Frequently Asked Questions

Learn how Hoodinly helps community media discover local opportunities, manage relationships, and prepare stronger interviews.

1. What is Hoodinly?

Hoodinly is a neighborhood intelligence platform built for community media. It helps media organizations discover local stories and events, identify potential guests, manage community relationships, schedule interviews, and prepare research and suggested questions.

2. Who is Hoodinly designed for?

Hoodinly is designed for radio stations, podcasters, newspapers, television stations, newsletters, digital publishers, nonprofit newsrooms, college media organizations, and other outlets that create community-focused content.

3. What is The Magpie?

The Magpie is Hoodinly’s AI-powered neighborhood intelligence assistant. It helps review trusted sources, search your Hoodinly data, identify useful opportunities, suggest possible guests, summarize information, and prepare interview research. The Magpie makes recommendations, but your team always makes the final editorial decisions.

4. Does Hoodinly replace journalists, producers, or editors?

No. Hoodinly is designed to support media professionals, not replace them. It handles time-consuming discovery, organization, research, and scheduling tasks so your team can spend more time building relationships, verifying information, conducting interviews, and producing meaningful local coverage.

5. How does Hoodinly find local stories and opportunities?

Hoodinly monitors public and customer-selected sources, such as RSS feeds, public calendars, municipal websites, school announcements, chambers of commerce, nonprofit websites, press releases, event pages, and other publicly accessible community sources.

6. Can I choose which sources Hoodinly monitors?

Yes. You control the sources your Magpie watches. You may add sources manually, use Hoodinly’s source-discovery tools, pause sources, remove sources, and prioritize the types of organizations or topics that matter most to your publication.

7. Can Hoodinly monitor Facebook Pages or Groups?

Hoodinly may support authorized social-media connections and publicly accessible Pages where platform permissions allow. Access to private groups, private accounts, or restricted content is not guaranteed. Hoodinly does not require customers to provide social-media passwords and should not be used to bypass platform privacy controls.

8. What can I ask The Magpie?

You can ask natural-language questions such as “Who should we interview about summer tourism?”, “What nonprofits have events next month?”, “Have we interviewed this person before?”, or “What stories are developing in this community?” Results depend on the information available in your Hoodinly workspace and connected sources.

9. Does Hoodinly verify every fact it finds?

No. Hoodinly helps locate, organize, and summarize information, but media professionals must verify facts with original sources before broadcasting, publishing, contacting a subject, or making editorial claims. AI-generated summaries and recommendations may occasionally be incomplete or inaccurate.

10. Can people request to be a guest through Hoodinly?

Yes. Hoodinly provides a public guest-request form that can be linked from or embedded on a media outlet’s website. Prospective guests can submit their contact information, topic, biography, availability, and supporting materials. Your team reviews and approves every request.

11. Can Hoodinly schedule interviews?

Yes. Hoodinly can send booking invitations, display available time slots, allow guests to select a time, generate calendar files, provide interview instructions, send reminders, and manage reschedule requests. Your organization controls its availability rules and scheduling preferences.

12. What is included in interview preparation?

Depending on the information available, Hoodinly can prepare a guest overview, topic background, reasons the interview may matter, suggested introductions, primary questions, follow-up questions, important notes, and related community information. All preparation should be reviewed and edited by a member of your team.

13. What are Hoodinly’s subscription plans?

Hoodinly offers Neighborhood, Community, Regional, and Network plans. The core workflow remains available across paid plans. Plans primarily differ by the number of publications, communities, users, Ask the Magpie conversations, and other capacity allowances included.

14. What counts as a publication?

A publication is a distinct media outlet or editorial brand managed within Hoodinly. This may include a radio station, newspaper, podcast, television station, newsletter, digital publication, nonprofit newsroom, or similar community-media outlet.

15. What counts as a community?

A community is a geographic area your organization asks Hoodinly to monitor. It may be a neighborhood, municipality, township, borough, city, county, ZIP code, school district, campus, or another clearly defined coverage area.

16. Is there a free trial?

Yes. Eligible organizations may start a 14-day free trial. A valid payment method is required, but nothing is charged when the trial begins. The selected monthly or annual subscription starts automatically after the trial unless it is cancelled before the trial ends.

17. How do I cancel my trial or subscription?

Organization owners or authorized billing managers may cancel through Hoodinly’s billing settings or the connected Stripe billing portal. Trial cancellation prevents the first subscription charge. Paid subscriptions generally remain active through the end of the current billing period.

18. What happens if I reach my Ask the Magpie limit?

You will no longer be able to start additional metered Magpie conversations until your allowance resets or your plan is upgraded. Existing results, guest records, bookings, and other stored information will remain available. Hoodinly may also offer additional usage options in the future.

19. Is my organization’s information private?

Hoodinly is a multi-tenant platform, and each organization’s workspace is designed to remain isolated from other customers. Access is controlled through user accounts, organization membership, permissions, and database security policies. Customers are responsible for assigning appropriate user access within their own organization.

20. Is customer content used to train public AI models?

Hoodinly does not use customer content to train publicly available AI models. Relevant information may be sent to authorized AI service providers when needed to perform a requested feature. Hoodinly may use limited aggregated, de-identified, or customer-authorized information to improve performance, diagnose problems, and develop the platform.

Email support@hoodinly.com for product help, billing questions, and account issues. Visit Support & Training for more options.