Getting Edinburgh organised: Introducing TownSpot
Edinburgh’s new people-powered community noticeboard is here. By popular demand, your events are now organised chronologically on citywide hyperlocal calendars and maps!
With more than 30,000 daily readers, The Edinburgh Minute newsletter’s Community Noticeboard section is one of the city’s most popular corners of the internet.
It has featured well over 10,000 community notices in a year and resulted in countless positive outcomes. My inbox bubbles on a daily basis with people telling me how posting their notice in the Minute resulted in their event selling out, their fundraiser hitting a target or their social lives being improved. Genuinely, every day. Nothing makes me happier about curating this newsletter than these outcomes. Every day the noticeboard features wonderful people doing brilliant things to make Edinburgh a better place, and often those aren’t featured anywhere else online. It’s what makes the Minute much more than just a news aggregator.
When I started the Minute more than three years ago, a key goal was to make local news useful again and for readers to be heard. I created the noticeboard section and, aside from people sending in the odd cheeky Rick Astley video, my job of verifying and curating your submissions has been easy and a real joy.
However, it became a victim of its own success. Some days up to 50 items are sent in. Across a week that’s 350. It’s literally too many for some folks’ inboxes, leading to emails being cut short. It was also taking me a few hours per day to check, format and organise. Not ideal.
So I enlisted some expert help from Mike Gyi, of TownSpot, who had already created a beautiful and incredibly functional platform to help you connect to where you live. Read more about Mike’s mission for TownSpot here. I’m sure you’ll agree it aligns with so much of what makes the Minute work for you too.
Over the past couple of months, if you’ve submitted a notice to the Minute, you’ll have seen a much easier process. Instead of the clunky old Google form (RIP), it’s now a simpler bespoke submission form. It is a breeze to use. It’s been an investment but thanks to paying subscribers, it feels more like a re-investment back into your newsletter, which is still 100% free to all. I’m so excited to show you what’s new…
To help organise things, submitters now get to choose a type of notice: news, notice or events. There’s also a ‘jobs’ section for the Culture Minute.
All noticeboard events will still appear in the newsletter, while also populating… 44 NEIGHBOURHOOD CALENDARS AND MAPS!
Finally, after literally years of readers asking for it, your community noticeboard events will be organised chronologically on calendars. The fun part, for those who really love living locally, is you can subscribe to as many hyperlocal calendars as you want. While the daily Minute newsletter will continue to feature notices as and when they come in, subscribing to your calendar collates everything on your doorstep into one handy weekly round-up email from TownSpot, in the same simple style as the Edinburgh Minute.
The Edinburgh event maps will help you discover what’s happening in your neighbourhood in a new way. And for venues and event organisers, it’s a new way to promote to people nearby without relying on problematic social algorithms, completely for free.
A fun part about the TownSpot app is that you can snap a photo of a flyer you’ve seen around the city. It’ll then be automatically placed on the correct calendar to share with your local community. Think of it like Pokémon Go for event flyers. There are leaderboards coming soon too…
📍 You can get the TownSpot app free here:
📍 And check out the TownSpot website here:
