a lot of vibrant use right away so i was going to start by acknowledging i got a reminder that i've been in this building before and i was even paying attention took a birthing warm for a wide variety of things and mention lost and found seeking recommendations putting items for sale offering items for free announcing events  organizing things announcing well sharing shall we say political opinions getting into you know kind of rigorous back and forth occasionally and our general approach is we don't want to get in the way we provide the forum we encourage people to come on and have their discussions but we also see from ports for primarily as a starting point and a catalyst for a face to face discussion  and we often see that a single posting on f p s will result in maybe ten or twenty follow up discussions maybe one or two of them will happen on front porch form maybe ten of them will happen through e mail and maybe another ten will happen through face to face conversation on the on the sidewalk or at the country store and really that's that's our mission we we are a for profit business but we consider ourselves mission driven and our mission is to help neighbors connect and build community and the whole concept is just to give people who live near each other an easy way to communicate the so that hopefully that'll stimulate more conversation across the board  so what else can i say we i mention we are business and so on the revenue side are you may have noticed our service is free so it's always a challenge to come up with a business  giving away your product but we sell advertising primarily it covers most of our opera operating costs we do have a annual supporting member campaign every october and thanks to several who've chipped into that over the years and it's it's working out really well are our advertisers tend to be very happy and returning and they appeal to businesses who want to associate with our brand who are like the front porch warm concept and think it's a good fit for the business and appeals to businesses that are interested in targeting small geographic groups so you can drop your ad so it's a small percentage i don't know what caught my head but it's once a year we in october we ask in so be prepared to get a few e mails from us and apologize in advance kind of a pain i know for some folks but and we are for profit which is unusual but you know it's there are a few comparisons out there but it's you know we give away our product and if you know i started doing it when i have people come up to me and say i just  know whatever save myself a thousand dollars because i got a used car from my neighbor instead of off the lot and i make a contribution a front porch warm i said sure we'll take a thousand bucks he said oh no i was thinking about ten ten  million dollars of federal and other monies to do a host of services across the state as part of the for mont digital economy project one of the services they wanted to provide was a an online community conversation space for every town in the state and so they put out the bid we bid on it we were obviously well situated to do that we were already providing the service pretty much what they were looking for and half  communities in so we were the the winning bid and so that resulted in about three hundred thousand dollars that we were able to use to build out our software and to expand to another hundred towns or so yeah we get a lot of inquiries from around the country most prominently from vermont tourists who move away who say wait a minute i got a call the other day from a lady in chicago who said y service in the upper valley the some folks who who host list serves time listservs that have gotten some good traction but then nationally there are well there been literally a couple hundred efforts to do something similar to what we're doing almost all of which have failed but there are two prominent efforts that are succeeding right now because they're well financed one is called every block  which is owned by comcast now it started out as an independent effort and the folks in chicago but they're expanding to other major cities and then there is one called next door dot com which is very similar to what we do and they were inspired by front porch warm i would say and they've they're a silicon valley classic silicon valley startup they've raised one hundred million dollars of venture capital money services address a basic human need to be able to communicate with the people you live around and something has happened in our culture over the last couple generations where many of us don't know or aren't in communication with their neighbors in the way that perhaps our parents or grandparents were and you know there's some plus sides to that i suppose you know i think things could be pretty stifling as much as i like to be nostalgic and think of norman rockwell images of the past but i think there's a there's some important things that are lost when people are isolated and out of communication with their neighbors and so i think there will be a always be a demand for a front porch warm like service up until the point where our culture changes again and people can just easily of course i know eighty percent of my neighbors well and we have regular you know easy communication so good good how about recommendations to people find that they get or give recommendations for anything in particular a good recommendation f if a nonprofit focused within a single front porch warm area it's pretty straightforward if the nonprofit covers several communities then they often come to us and say can i please have access to fifteen front porch forms  and and we have to decline because we we get that request so much and i think her mom has the most nonprofits per capita in the country so we would be flooded with you know people do important work but it  much so what we offer we suggest that folks in those situations recruit their volunteers in these other communities and perhaps are doing this already to post in a neighboring f p s and at first you know people like oh well you know i don't like it suggesting that means i have to do more work i said yes it does but it means you get a better quality response because people tend in our experience to respond to postings that are shared by neighbors that they know well jeff saying i should pick into this and maybe i should look at that then you know just from someone they don't know who's from from a further distance that's one thing we see  well maybe i shouldn't ask this