Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Samantha Radomski from Clay County, Florida, to dive into their approach to citizen engagement. John Duckwitz from Granicus joins us as well and together we'll learn about what made Clay County go with Granicus to deliver more digital citizen friendly tools for engagement, analytics, and improve efficiency in the back office and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor.
In this short series, we’re talking all about Citizen Engagement. I’ll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve.
Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available to help by efficiently providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We’d love it if you could spend less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. Stay tuned for more episodes on innovators in local government across the globe. Read the Guide.
More info:
Featured government: Clay County, Florida
Government Guests: Samantha Radomski, Administrative and Web Content Specialist
Featured Maker: Granicus
Maker Guest: John Duckwitz
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the wiki for local government innovation and on this short series, we're talking all about citizen engagement. I'll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve. Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available by providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We'd love it if you could spend less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host.
Lindsay: (00:42)
Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Samantha Radomski from Clay County, Florida, to dive into their approach to citizen engagement. John Duckwitz from Granicus joins us as well and together we'll learn about what made Clay County go with Granicus to deliver more digital citizen friendly tools for engagement, analytics, and improve efficiency in the back office and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor. Thank you all for joining me today. Can you quickly introduce yourselves and share a bit about your roles, Samantha, I'll start with you.
Samantha: (01:15)
Hello, my name is Samantha Radomski. I am the online presence coordinator for Clay County board of County commissioners. I am a certified Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator specializing in digital accessibility. I handle all the public records requests that come into the County and being the online presence coordinator, my job is to lead a team that encompasses the social media specialists, the webmaster, the digital media specialist, and our main job is to make sure that we are sending out the vision of Clay County through various different platforms and mediums.
John: (01:49)
And my name is John Duckwitz. I'm the director of customer success at Granicus, and I represent a team of 35 really fantastic MacGyver style experts on our software. We focus on assisting our government clients in the deeper adoption of our product solutions and making sure that we're helping them to deliver on our kind of programmatic outcomes, the reasons that they come to us and want to use our software here at Granicus.
Lindsay: (02:19)
I want to start with a little history on Clay County, Florida, which is home to about 220,000 residents. Samantha, can you share with us your, what your approach has been to citizen engagement prior to working with Granicus and what spurred the need for a better tool to engage your residents?
Samatha: (02:35)
So prior to working with Granicus, we had a very reactive approach to citizen engagement. We only had our website, we did have another service platform that we utilized, but other than that, it was our website, that service platform and social media. We didn't really engage too much in any other areas. Once we started talking about how we need to have that more complex engagement that all the citizens were requesting, it was that time that we needed to look at our contract with Granicus. And that's when they pitched that, Hey, we have this new gov service platform, by the way, you don't have a newsletter. So we got together a little team of us and we started saying, you know, everybody is wanting us to go to multiple different platforms. They want to be able to have different elements of communication and really engage with the government on a whole new level.
Lindsay: (03:39)
Well you tell the story of a lot of local governments, specifically smaller local governments, where they're just leveraging a lot of social media and more of the boots on the ground approach to citizen engagement. So I'm interested to tap into more of these digital tools and have Granicus on with us as well today. You've been working with Granicus for almost five years now to improve your engagement efforts and your strategies there. Citizen engagement is a very broad term, as you know, can you share more specifically what you're using them for?
Samatha: (04:09)
We had a very outdated website and we really wanted to modernize, streamline. We got a new County manager and he was all for, you know, we want to give the citizens the look and feel that they really deserve. So we opened up with what functionality is out there that you don't necessarily see on a lot of government sites and Granicus was able to provide us, um, we did a complete redesign, nothing on our website is exactly the same as it was prior and the functionality of the tools and everything really was above and beyond in the whole redesign. We utilize the gov service platform so we have the report feature, which allows citizens to report potholes, park issues, missed environmental services. We also have forms that I have built out for, if you need to request an ambulance billing, a fire report, uh, mosquito requests, public records, of course.
