Over the first weekend of June this year, UK neighbours celebrated Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, marking her 70 years of reign. To help bring neighbours together for this momentous occasion, Nextdoor partnered with the Eden Project’s Big Jubilee Lunch, an initiative that brings millions of neighbours together every year in June for food and conversation. The Big Jubilee Lunch was an official part of the Jubilee celebrations, culminating in a Royal Big Lunch at The Oval on Sunday 5th June, attended by HRH Prince of Wales and HRH Duchess of Cornwall.
Our externally audited activation amounted to an incredible 18 million participants to The Big Lunch this year. As official sponsors, alongside PG Tips, Iceland Food Warehouse and the Pears Foundation, this was a fantastic opportunity to reach a national audience to raise awareness of Nextdoor, the power of local and "In Real Life" moments and drive engagement through content on our platform.
With the goal of reaching and connecting with new neighbours in the UK and encouraging them to support each other and build community, Nextdoor partnered with the Eden Project’s initiative The Big Lunch in 2022. Since 2009 The Big Lunch has been bringing millions of people together across the UK on the first weekend in June, to share fun, food and friendship. A Big Lunch can be anything from a small gathering or a cup of tea with a neighbour to a full-blown street party. This year, The Big Jubilee Lunch became part of the official celebrations for HM The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – and we used that moment in June as our major tentpole campaign for 2022.
As part of our partnership with The Big Lunch, Nextdoor created a campaign landing page to build interest and provide an easy tool to join up and find information. We also launched the Nextdoor Jubilee Events Map working with The Big Lunch and DCMS (UK Government Jubilee page) to encourage neighbours to add, share and find local Jubilee events happening near them.
For many, The Big Lunch ignites a passion for doing more good things where they live and so the campaign had aims to work with Nextdoor to reach more people, create fun and inclusive activations and provide a lower entry point for participation through the platform. This was especially important as communities across the UK were still feeling the impact of Covid and the cost of living crisis and the Jubilee provided a much needed opportunity to come together.
For The Big Lunch, it was the first time working on such a scale with a social networking platform and being able to make hyperlocal connections was an amazing success. This year an incredible 17.2 million participants took part in The Big Lunch - 1 in 4 people in the UK - and 11.7 million friendships were made.
As official sponsors, alongside well-known brands PG Tips, Iceland and The Food Warehouse and Pears Foundation, this was a fantastic opportunity to reach a national audience to raise awareness of Nextdoor, encourage the power of hyper-local connections and "In Real Life" moments to drive engagement through content on our platform.
The Big Lunch helps brings neighbours together, providing a simple reason for connection. 81% of participants said taking part made them feel part of something bigger this year and 79% of Big Lunch attendees now feel a stronger sense of community. Moreover, 12.9M people said they’d be more likely to lend a neighbour a hand, 12.8M people feel closer to neighbours after going to a Big Lunch, and 11.4M want to keep in touch with people they met.
Nextdoor’s campaign landing page for The Big Lunch drove more than 75K unique visitors and more than 23K+ on-site clicks, resulting in a 31% conversion rate. 490K unique users visited the map during the campaign period 1.4K events were pinned to the map.
Additionally, Nextdoor promoted an on-platform competition where neighbours had a chance to win £200 to host a Big Jubilee Lunch by posting a message to their neighbours about why they wanted to bring the community together. The competition drove a total of 1.1K entries, 2.6K comments, 7.9K reactions and had visits from Nextdoor employees including our Chief Neighbour, Sarah Friar.