question because you never know where to go but how about controversial issues have folks yet please i know i'm succeeding which in there i make light but there are important issues that you know different of our neighbors are struggling with to resolve one for example the f thirty five controversy which has raged in a lot of places for a while including on some front porch forums and one day i knew we must be doing something right when i really got scathing critique from both sides of that argument saying i must be in league with the other side the only way this could possibly be happening and no i didn't share their notes with the two parties and said you know i we're doing our best here but generally our approach is to leave the platform open and let folks have their discussions but we do we do have what we call online community managers are the bulk of our employees play that role and there are their responsibilities are you know just to make sure everything's flowing well and efficiently and it's just a small part of their job is to step in when things get testy and generally we have our terms of use which are published on our are kind of the rules of engagement and so if something violates our terms of use they'll bounce it back to the author and say you know this doesn't comply with the terms you agreed to would you consider rewriting it  and we often know if it's a problem for someone really being upset and you know right we often will let that sit for twenty four hours and then bounce it back to the person and say you know this doesn't comply with our terms of use and we often the most common response is oh my gosh thank you so much i wrote that last night when i was see and read and you know i'm so glad you didn't publish it because yeah i do feel strongly but i can see there's a better  there are times though and she's on i probably have bruises and colleagues that we could to remind us of people who really are there they're not backing down and they're pretty pumped up and and we just tell me this isn't the place you know the going to have to be other venues  so the most critical thing is personal attacks and that's a subjective term you know so we do our best to be consistent around that but when we say neighbor versus neighbor a personal attack so one of our car or favorite guiding phrases is with concerning postings is in and around difficult topics is attack the topic not the neighbor so if you're upset about dogs making a mess in your yard don't say you know john doe is a plea to the police because of his dog you know i'd like to address the topic of dogs and cleaning up after you know the owners cleaning up after them and that can be a hard posting to write when you're you know still cleaning off your shoes but you know it's going to be a bad posting when the author is the opening  is you know i'm typing as i'm cleaning off my shoe and like ok this is not going to be one of those calm postings but yes it's always interesting in you know the political stuff is challenging those people bring you know strong strong impassioned feelings around the variety of topics and we just try to be very respectful of people's opinions and their rights to  was welcome to come in and talk and and about the elections coming up or town meeting or whatever but if someone starts to get like in your face and yelling at people it's like you calm down it's like not calming down  what you have gone out and come back tomorrow you know this isn't working out for is so we we kind of see ourselves in that will occasionally when it does get dicey but it's really quite rare you know many front porch forms will experience it a couple times but yeah a lot of people find it interesting for you know people that a tremendous amount of community around topics around interest so communities of interest so you can find all the online the people who are left handed knitters who i prefer black on black yarn or whatever you know there's a club for that and you can find them online and maybe not that one yeah but it's communities of interest and so what's offered though is what as time out earlier communities a place i think in our culture and vermont exception i think i think the sense of community of place is still you know if in the country there was a kind so i think a community a place is tremendously important and it's not the end all be all i mean we still need to find this important find like minded people or people with similar interests and  online world offers that in spades but this idea of least being in connection with the people around you you don't have to be best buddies with your neighbors  are but at least to be in communication and to you know it offers the opportunity for lots of things you know respect and mutual aid and and  you know when we started from ports form it started in our neighborhood i live in in burlington which the one nine hundred twenty s vintage you know a little tiny a thicker lot neighborhood where once crammed in next to each other and it took off and flourished there and so we looked to expand my first thought and one of many that were incorrect was to look for similar places to that neighborhood and essex junction and then and south burlington and and start from por forms there thinking it wouldn't work in rural areas wouldn't work and village you know type rural rural towns wouldn't work in the old north then or when you ski in them you know more mixed income areas and various reasons we decided just to start everywhere and county and spread it across the state and i've been you know pleasantly proven wrong that it's really well the you know the rich men like and really the content is not all that different than in the old north and it's super vibrant too in burlington when you see all those places and it's going to make sure there are differences each one's a little different from the other but the course is always the same you know  and found its recommendations its people worrying about you know a car break in or something like that and then it's you know we talked about the the challenging issues that come up the debate but i will say it's just how can verify this every day there are wonderful neighbor helping neighbor stories that we get to see in this kind of things always happened in vermont you know somebody's house burns in the community rallies but it seems to well first the more people know about it i guess when it happens on because a front porch more so in the past maybe ten people would come to help out that neighbor who's