Samantha: (05:08)
That allows us to get metrics on how we interact with citizen requests on that element. And then one of my recently favorite products is gov delivery. When COVID first started to shut down everything, we noticed that there was a massive draw to being able to get information out in a large quantity. Unfortunately, we weren't fast enough to do gov delivery at that time, but we were able to pitch that if we would have been able to have this, it would have directly affected us in a really good way, which, um, recently I have started using that to push out when our vaccination appointment bookings open. And I do have to say that Granicus has gone above and beyond with this element because we were just told that we had the highest click rate opening on the first bulletin ever sent on a topic. And so I have, uh, just over 8,000 people subscribed to one topic and we received an 83% click rate opening. Those are the products we have now, and I'm in love with them all.
Lindsay: (06:26)
Yeah, that's fantastic. Everybody is obviously very interested in the vaccine, so it was a very hot topic for sure, but at 83% click rate is pretty impressive. Um, from what I know about Granicus’ product, the engagement piece is not only helping with citizen engagement, but with internal engagement with your staff as well. Can you explain this from your perspective?
Samantha: (06:48)
Yeah. Our HR team sends out a weekly internal email. Basically it provides the staff members, what employment opportunities there are that you can transfer into, health things, Um, just some events that are going around in the County. So HR has really utilized pushing information to the staff in that element. We have a parks quarterly newsletter that gets sent out and they include the internal as well. And I'm developing plans on how to implement more internal utilization of this platform.
Lindsay: (07:30)
Great. And John, I'll now go to you. Can you give us a quick rundown of Granicus' role in citizen engagement and the various products you all offer in this space?
John: (07:40)
Sure. I'd be happy to. You know, Samantha put it so aptly earlier in the conversation where she said citizens were looking to interact with government and the staff at Clay County was looking to engage with citizens. And so they needed something that holistically bridged some of the gaps there. That's really the space that we here at Granicus sit in. We are a civic engagement platform, meaning that we have more than 40 different product solutions that really help with that end-to-end experience citizen experience. Across those 40 products, we really look at it as really five core product families and we have, uh, what we call gov access, which is our website, our CMS solution, uh, you know, transactional websites that are designed for the needs of today's citizens.
John: (08:27)
We have our gov service solution. That's our online citizen self-service solutions and kind of operations automation. Gov meetings solutions boards management, legislative, uh, management of videos for a town council meetings. And then as you've heard also gov delivery for kind of targeted email text messaging, social media, and communicating out to your audience. And then last but not least, gov records. It's an entire product suite for paperless records management, uh, land records, uh, vitals, birth, death certificates, that sort of thing. So really anything end-to-end that a citizen might need to come and interact with their local government, uh, we can provide a cloud-based solution to help, uh, governments modernize in today's environment.
Lindsay: (09:16)
I know for its smaller local governments, when you say 40 products, you have offered that can be a little intimidating. Is there a specific product that you would say governments should start out with, if they're not ready to commit to the full package you have maybe one or two that they should look to first?
John: (09:36)
Sure. So a fantastic question. It really gets to the heart of this idea of kind of service transformation. Start where you are. Um, if you have a gap in the way that you are communicating with your citizens maybe you want to start with our gov delivery solution, uh, the way that you're delivering services, obviously the services solution, but really I personally would probably suggest, uh, taking a good, hard look at your web presence. As a citizen in the community, uh, if I need a service, um, or want to hear from, uh, from my local government, I'm going to search for them on the web. And you've got to have a really clear, uh, easy to navigate web presence. So, while any of our solutions I think are great for a government to kind of adopt and start with my personal feeling would be, you've got to have a great web presence that's easy to navigate. That's the entry point.
Lindsay: (10:32)
Yeah, I think I would agree with that. And I've seen a lot of local governments put a lot of money and resources behind revitalized websites. And what I've seen too often is plugins with a lot of third-party tools that don't have the same level of standard when it comes to digital accessibility. So I'm excited to have Samantha on the phone here, who is an expert in this. This is something that governments have to look at if they're driving to have more inclusive digital services. Samantha, there obviously are a lot of products in this space to help local governments and better engage with their citizens. How did you all even discover Granicus way back when, and why'd you decide to go with them versus a competitor?
