Every chamber, downtown association, realtor, and welcome committee ends up making a newcomers guide eventually. Someone moves to town, asks where to get a haircut, and you realize there is no good answer to hand them. So you make a PDF. It is out of date in six months, and nobody can find it on your website anyway.

Here is how to create a newcomers guide that new residents use, that stays current, and that your local businesses want to be in.

What to include in a newcomers guide

Think about the first ninety days. A new resident is not looking for a list of every business in town. They are looking for the forty places they need right away.

• Daily essentials. Grocery, pharmacy, coffee, hardware, gas, the post office, dry cleaning.
• Services they will need once. DMV, utility offices, the library card desk, school registration, vet, urgent care, a dentist taking new patients.
• Where to eat. Five or six restaurants that locals recommend, not fifty. Include the one you take out-of-town guests to.
• Things to do. Parks, trails, the farmers market, the pool, the rec center, the arts council.
• Community. How to join the chamber, where the city council meets, the neighborhood associations, the volunteer groups.
• Dates. Trash and recycling day, the summer concert series, the fall festival, Small Business Saturday.
• Welcome offers. One offer per business for first-time visitors. A free coffee, $10 off a first haircut, a free month at the gym. This is the part new residents share with each other.

Add a short welcome from the chamber director or the mayor. One paragraph. It is the only part of the guide that should sound like a person.

Digital newcomer guide vs printed welcome packet

Print still has a place. A realtor handing a folder across the closing table is a moment, and apartment managers like something physical for the move-in packet. But a printed guide has two problems: it is out of date the day a restaurant closes, and you have no idea whether anyone opened it.

The answer is both. Build the guide once as a digital map or directory, then print a one-page welcome card with a QR code that opens it. The card never goes out of date because the map behind it does the updating.

How to build a newcomers guide as a map or directory

A map is the right format for a newcomers guide because the first question a new resident has about every place is where it is. Proxi is built for this, and most of our Main Street and chamber customers already have the pieces.

Start from your directory. If your chamber or downtown association keeps a business directory, the newcomers guide is a filtered view of it. Tag the forty essentials as newcomer picks, group them into the categories above, and you have a guide without retyping a single listing. When a business updates its own listing, the guide updates too.

Or build a standalone map or guide. If you do not have a directory yet, make a map with the forty places and a card for each: photo, hours, one sentence on why it is on the list, and the welcome offer. A guide in Proxi lets you add short sections between the map categories, like how trash pickup works or how to register for school, so the whole packet lives in one place.

Let businesses claim their spot. Turn on listing claims so the coffee shop can update its own hours and swap its offer. You approve the change. The guide stays accurate without you chasing anyone.

Embed it and make it public. Put the map on a Welcome to Our Town page on your website, and set it to Public so it is indexed. New residents search for things like moving to and new to before they ever find your site. A public map with real listings on your page is what gets you into those results.

How to get your newcomers guide to new residents

The guide only works if it reaches people in their first month. The organizations that meet newcomers first are rarely the ones who built the guide, so recruit them.

• Realtors. A welcome card in every closing folder. Realtors love this because it makes them look local.
• Property managers and HOAs. Move-in packets and welcome emails.
• The local paper or radio station. A standing New in Town page that links the guide.
• Utilities and the city. The water setup confirmation is the one email every new resident opens.
• Your own businesses. A sign at the register: New to town? Scan for your welcome offers.

Put a signup form on the guide so new residents can leave an email or phone number for a monthly note about what is happening downtown. In Proxi that form feeds one audience tagged as newcomers, so you can send them the farmers market opening, restaurant week, and the holiday calendar without mixing them into your main list. A year in, you know exactly how many households moved to town and which businesses they visited first.

Newcomer guide ideas that go beyond the basics

• A first-weekend itinerary. Saturday morning coffee, the farmers market, the trail, dinner. One route, five pins.
• A kids edition. Playgrounds, the library story time, pediatricians, the best ice cream.
• A dog edition. Dog parks, vets, groomers, patios that allow dogs.
• A new business edition. For people opening a shop, not just moving in: permits, the chamber, the SBDC, commercial brokers, the coworking space.
• Seasonal updates. Swap the welcome offers quarterly and send the newcomer list a note each time.

Start with forty places

Do not wait until you have every business and every offer. Pick the forty places a new resident needs first, get ten businesses to put up a welcome offer, build the map, and put the QR code in the hands of the realtors. You can add the rest as it comes in, and unlike the PDF, you will never have to reprint.

There is a guide template at app.proxi.co/templates if you want to start from one.