had a kitchen fire and now you know might be hundreds of people who are aware of it and many of them will will help directly or at least be aware of it and you know maybe help down  coverage and now that's been accomplished and in one half the state we're very well established in terms of people using it and the other half the state it's coming along nicely but we know we're projecting to be there in the coming months and so you know what happens after that that the two competing ideas are to expand outside of vermont and or maybe and or kind of go deeper in vermont and offer more  services so we have a lot of different ideas on the table we're kind of at a brainstorming stage now and it's interesting because every i talk to has a different idea for an additional bell or wessel to add the front porch and so it's just matchmaking and it's not one person needing charity to the person giving charity it's to people who have complimentary needs find each other like you know this person wants to volunteer somewhere and in this person you know has a need for volunteers and so it's it's great and it's actually quite bizarre humbling to get any amount of urban centers and they purchased in these large corporations are always merging and buying each other so it was part of a package with m s n b c or something but they are they're investing in it right now which the previous owner was n b c and they shelved it and then comcast bought n b c i guess and now are investing in it so there's a lot of interest in this concept of helping people whatever it is if you want to get people to dial in in that environment then you need to become a participant so and so if your small business wants to make use of front porch form in your front porch form then the more that you can be seen as an active participant in that forum the better your business related occasional business related postings will be accepted so if someone says you know i'm looking for you i've got a bunch of i'm looking for moving boxes or something and you've got a barn full of them and if you type and if you know you contact person directly or you could answer right back in from ports form and say you have got moving boxes if you want to you know give me a call and the point is to let you know the neighbors see that you're an active participant and so we ask that small businesses post really no more than once a month about that directly about their business on front porch form but that's certainly acceptable if that's kind of a soft limit but it's really in the small businesses best interest sometimes people will sign up and say i've got a house cleaning business you know we've got two or three crews and you know we've got a vailable delivery on wednesdays and thursdays and they want to post that every day for a month and every issue you know you're to have people hating you really quick this is not in your best interest so you know we say you know do once a month it what you really want to do is get your happy customers to post testimonials on your behalf saying hey feynman's looking for a housecleaner  try these guys they done great work for us for the past two or three years so there are ways just to use it always put yourself in the shoes of the reader you know what are they what would be most compelling for the readers  secondly to reach a broader area we have you know hundreds of front porch forms all across the state now so if you've got particular geography in mind beyond the place where you live you can ask people in those other places who you know or who support people in front porch form in every month they put out their announcement about their events and it shows up here here here here we see it pop all over it in county and they get a strong response from that and then finally we have our o pick whichever towns are neighborhoods you want to focus on and we click reports come with that and so you can see how many say you buy fifty thousand in boxes you want to hit fifty thousand in boxes for a given week and these four towns then will send you a quick report at the end of that week to show how many clicks resulted from those fifty thousand ads and a little map and you know everything you can see where you know where your ad is is getting traction and the cost of those varies depending on really how much exposure you want to get so with the purchase advertising and you know we have a lot of there are several statewide advertisers and you know many chip in countywide and so but the small businesses will often come in and purchase to households as opposed to people population and we if you had a front porch form that covered ten thousand households which some people proposed it would feel too big and too impersonal and in my experience and it would become different it would become more proclamations and transactional you wouldn't you wouldn't get much from the way of personal interaction if it's too small fits if it's ten households or twenty households we go out people asking for that you know can just do my road you know there's twenty houses and that's that's not enough critical mass and the b one posting every month and that's you know it's just people forget about it it will just die on the vine so there's some happy meaning in there and our initial thought was it was around three hundred households and then we opted to five hundred households and they were up to thousand households and now we're at about a thousand to fifteen hundred households seems to be the place where we're settling in as an optimal size and so when we first laid it out you know richmond had three front porch forms each with about five or six hundred households i think from numbering the numbers and so the idea of putting those three together meant would be three times bigger than four or five times bigger than our model so we has attained and i would say the initial richmond ones were modestly successful but that has been super vibrant since we combine and so it's clear the right move we did get a lot of feedback but it varied we had people who actually wanted to cut into smaller pieces and we had people who wanted to keep it wa you know it's there's a friction there and there always will be because we took a poll of everybody and said what would your ideal front porch form boundary be with you live in the richmond village it would probably be the town of richmond  maybe but if you live you know on the jericho richmond lines you'd say well my idea one would be you know cutting through this part of jericho in this part of richmond