All about Namola Communities

Everything you need to know about Namola Communities

Welcome to Namola Communities 

A Namola Community is a safe space within the Namola App, where community members can share their emergencies, post about suspicious behaviour, receive safety alerts, and help out members of your community.

What is Namola Communities?

Think Facebook and Whatsapp Community group, but much better for safety in your local area:

• Less noisy: Designed to alert you about the safety stuff, not the chit-chat.
• Designed for Safety: Namola is your one-stop safety shop
• Get Help Fast: Incidents reported with the 🆘 SOS button also go to our 24/7 national emergency Response Centre, to help you and your community get the right help 🦸🏽‍♀️.
• No group size limit: Everyone in your local community can join your Namola Community. Local safety shouldn’t be an exclusive club of 256 enthusiasts.
• Know where the incidents happen: Every SOS is automatically geotagged📍so you don’t have to waste time explaining where it happened.

Namola Communities ensures residents stay informed of any safety-related news and creates a safer place for you to live by increasing awareness of emergencies, suspicious behaviour and crime in general. Communities is a feature built into the Namola app that allows users from a certain area to create groups (called 'Communities') where other users from the area (or associated organisation) can join and reach out, engage, and support one another to help preserve and promote community safety.

Community members can post, share and even comment on safety-related incidents as well as report any irregular behaviour within their immediate area. Their emergency SOS's can also be pushed directly through to their Communities, to allow for immediate community response. Community admins can create, manage and invite community members to their community group. 

Who is Namola Communities built for? 

Namola Communities is built for every South African who wants to live in a safe environment, and who wants to ensure that others can stay safe in that environment as well. It is built so that South Africans can feel safe in their communities through the sharing of important safety information, ultimately allowing everyone to see what's happening in their communities and keep their local area safe.

Why has Namola introduced Communities?

Namola's focus has always been on peace of mind, keeping you and your loved ones safe, and getting you help as quickly as possible, when it is needed. Through Namola Communities, every South African can now play a proactive roll in the safety of themselves and those around them, by making their community a safer place to live.

Looking after those nearest to you is nothing new to South Africa, and neighbourly support, assistance, and information sharing - to keep a neighbourhood informed - is already so strongly entrenched in so many communities. Namola Communities simply allows it to take place in one central platform online, all whilst using all the benefits that technology affords us.

How to use Namola Communities for community safety

There are two key ways to use Namola Communities for community safety:

1. Post-safety-related information.  Post anything that may be of interest to fellow community members ( suspicious behaviour, incidents, emergencies or the like) using photo's or text. Other admins or members can then comment on, share or respond to these posts or reports. 
2. Report an emergency with your Namola App.  As always,  the Namola App will send an alert to the Namola Control Room, and the user will receive a call back from a Namola Operator, within seconds to confirm the emergency and to send help. In addition to this, you can now choose to post SOS events to your communities, with the exception of "Sensitive" and "Test" incidents, which will never be posted to communities.

Benefits of Namola Communities

• It's a free way for a community to come together to work as one to make their neighbourhood a safer place to live, work and travel in.
• Personalised and relevant information. Your Namola Community is run by your neighbours and your community members. As a community member, your newsfeed will contain only information relevant to you and your area.
• You manage your community. If you want to create a community, you set the rules for that community. You get to decide who can join, and who can't as well as remove troublesome people from your groups. With Namola Communities, you run your Community. Your way. Inside Namola.

• Help, fast! When you have an emergency incident, those nearest to you - who are able to help - will immediately know, and are likely to be the quickest to come to help you.

• You manage your engagement. Members are not forced to see their screen fill up with comments that you do not wish to see. Members can choose when to engage, and when to step away.
• Supported and trusted. As always,  the Namola App will send an alert to the Namola Control Room, and the user will receive a call back from a Namola Operator, within seconds to confirm the emergency and to send help, but you will also receive additional help from community members. 

Who can set up a Namola Community?

Anyone can, but these are the guidelines we suggest that you follow: 

How do you know joining a Community is safe? 

Just as you would only join a WhatsApp group or Facebook group that you trust, you should only join a Community that you trust. We encourage existing safety initiatives in neighbourhoods to start Communities, and advertise these to the residents. Search for your local Communities on Namola, or ask a member of your local CPF/NHW/Local safety initiatives to start a Community if none exists yet!

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