Locable Platform Update: Facebook Integration, Deals & Deliverables, Mobile Tours and More

We’ve been busy improving several parts of the Locable platform, with updates rolling out across both our Community Engagement Core and Administrative Efficiency Core.

The individual updates are different, but the goal behind them is the same:

Reduce duplicate work, make local information easier to maintain, and help small teams get more done without adding more things for staff, businesses, or community partners to manage.

Facebook Content Can Now Work Harder Through Locable

Over the past few months, we’ve written quite a bit about a simple problem: useful community information often gets trapped on social media.

We’ve covered why community information shouldn’t be trapped on Facebook, the problems created when events, announcements, and updates only live on social media, and more recently shared a practical checklist for keeping good content - including reels and shorts - from dying on social media.

But getting businesses and organizations to 'do it the right way' without seeing the benefits isn’t much of a solution either.

The better approach is to help the work they’re already doing go further.

We’re now beginning to enable an expanded Facebook integration for Locable accounts. When a business or organization connects its Facebook Page to its Locable account, recent Facebook posts are displayed in its directory listing (as of this writing, we're rolling out the feature one community at a time).

That means useful updates already being shared on Facebook can help keep a business or organization’s Locable presence more current without requiring someone to manually recreate each post.

This Is About Reducing the Participation Tax

This builds directly on what we call the Participation Tax.

Every time a Chamber, Main Street, Tourism organization, municipality, or other local group asks someone to:

• Submit your event
• Update your listing
• Send us your announcement
• Post your information here too

We’re asking a busy person to repeat work they’ve probably already done somewhere else.

The problem isn’t that people don’t care about participating. The problem is that participation becomes unnecessarily expensive in time and attention.

Our Community Engagement Core is designed around the opposite idea: connect information, reduce repetitive submission, and let useful local content flow farther with less chasing.

Facebook Events Are Part of the Next Step

We’re also working to extend the Facebook connection to eligible events associated with Pages that are directly linked to a Locable account.

Events are one of the clearest examples of why connected content matters.

An event may need visibility on a business website, Facebook, a Chamber calendar, a Main Street website, a Tourism site, a city calendar, email newsletters, and other community resources.

As this functionality rolls out, our goal is to help authorized Page owners bring eligible event information into Locable so it can participate in the broader local information network instead of being isolated in one feed.

Deals & Deliverables Are Coming Out of Beta

We’re also preparing to move Deals & Deliverables which includes task tracking out of beta after receiving useful feedback from our initial customer group.

This is an expansion of Locable’s Administrative Efficiency Core.

Deals & Deliverables help organizations track things like the following without relying on spreadsheets, sticky notes, or somebody remembering what happens next:

• Sales and sponsorship opportunities
• Follow-ups
• Partner or member commitments
• Onboarding
• Fulfillment and deliverables

We've also introduced a number of templates to help you implement best practices without having to figure it out. I'm looking at you, those-who-have-sales-responsibilities-but-have-never-had-sales-training.

We first previewed these capabilities in our post about Deals & Deliverables for Chambers, Main Streets, Tourism organizations, and local media teams.

Existing customers who want early access before the broader rollout can contact us and we’ll begin enabling accounts.

Distrx is being fully retired

We previously announced the migration of the legacy Distrx capabilities into Locable, and we’re now wrapping up that project with a complete rewrite.

Rather than maintaining a separate experience, these capabilities are becoming part of the broader Community Engagement Core.

Every Locable Community will be included in the new mobile app, while walking tours, driving tours, scavenger hunts, etc are part of upgraded plans.

This includes an upgraded mobile app that is moving through the app store approval process along with expanded tools for communities that want to help residents and visitors discover more of what makes their area worth exploring.

Points of Interest and New Tour Capabilities

As part of the consolidation of Distrx, we’re expanding the Community Engagement Core to support Points of Interest and improved mobile tour capabilities.

Within Locable, you'll be able to natively create maps and tours for:

• Historic sites
• Public art
• Attractions
• Murals
• Parks and recreation
• Local landmarks
• Shopping and dining districts
• Themed walking or driving tours
• Farmers' Market and other Vendor Maps

The goal is not simply to add another map or tourism app. It is to make these resources part of the same connected system already supporting local businesses, events, directories, and community content.

New Community Activation Resources for Locable Customers

Technology is most impactful when people use it and engage.

While our platform enables communities to surface more information without more effort, greater local adoption compounds those benefits by providing more content and greater distribution.

That’s why we’ve rebuilt our Community Launch guide and created a completely new Community Activation Guide exclusively for Locable customers.

The guide includes practical ideas, examples, and recommendations for helping businesses, nonprofits, board members, and community partners participate while reducing the amount of chasing staff has to do.

It builds on the same philosophy behind these platform updates: make the next useful action easier, reduce unnecessary friction, and start with activities people are already doing whenever possible.

It also provides practical activities that highlight participation AND provide real-world examples of your impact to grow support, engagement, membership, and more.

Customers will receive access to the guide directly from Locable.

One Platform, Less Duplicate Work

These updates span different parts of Locable.

Deals & Deliverables expand the Administrative Efficiency Core by helping teams manage follow-through and recurring operational work.

Facebook integration, mobile tours, Points of Interest, and the Distrx migration expand the Community Engagement Core by making community information easier to collect, connect, maintain, and distribute.

The common thread is pretty simple:

Less chasing. Less re-entering information. Better follow-through. More useful community participation.

That’s the direction we’re continuing to build toward as we help communities #TakeBackLocal.