Frequently Asked Questions

Welcome app helps municipalities to make information and activities digitally accessible for newcomers. Welcome app is currently working with the municipalities of Tilburg, Venlo, Leiden, Dordrecht and Almere. This means that many activities in these regions are available in the app. In addition, there are also national activities to be found in the app.

We call Dutch residents locals!

You can use conversation starters in the app. These are questions that are there for you. For instance: “Hi! What do you eat to stay healthy and fit?” In the app you will find several questions that you can use as a first question.

No, we only offer the platform. Local organizations, companies and individuals are the ones who organize and offer activities through our platform.

In the calendar of Welcome app you can filter in different ways. You can filter by location, so you can choose your neighborhood or type in your location. You can then search for activities in the app through different categories, such as language, sports, food and Dutch culture.

Welcome app is not (yet) active throughout the Netherlands, so that’s possible! Most local libraries offer free language classes or have language cafes. Try Google to search your local library and find language classes. Additionally you can work on your fluency & network at one of the many Vertel es taalcafés across the country!

Welcome app is not a job finding platform. We usually do not have vacancies in the app. You will find all kinds of activities in the ‘career’ category in the app that you can attend. These are activities such as training programs, workshops and activities that help you to build a professional network.

Please keep in mind that it sometimes takes a few days to receive an answer. It helps if you start with an easy question, such as: “How do you start your day?”

As an organization you can work with us to welcome newcomers to your city. You can upload your events, workshops, language or sports lessons, fun activities for children, walk-in consultation hours, but also calls with your organization. You upload these via the web app in your own organization’s portal. There you can easily see which organizations there are in your city and what activities are organized by them. There is also a possibility to connect with them to make collaboration easier. You can also send messages to newcomers who have indicated that they want to be at your activity. At the same time, we ensure that Welcome app reaches newcomers in your city and that the events of organizations are visible to them through our app.

Welcome app is different from the ‘traditional’ social maps. Social maps are often heavy websites, with a lot of text and a dry overview of projects or organizations. These maps are often not designed with the target audience in mind: information is centralized but not easily accessible (often only in Dutch) or action-oriented. They do not call for participation.

Welcome app is different because it is designed together with the target group. It is a platform that informs people on an activity level and motivates them to participate. The activities that are displayed are structured in categories (language, sports, kids, culture, etc.), presented in your own language and linked to your location. In addition, Welcome app is more than just an app: we are also a community. We continuously collect feedback from our users and provide demand-driven offerings. In addition, we are available for personal approaches and we are always available for questions via our helpdesk.

Anyone can create an account on the app for free, no matter if local, newcomer or organization. We have developed a web app for organizations to make it a bit easier to manage activities. The app is completely free.

The maintenance of the activities is the responsibility of the organizations themselves. We regularly check the offers in the app and contact organizations if we see that activities are no longer relevant or current.

As an organization you can log in to the web app and it is not necessary to download the app itself for this. Don’t have an account yet? Create an account here.

We take the security of our app users very seriously. Activities uploaded by organizations are always checked by us first.

We understand that it is a lot of work to put all the activities on it. We therefore recommend focusing on activities that are interesting for newcomers. Consider, for example, activities where it does not matter what language the visitor speaks, activities that are free, or activities that are accessible to newcomers in a different way. You only have to post recurring activities once!

No compensation is given to organizations for providing activities. We think we can be a useful tool to make it easier for your activities to reach the target group. The app is designed for them. This makes us different from other social maps.

We share this wish with you – at the moment this is not yet possible, but something that is planned for the coming year. We would like to hear your feedback on how to make the web app as user-friendly as possible. Even creating an API will involve human work in managing activities.

Welcome app aims to support newcomers in different phases of their integration process. All these initiatives are great and are exactly the activities that should be included in Welcome app. It is our goal to inform people in the language of the newcomers, in an accessible way, about all the possibilities that are available.

Welcome app is for newcomers with a refugee background. As a ‘local’ you can also create an account: you can then answer questions from newcomers and get in touch with them, and see the activities that are organized in your city.

The use of Welcome app is completely free for organizations, newcomers and locals!

As an organization, you create an account on the web app. You can then set up your activities here, so that newcomers to your municipality can find and book them.

With Welcome app, all relevant local activities, information and organizations to newcomers come together in one place. Via a user-friendly app that is available in nine different languages, newcomers in your municipalities can easily take control over their integration process. This makes the lives of municipal consultants easier: they spend less time looking for current offerings in the city, receive fewer individual questions from clients and clients find activities and information more easily by themselves.

An additional advantage is that by using the Welcome app, all local civil society organizations involved can find and visit each other more easily to share information and/or work together.

Welcome app is indeed available for everyone in the Netherlands. That’s because we think it’s important that all newcomers (albeit limited) can benefit from our platform. However, users who do not live in the municipalities Welcome app works with will see a limited version of the app. This way they can ask questions to the helpdesk, find and book national (often online) activities. Therefore, they can’t chat with locals nearby and find local activities and organizations. The Welcome app only makes a real difference if it can bring supply and demand together at a neighborhood level, and we do that by working together with municipalities.

The Welcome app is precisely designed to unburden consultants. Because all content is always up to date, a consultant can very efficiently find the right offer and share it with the client. Consultants are not expected to provide or maintain information, this is done by the Welcome app team and the providers themselves.

Welcome app now works with five municipalities: Venlo, Dordrecht, Leiden, Tilburg and Almere. Do you also want to work with us? Send an email to info@welcomeapp.nl for more information.

The results are very positive so far. We started this new approach in April 2022 and more than 500 organizations are connected to the platform. We reach more than 1500 users per month.

Yes, Welcome app can be used for both Ukrainians and other refugees.

The Welcome app team and the providers of the activities (civil society organizations) are responsible for keeping the content on the app up to date. The municipality therefore has no extra work for this.

If your organization offers activities that are interesting for newcomers, then Welcome app is for you! Not only when it comes to activities that directly contribute to the integration of newcomers, such as language lessons or informative consultation hours, but also when you organize cultural, social or sporting activities. In integration, it is important that newcomers can participate in all facets of society.