Free guide
One municipal year on the Hub, in order: the decision about what this channel carries, publishing the code, the audiences, the departments, the first month and the seasons that repeat. It is written for the person who will actually publish the code, grant the access and send the 6 a.m. detour.
For the communications director, public information officer, clerk, public works or parks lead who will run resident communication for a city, town, village or county.
This decision protects everything after it. The Hub is one additional voluntary channel to the residents who chose to connect. It is not an emergency alert system, a mass-notification or reverse-911 platform, a 311 or utility-billing integration, or a path to wireless emergency alerts, and sending here satisfies no public-notice, open-meetings, accessibility or records-retention obligation.
Write that down, agree it with the clerk and counsel, and hold to it. Every required notice keeps going where it goes now. What this channel adds is the plain-language version, sent the hour you decide it.
The audience is self-selecting and always partial. Write every message as though the reader may be the only person on their street who receives it.
Your Hub publishes an enrollment code and QR code the first time you sync connections, and prints an enrollment kit. A municipality has no signup moment, so publish once, in many places, and leave it published.
The water or sewer bill insert, the tax statement, the annual collection calendar and the newsletter. These reach households that never visit the website, and they repeat on their own schedule. For most towns it is the highest-yield placement there is.
The clerk's counter, the permit desk, the library, the recreation center and the park kiosks. Print the enrollment kit and leave it there. Staff who mention it once per transaction move the number faster than any campaign.
The agenda footer, the website, the closure page and the parks registration page. If your town runs its own notice sign-up page, point it at the inbound webhook or use the Zapier private app so each resident who signs up is invited that day.
Only a sign-up list residents joined themselves may be imported. A utility-billing file, a voter roll and a tax roll are not lists residents joined, and are never uploaded here.
Onboarding seeds a civic starter pack: All Residents, Public Works & Utilities, Sanitation & Collection, Parks & Recreation, Meetings & Notices, Emergency & Urgent Operations and Municipal Staff. All Residents reaches everyone connected and asks for a step-up confirmation. Neighbourhoods, wards, routes and water districts are your own data: create them by name.
Each person signs in as themselves, so every send is attributed. The decision that matters is which audiences each Leader may send to and whose replies they may read.
One Owner, usually the communications director or the manager, holds billing and the municipality's Blasts account, which lives on a mailbox on the town's own domain so it survives an election or a retirement. The clerk is usually an Admin; finance is a Viewer.
The public works superintendent gets Public Works & Utilities plus the route and district audiences. Sanitation gets collection, the recreation director gets Parks & Recreation, the clerk gets Meetings & Notices, emergency management gets Emergency & Urgent Operations. Everything unticked is listed as what they cannot reach.
In Settings, choose whether a Leader's messages wait for an administrator's approval; many small offices start with it on. On Home, add a passkey so the step-up for an All Residents send takes Face ID, Touch ID or a device PIN.
The audit trail on Home records who sent, approved, invited or changed what, which is the record you want when someone later asks who told residents and when.
Replies land in Conversations, one inbox the office shares. A Leader sees only replies from the audiences they are granted, so a missed-collection question reaches sanitation and not the recreation director. This is not a 311 or work-order system and there is no connector to one: a reply is a question a person answers, and anything needing dispatch still goes where it goes now.
Each connected resident chooses Blasts, email or both, and the Hub sends the same message on both from the municipality's own verified sending address. Email is metered in email credits: every new Hub includes 50. Receiving is free for residents; a reply they send uses their own credits.
One typed message to one resident is one Blasts credit; one email is one email credit. Credits are prepaid on BlastCredits at standard pricing, never expire and carry no subscription, so a deposit made before winter is still there in spring. A whole-town notice to 1,500 connected residents costs 1,500 credits; one collection route costs a fraction of that.
Sending, audiences, roles, conversations, Content Series and the email leg are included from the start. Hub Pro, which adds Journeys and Event Campaigns, unlocks at $500 in cumulative purchases for any organization. The nonprofit verification program does not apply to a municipality.
Keep running permitting, utility billing, work orders, agenda management, records retention and your official public-warning path where they are: the Hub holds none of it.
People reach the Hub as a CSV export of an opted-in sign-up list, through the inbound webhook, or through Zapier. There is no Granicus, CivicPlus, Accela, Tyler, OpenGov, Everbridge, 311, CAD or utility-billing connector.
The first two steps are setup. The rest is the rhythm of a municipal year.
Write down what this channel carries and what it never carries, and agree it with the clerk and counsel. Sign in, finish onboarding, click Sync connections, keep the audiences your departments own, and turn on auto-accept.
Get the code and QR into the bill insert, the collection calendar and the newsletter before they go to print. Print the enrollment kit for the counter, the library and the park kiosks, and add the code to the website and the agenda footer.
Invite each department head as a Leader with only their own audiences, and the clerk as an Admin. Save the advisory, closure, utility work, collection change, meeting and parks notices as Templates. Send a welcome to All Residents saying what this channel is and is not.
Public works posts closures to the streets affected. Sanitation runs the weekly collection reminder as a Content Series. The clerk sends meeting notices with the agenda attached and the official notice linked. Create the route audiences the replies tell you are missing.
Before winter or storm season, top up credits so nothing waits on a purchase. Rehearse the operational update: who writes it, which audience, what it says about where official instructions come from, and how often the next one comes.
Report what is true: residents connected, notices sent, read counts, and the fact that this is a voluntary channel beside the required notices. Archive audiences nobody owns, and review who holds Owner and Admin.
Hub Pro unlocks at $500 in cumulative purchases for any organization. The nonprofit verification program does not apply to a municipality, and there is no public-sector tier.
DirectToResidents is open today. Sign in to your Hub, or set one up through onboarding after signing in; the Hub activates with your municipality's first credit purchase on BlastCredits. The Hub documentation covers everything in this guide in more detail, in municipal terms, including the article on where this channel fits beside your required notices.
Product facts on this page reflect published Blasts.app information as of September 24, 2026.