How we’re pairing behavioral science with the neighborhood network, and why access alone was never the point.
Via Nextdoor for Public Agencies, our free government platform, every public agency on Nextdoor gets access to a built-in audience of verified residents across their entire municipality, in custom areas such as council districts and evacuation zones, and in specific Nextdoor Neighborhood Networks. But access alone doesn’t keep anyone safe. A message that reaches thousands of neighbors and moves none of them to act hasn’t done its job.
When residents ignore a warning, they are usually running mental shortcuts that feel like logic. “It won’t happen to me.” “It hasn’t happened here before.” “I’ll deal with it when it gets closer.” A standard warning doesn’t disrupt those shortcuts. Often, it reinforces them. It shows up outside emergencies too. A budget survey goes unanswered because residents believe their input never changes anything.
Vermont in July 2023 is the example I keep coming back to. Many residents had one flood in their heads: Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. Warnings ran straight into the belief that we survived Irene, so this isn’t that. Then the Winooski River in Montpelier crested at about 21 feet, more than two feet above its Irene crest and second only to the flood of 1927, according to the National Weather Service.
Complete warnings get the content right. The behavioral work gets past the belief that stops a resident from acting on it. Agencies need both.
That’s the problem the Behavioral Comms and Alerting Prompt and the Behavioral Comms Lab were built to address, and we didn’t build them alone. Hear how the Prompt came together on The Alerting Authority Podcast, where Dr. Jeannette Sutton and Eddie Bertola talk through the research behind it.
The Prompt is a guided writing tool built on peer-reviewed research. Dr. Laura Myers, Senior Research Scientist and Director of Resilience at the Center for Risk and Insurance Research at The University of Alabama, shaped the six questions it asks before you write a word: who you’re writing for, what you need them to know, do, or feel differently about, and most important, which mental shortcut is in the way. Then it drafts a Nextdoor post built to disrupt that shortcut. Paste it into your AI assistant of choice and answer the questions. No behavioral science background needed.
When the situation is urgent, the Prompt gets out of the way fast. Its alerting guidance draws on the research of Dr. Jeannette Sutton, Founder and Editor in Chief of The Warn Room and an Associate Professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cyber Security, and on her input as we built it. Her research shows the complete message is the best message. Warnings that name the source, hazard, location, time, and protective action move people to act. Incomplete ones send them searching for confirmation. The Prompt builds those five elements into every Alert and prompts agencies to send an all clear once the danger has passed.
When we first showed her the Prompt, Dr. Sutton raised a concern: if AI writes the post for you, you never learn why it worked, and next time you start from zero. That pushed us to build the teaching into the Prompt itself. It explains its reasoning as it asks each question, so a communicator finishes understanding the shortcut they were up against and why the message is built the way it is.
Larry Merritt, Associate Director of News Affairs at the Chicago Fire Department, said after using it: “With behavior science baked into the prompt, I learned how to write messages that get past people’s biases, so residents actually pay attention and change their behavior to reduce fire risk.”
The Behavioral Comms Lab is where it comes together. It’s a community of practice on the Nextdoor Public Agencies Resource Hub, co-facilitated by Dr. Myers, where government communicators workshop real messages and learn from each other’s wins and misses. Bring the message you’ve been writing the same way for ten years, and the nagging feeling it could do more.
Alongside the Prompt, the post composer on Nextdoor now has three new fields for public agencies: a title, an Alert type, and an expiration date. Together they make an Alert easy to scan and sort. The expiration date closes it out automatically once the danger has passed, building Dr. Sutton’s all-clear guidance into the tool.
This is what we mean when we say we invest in public agency success. Tools that put real research to work, and a community that keeps improving together, make access count. The conviction behind all of it hasn’t changed: neighbors who know each other are more likely to look out for one another.
Try the Prompt at nextdoor.com/commsprompt. Join the Behavioral Comms Lab at nextdooragencies.com/home/clubs/behavioral-comms-lab (A Public Agency profile is required for access). If your agency isn’t on Nextdoor yet, get started at nextdoor.com/agency.