check before you trust it.

An official account belongs to a public-interest institution whose announcements are of use to the people physically near it. These nine kinds, and only these — there is no “other”:

Every account starts at 1 km, the same as anybody’s post. It can reach further, up to the figure above, once all its proofs are in — and each announcement asks only for the area it actually concerns. Nothing about reach is for sale, and nothing raises it past 5 km.

An institution with more than one site — five campuses, three hospitals — has one account per site, each with its own address, its own proofs and its own person responsible. Each site is listed on its own.

Nobody can switch the mark on for themselves, and nobody can pay for it. We need three things: that the institution exists, that the applicant speaks for it, and who the applicant is. There are two ways to show them.

If it is registered

• a document showing the institution exists — a registration, a charter, a notification, or a recognition letter
• a letter on its letterhead naming the person who will run its account
• a phone call to a number we found — the institution’s own published number, from its website, a government directory or a notice board, never one written on the application. We ask for the applicant by name and read them a code, which they type into the app.
• proof of who that person is. They must have a phone-verified vaibli account in their own name, never a shared one.

If it is not registered, but has a committee

Most of what a neighbourhood actually runs — the masjid three streets over, the community school, the volunteer clinic, the town committee — has no state registration. Leaving them out would hand the mark to wealthier areas and keep it from the places that need it most. For education, health, places of worship and neighbourhood bodies, we accept instead:

• a visit: someone from vaibli goes to the premises and photographs them and any signage, with the location recorded
• a resolution of its committee naming the person who will run its account, signed by at least two office-bearers, with their names and numbers
• the same phone call, to a number we got on site — from the signboard, or from an office-bearer we met — not from the application
• the same proof of who the applicant is

An account proven this way stays at 1 km until it has been re-confirmed once, six months later. Standing is earned by a period of good conduct.

If two groups both claim to speak for the same institution, the account is suspended until one of them withdraws. We do not decide which committee is the real one.

Every account is re-confirmed — once a year, or every six months on the committee path. If an institution stops answering, the mark comes off until somebody confirms it again.

These cannot hold the official mark in any form. The refusal is on what they are, not on a judgement about them:

• political parties, candidates and campaigns, and politicians in a personal capacity. Nothing political is published under the mark, from any direction, including by a government office during an election.
• businesses of any size. A local business, a company or a private hospital’s paid services can be a Verified Business instead, which is a different mark with different rules.
• news outlets and publishers. Our checks prove an institution is real and that a person speaks for it. They say nothing about whether its reporting is true, and the mark on a story about someone else would read as us vouching for it. A newsroom can be a Verified Business.
• informal groups with no committee behind them.
• individuals, however well known.
• vaibli itself. We do not hold an official account and do not use one to talk to you.

• post official information about itself and its place — a closure, a changed exam hall, a water shutdown. Not opinion, commentary, campaigning or promotion.
• every post it writes is checked by a person before anyone sees it. The exception is a short notice the app assembles from fixed wording — a changed prayer time, a funeral prayer, an update on a power cut — which appears at once and is checked afterwards.
• a few posts a week at most, and fixed-wording notices have daily limits of their own. A wider reach never comes with more posts.
• its posts expire like everybody else’s

It means we checked who they are. It does not mean any particular post is accurate, and it is not an endorsement — if an institution announces something wrong, the mark says nothing about that.

The person who will run the account applies in the vaibli app, from Settings → Apply for an official account, and sends the documents there. The app shows what is still missing and when to expect our call. Documents go to our reviewers only; nobody else sees them, and they are never shown back.

If you don’t see that option in the app yet, applications are not open in your area — write to support@vaibli.app and we will take it from there.