Using Nextdoor to get your bridge club and classes better known

How do you get your bridge club and classes better known in the community? Although on occasion people will travel some distance to play bridge (and why not?) we believe that the more local, the better. This is particularly the case when you are introducing people to the enjoyment of bridge later on in life.

For this reason we have long recommended Facebook for promotion and advertising of upcoming bridge teaching. Facebook lets you specify a target audience within a few miles of where your lessons will take place, and to a specified age group.

Facebook is good in this respect; but there is another hyper-local option which, we are hearing, is very effective. This is the Nextdoor network. One club in Kent found 12 new students for their bridge classes very quickly through Nextdoor – and it was more effective for them than leaflets or other methods. Another club in Yorkshire also reports a good result.

What is Nextdoor? The concept is quite simple: it is a network of groups each of which covers a small area such as a housing estate. Only people in that local area are allowed to join the group; this is not very rigorously enforced but seems to work well.

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Nextdoor is therefore the perfect place to announce your bridge classes, which you can either mention in community posts or advertise in a sponsored post. You must of course be respectful of the online community. You should read the community guidelines and the information on promoting local business. If your bridge club is run as a for-profit business, you must follow the guidelines. On the other hand, most bridge clubs are not run for profit and benefit the community in all sorts of ways, providing social interaction, mental challenge, and of course a great deal of enjoyment.

The important thing is to be a good citizen and communicate the opportunity bridge represents in an appropriate way.

Properly used, Nextdoor is a valuable way of contacting your local community alongside other approaches. You can sign up here. Note that you do not have to share your full address with your neighbours; this is the default but you can change it in privacy settings to show only the street.

Take-up will vary from one area to another, but in my own area the site says that 26% of 1000 households are represented, quite a good proportion.