everyone has a different perception based on where they are  and we learn through the hard way school of hard knocks and we can't please everybody and so alternately we just said this these are a boundary and once every year or so we revisit and tweak where there's a pretty loud consensus that the people the surrounding areas to see it is a check box and that's checked and they can other people can see it and it seemed to be very popular and help a lot of folks but also there are a number of people who don't check that box you know because there are postings that they don't want that widely out you know my eleven year old wants to work as a mother's helper you know and i want to tell that to six towns and i want to tell that to my immediate neighbors  yeah yeah so our expectation our our aim with reports form is to get everybody in the community sign up and get everybody to spend five minutes a day glancing at it we don't anticipate that i was going to sit down and poor through every issue and so we've organized in such a way that there's that hopefully fairly handy table of contents right at the top and it's interesting that at first we just went with the headlines we thought well that's what's important  cat car for sale but we soon realize that a lot of people it's the names they're equally as important or more important sometimes so it's car for sale sam johnson you know that last cat from sally smith and then we realized even the road names were important because people want to know that sally and that's you know and so the table of contents is kind of the most distilled version of like is there anything for me today no  you see every thousand little differently but so yeah we don't expect everyone to look at it every time that's said are open rates are incredibly high now i have to get  the newsletter world and in you e mailing out a lot of e mail and we we send out more than two million e mail messages a month so in vermont all of the news letters always different from authors and and so we we worked really hard to make sure that every wants to be on the list and then because before we could easily check needed to activists as spam and then we were shut down so we have to work really hard to make sure the people on who are getting it want it and if you don't want it th we you know we cut you off and we pay close attention open rights so there's a little piece of code in each email the bounces back to say yes this has been opened unless you have your images turned off or unless you have only e mail or unless you know several unless it is and so are are measured confirmed open rate is forty five percent industry standers fifteen percent and so that doesn't mean that forty five percent of people actually open it i mean we know that a minimum forty five percent open and that other or that fifty five percent we don't know presumably most of them up now and we did a survey a survey results just what was it like ninety most people don't look at every single issue probably turnaround and one of the keys to our model has been that we publish daily and it sounds kind of strange like let's sounds worse you know instance better but our goal is to help people connect and build community and one of the ways we do that is by giving people something in common to talk about in a common timeframe and so you know it's a lot of interesting survey data we've looked at around that but so are our cycle is we publish typically once a day at the end of the day and a business day so it's usually around four to six pm if you've got something important around it it's a difficult thing to time you if you try to be real precise i'm going to send in write it for zero six and then i'll go right out you know it's like well better safe than sorry i sent it in the day before you know if you've got an event announcement we recommend forty eight hours or more you know because you never know we also with richmond well and willesden n j airco and most of these bold little bolts a little slower of the front porch form there is not guarantee that every day there's going to be an issue in these other slower areas so you know if we have one posting and it's for an event three months from now we're not going to publish it that day we're not going to say ok five hundred people on this forum here you go we're going to wait a couple days until there's something a significant amount of content because we don't want to we want people when they see it in their inbox to thank here's something to read you know here's something is of value but important things support work but our crew it from point form are getting ready to go out and volunteer because we were largely unaffected were most of us live and and we got the messages like now state your computers and keep front porch warm humming because well richmond you sort of middlesex more town where people are really heavily impacted we published i think ten issues a day and more town for several days and they were they were packed that was the became the primary communication tool in town for a few key days which is amazing considering i don't know how people even had access the internet but people were attacking printing it out and tacking up t have you know since we started from porch form people have asked to put images with my posting and it's always been something we've looked at and struggled with but ultimately decided not to do we may do it in future there are some serious tradeoffs and one of the tradeoffs is we get a lot of feedback that people like the simplicity of it and it's text it's easy it's you know it and simple we get a lot of feedback from people who say but it's usually the people we hear loudest from about the images or people who have things that they want to  of other people have you know just whatever they want to show a picture of the block party and that's all great another challenge though is moderating images  at's just you can imagine the things people can post on there and then we're into a whole nother level of paying attention like oh i didn't know what i was looking at hoops we just published something we shouldn't have  so certainly any way you can if you want to make sure it's it's hyperlinked just be sure to put the whole h t t p colon slash slash you know instead of just somewhat warm dot com you put the leading part in and advertising yourself or have you always rely on we're going to we're not your business we haven't purchased advertising and we've done plenty of swaps with with other from on media and events