ioby (in our backyards) - civic crowdfunding with city match funds
Civic crowdfunding platform combined with grassroots coaching. Local 'Leaders' propose neighbourhood projects (community gardens, murals, after-school programs). City partners offer 'Match Funds' (e.g. One Northside Crowdfunding Challenge in Pittsburgh, Lorain County Match Fund) where neighbourhoods compete for matching capital pools. Average donation $35, $21M+ raised, most donors live within 2 miles of the project.
Match-fund challenges (Pittsburgh One Northside, Lorain County, NYC COVID Neighborhood Relief Match) set explicit competition between projects in different neighbourhoods - first to raise X gets matched, top-raisers get bonus. Public leaderboards of raised amounts per project per neighbourhood.
Each project's $1,200 budget requires recruiting ~35 small donors, which by design forces the leader to organise their immediate block. ioby provides coaching specifically on 'recruit volunteers, grow support networks' - the platform fails for a leader with no local community.
Combines a verifiable money metric (USD raised) with the requirement that funds come from physically adjacent neighbours. Match-fund challenges are an under-cited variant of neighbourhood-vs-neighbourhood competition with a real prize.
Others in the same family
Polco Comparison Groups / Track dashboard
Polco is a civic engagement and benchmarking platform for local governments. The Track dashboard lets a city/school district pick up to 9 peer jurisdictions and compare side-by-side on community survey results (NCS), financial health, demographics, and policy outcomes. School-district dashboards filter survey data by neighbourhood, race, gender, age. Layered onto Polco's survey/budget-simulation engagement tools.
Decidim process-groups + Barcelona/Helsinki/NYC participatory budgeting district tiers
Decidim's 'process groups' feature is explicitly designed for grouping parallel participatory budgets per district/neighbourhood. NYC's PB ran in 30 of 51 council districts in 2021-22, each with at least $1M to spend, residents drop pins on a map to pitch ideas. Helsinki's OmaStadi splits city budget by area (Itäinen, Eteläinen, Pohjoinen, etc.) with separate ideation, deliberation and vote per area.
Energy Sparks (UK schools energy league)
Open-data platform that ingests half-hourly electricity and gas meter readings for ~620+ schools and turns energy investigations and saving actions into points. Public national, regional (London, North-West England, etc.), Multi-Academy-Trust, and Local Authority scoreboards rank schools in real time across the academic year. Cash prizes for top schools are spent on a sustainability project the school chooses.
Cool Block / Cool City Challenge (Empowerment Institute)
Five-month, nine-meeting structured program where 5-8 households on a city block work together on carbon reduction, disaster resilience, water stewardship and neighbourhood livability. A city launches a campaign and recruits Cool Block Leaders, who invite neighbours onto a team. Block teams then aggregate into 'Cool Neighbourhoods' of ~10 blocks. Pilot achieved 32% average household carbon reduction and won NASA's outstanding sustainability solution.
Wandrer.earth - 'every street' completion with area leaderboards
Gamified exploration platform that ingests Strava activities, compares against OpenStreetMap road/path data, and tells users which streets in their city/neighbourhood/county they haven't yet covered. Awards milestones at 25/50/75/90/99% completion of geographic areas. Includes public leaderboards by area showing top Wandrers for each city, neighbourhood, county.
Colab.re - Brazilian municipal app with neighbourhood reports
Brazilian civic-engagement app where residents photograph and post urban problems (dengue hotspots, potholes, broken streetlights) geotagged to neighbourhoods. Reports flow to city hall for action and are visible to other residents who can upvote/comment. Won UN award as best urban app and a top-5 Government & Participation app.