Samantha: (11:15)
So, I was not here when we first started with Granicus. So I can not speak on why we started, but one of the main reasons that we stayed with Granicus was because, um, we kind of bundled it all together. We did not want to have to communicate with six different companies. If something went and down on two different platforms, we wanted to be able to have one centralized, um, mode of communication. And so having Granicus be able to offer the website, the service platform and gov delivery kind of solidified the fact that we're going to go with them and stay with them. Plus we really liked some of the designs that they showed us for the new website. And they were able to, when we were like, no, we want this, they justified why it might not be the best option. So it wasn't just let me satisfy whatever you want. It's, let's talk about the options that we do have and why this might be better for you. Being able to work with Granicus in order to one, enhance the products, as well as provide our citizens with what they want, the communication was very, very good.
Lindsay: (12:33)
That's great. And I know from a vendor management perspective, yes, of course having somebody who's going to be able to give you a variety of different solutions and it's less to manage on your end is definitely a plus. Going back to some of the product offerings you have. I know a lot of questions that are coming through Govlaunch are around these virtual town hall meetings and the need to engage citizens and getting feedback from constituents in a more digital way. Does Granicus offer any products that address this specifically?
John: (13:03)
So short answer. Yes we certainly offer a number of products in our gov meetings suite that allow for that, uh, citizen engagement specifically. A lot of, uh, counties and cities actually have legal requirements to allow citizens to participate in council meetings, to comment on potential ordinances, things on the legislative agenda for a particular council meeting. So you have to be able to collect those in advance or allow citizens to speak in real time. Um, even in a scenario as we have been in 2020, where all of these meetings and participation from the council members themselves, all of that's gone remote, you've still got to offer the ability for citizens to interact. Um, so we have a really great solution. It's our citizen participation solution, kind of core to that is e-comment tool, uh, again, allowing for the collection of those citizen comments on particular or specific, uh, legislative items on the agenda for a council meeting.
Lindsay: (14:06)
Samantha, you mentioned using one of Granicus' tools for engagement and communication with citizens around the COVID vaccine. I suspect this is going to be a very popular question with local governments so can you elaborate a little bit more on the tool that you're using and specifically your strategy thus far with this engagement effort?
Samantha: (14:29)
Yeah, on our website, we utilize our, um, emergency banner at the top to go straight to our emergency management page, where we have some of our vaccination information on there. During the height of COVID I built out basically a one-stop resource area and Granicus had provided a beautiful template that had the feeds for the CDC already in there. For vaccinations, we started to just do social media and announce it on our website. We didn't really push it out anywhere else. And then we started hearing, well, I'm 60, some odd years old, and I don't have a social media, or how am I supposed to get my mom the information when I'm not even getting the information because I'm in the middle of my workday. So I dropped back and punted because we have this great platform that I could be using. And we took a simple, just a little square. And it's called the COVID-19 vaccine update. You sign up for it. And on Wednesdays, we announce if we did get any vaccines or not. We've been putting it out around 11:30. So it goes out on Wednesdays and it hits all of the people who have subscribed. We have a little over 8,000 that I checked today that either subscribed via text message or an email alert.
Samantha: (16:03)
The email or the text message comes in, and it says Clay County update for vaccines, follow the link, and it sends it straight to that page on the alert. So that has been really good. I didn't think it would be received as much as it had been when my gov delivery contact sent me the email saying, Hey, um, you just blew up gov deliveries, analytics for having one, uh, bulletin go out and have an 83% click rate. So utilizing that it kind of allowed all of the citizens to get the information, whether you have a smartphone or not. As long as you have a phone that can receive text messages, then you can get this alert. If you have an email, then you can get this alert. If you have social media, you'll get the announcement. If you only want to be on the website and just keep refreshing, then that's, that's your mode of communication. But I wanted to make sure that we were allowing everybody to get the communication that they needed in the accessible format that they needed.
