FAQ

Creating an account is free and takes under a minute. Click Sign Up in the top navigation, enter your name, email, and a password, then verify your email address. Once verified you'll have access to event tracking, badge progress, and your personalized civic dashboard.

After signing up, head to the Events page and browse upcoming opportunities. You can filter by category — political, youth, environmental, and more. Click any event card to see full details and register. Our Compass AI guide can also give you personalized recommendations if you tell it your interests.

Yes — NextStep is completely free for residents. We're a civic platform, not a subscription service. We may offer optional premium features in the future, but core access to events, the map, badges, and Compass will always be free.

NextStep lists a wide variety of civic engagement events: town halls, community cleanups, voter registration drives, school board meetings, neighborhood association sessions, environmental projects, youth workshops, and more. Events come from both our curated data and community submissions.

Yes! If you're organizing a civic event in Boca Raton, use the contact form and select 'Event Information' as your topic. Include the event name, date, time, location, and a short description. Our team reviews submissions and adds approved events within 48 hours.

On any event card, click the green 'Mark as Completed' button. This logs your participation and adds progress toward relevant badges. You can undo this at any time by clicking the button again.

Currently yes — we're focused on making civic life in Boca Raton as visible and accessible as possible. If you're interested in bringing NextStep to another city, get in touch. We'd love to talk about expansion.

Badges are earned by attending events and completing civic activities. Each event card shows which badge categories it contributes to. Visit the Badges page to see every badge, what's required to earn it, and how far along you are.

Only if you manually unmark a completed event. Your progress is stored locally in your browser, so clearing browser data will reset it. We recommend creating an account to sync your progress to the cloud (coming soon).

The Founding Member badge is awarded to early users who participated in NextStep during our launch period. It's a permanent recognition of being part of the founding community.

Compass is NextStep's AI civic guide, powered by Claude. You can ask it anything about Boca Raton civic life — how local government works, what events are coming up, how to volunteer, how to earn badges, and more. It's conversational, remembers your chat history, and gets smarter with context.

We take privacy seriously. Account data is stored securely via Firebase. Chat conversations with Compass are not stored server-side. For full details, see our Privacy Policy.

Absolutely. We partner with nonprofits, civic groups, schools, and local government offices to list events and amplify their outreach. Use the contact form and select 'Partnership Inquiry', or email nextstep.civic@gmail.com.

Follow us on social media, subscribe to our Wave newsletter, check the Events page, or enable notifications in your account settings. Our announcement banner on the site also highlights upcoming major events.