Lindsay: (17:11)
And then John obviously there's a, a variety of different ways local governments are probably working to engage their residents specifically around information on the vaccine. How else have you experienced this at Granicus? What questions are you getting? Um, what would you add?
John: (17:27)
Yeah, it's been very much a journey for, for us at Granicus over the past year. Any SAS company has a product roadmap and a vision for how their year is going to go. At the beginning of 2020, um, as the pandemic was kind of really starting to spread across the US we had this opportunity I will say to reflect and say, what, what do we want to do? What services do we want to provide to help government address these issues, uh, because, you know, we as a staff at Granicus, not only do we work with government, but we are citizens in the communities where many government organizations are using these tools. So we kind of redirected, uh, our product teams and our engineering teams. As Samantha noted, we very quickly spun up a specific templates, uh, for our gov access, our website customers to stand up a COVID communications page or a vaccine related communications page. We've put out a lot of thought leadership on how to manage your strategic communications plan, creating topics specifically for people to sign up, uh, for COVID, uh, comms and now vaccine comms. I'm so proud of the work that's been done in the way that we've been communicating, uh, as an organization to our customers in government. And I think if, if there's anything that, um, uh, you know, government communicators or, or anybody who's in kind of IT or has any sort of, uh, aspect or, or, or city management role, if they're saying, what else can I do right now?
John: (18:58)
It is make sure you have a clear place for citizens to go to find information, not only on the ongoing COVID crisis, but vaccine communications, make sure you have a clear place for them to sign up for comms, much like they do at Clay County on that page. And from there there's so much you can do to then kind of segment, you know, your audiences, make sure you're talking to specific, uh, population segments, you know, folks who are over a certain age that might be in phase one to get their vaccine and, uh, and, and on down the line. So, um, you know, it, anything you can do to kind of start right now, um, it all goes back to where we started in this conversation of, you know, make sure you have that clear entry point for citizens, uh, on a web presence and then a comm strategy that backs that up.
Lindsay: (19:49)
You have a vaccine communication toolkit it's been shared on Govlaunch. Can you share some highlights from that resource?
John: (19:57)
Yes, I'd be happy to. So, um, you know, we, we kind of, like I said, started last year with our, uh, our COVID communications toolkit, and that has now evolved to our vaccine communications tool kit. There's a lot of free features and, uh, widgets like, uh, what Samantha was talking about with the CDC scroll of their kind of content, lots of cool things that we've built that you can add to your existing Granicus products, whether it's your website, um, you know, your gov delivery instance. Um, so take a spin through there. Lots of cool things that are kind of free, uh, right now for our Granicus customers to access in the toolkit. But also what we're offering is engagement with that Granicus experience group those consultants who can take a bigger picture, look at, you know, what's your strategy right now, if you have one, if you don't, you know, let's work with you to say, here's how we can connect the tools that you have from Granicus to make sure that you are creating that, uh, that journey, that you have entry points that you have clear, uh, you know, points of communication with your citizens.
John: (21:03)
So if you go to Granicus.com, there's lots of information in the toolkit, free things that, uh, that customers can access now. And some really great thought leadership and a welcome invite to engage with us and our experience group to create a custom plan for you, uh, as a government entity.
Lindsay: (21:22)
Sounds good. And Samantha, what are some of the takeaways you'd like another local government to keep in mind when looking at vendors for citizen engagement tools and maybe one sentiment you'd want them to take away from this, uh, this podcast about why you'd advocate using Granicus?
Samantha: (21:40)
Um, so basically I am 100% for accessibility. That's the first question I ask any vendor is, okay, well, tell me about your accessibility. If they stumble, if they can not provide you any information right then and there, then they are not going to be accessible. Um, Granicus thankfully passed all of my tests. Accessibility is the number one feature, because if you cannot provide the exact same engagement for all citizens, then you are not doing your job in communicating effectively. Um, one of the other things is that communication in every element possible is key. So if you can put all of your eggs in one basket, the communication and that relationship builds. So with Granicus focus, I can call just about anyone that I've talked with and I'm like, Hey, blah, blah, blah. I have this crazy idea. What do you think? And they're like, you're just crazy. Or that is an amazing idea.
Samantha: (22:48)
And I know a lot of other counties or companies that would love to have that. Um, integration with all of the services that you are looking to provide your citizens either now or in the future. We're looking at rolling out a chat bot, um, in a year. So we'll have people be able to ask Alexa and Google and we'll have a live chat feature. That is something that we are looking in the future for, but was one of our main concerns when talking with Granicus was, how compatible are you with this? Can I have someone say, Hey, Alexa, I want to report a pothole in Clay County. Can it do that? Yes, it can. And if it can't, then we will make it work because that's something that other people will want. And when talking with vendors and meeting with people, you want to not just think now, but think six months a year down the road, because the way we are hit headed digitally, we have to think very much outside the box. And if your vendor is not thinking outside the box with you, then they're not the right vendor for you. And Granicus definitely thinks out of the box with me so.
Lindsay: (24:05)
Well good, I want to applaud your answer as specifically around accessibility. I think you really hit the nail on the head there and more local governments should really be looking at this with the same level of seriousness that you are. So thank you for that and for sharing all of your experiences with Granicus. And John I'll let you have the last word, you know, after working through implementation with over 2,500 local governments. And again, we define local governments as cities, towns, villages, counties, um, anything below state or provincial level at this point, what's some advice you'd share with a local government looking to a citizen engagement solution.
John: (24:43)
Ooh, that's a, that's a big question. I'll do my best here, but again, start where you are, look at what you're offering today, um, as entry points for citizens to, to interact, uh, with your government entity and, you know, take a real stock of kind of where the gaps are. Um, I think I, I'd also just to kind of dig, dig into a little more and give you some, some concrete things. In starting that journey, if you've, if you've identified that you have a need, um, you know, a lot of the steps are internal first, you know, get, get executive buy-in, um, you know, make sure that you've got all of the key stakeholders kind of onboard, uh, before you even start potentially a procurement process, or even a request for information from a series of vendors, um, document your needs and your current processes, your internal workflows identify where those gaps and pain points are.
John: (25:40)
So you can bring those to the, to the vendors, uh, and pressure test what their solutions can offer. Create that strategy for a user experience, uh, again that the not only the, the internal user on your staff, but the citizen, uh, user that, that citizen journey that I've referenced a couple of times, you've got to, you've got to come to the table with an idea and a vision for where you want to be and know that you're, you're going to iterate that, uh, over time, um, you know, clay County made some massive, uh, kind of, uh, service transformation, digital transformation steps, uh, in a short period of time, not everybody's so lucky, um, to, to be able to take that approach. So, um, so having that kind of idea of an overarching strategy and where maybe tech solutions, uh, can take part and breaking it into phases is a really, uh, I think strong approach to take moving forward.
Lindsay: (26:37)
Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing your important work with the wider community of local governments looking for these tools to engage more digitally with their communities. Um, keep up the exciting work in Clay County, Samantha, and best of luck to you, John, on behalf of Granicus.
Samatha: (26:51)
Thank you.
John: (26:52)
Thanks for having us
Lindsay: (27:00)
For small to medium sized local governments, going with a more established player like Granicus could be a good choice. With robust features that allow for the customization you need, coupled with their superior support, Granicus may cut down a lot of noise on the vendor management side and be just the partner you need as you begin your citizen engagement journey.
In case you missed it, Granicus and Govlaunch have teamed up to create a Citizen Engagement Guide, with some useful tips and considerations for local governments just starting out with their engagement efforts. You can find this resource and others on Govlaunch.
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch, the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.