4 App Solutions to Boost Municipal Citizen & Resident Engagement
By Jenna Blumenfeld, Stream
Municipalities work tirelessly in the background in ways many of us never consider. While local officials work in tandem with state bureaucracies, it is local governments that supply the services that enrich communities, fix immediate problems (think: downed trees), organize emergency services, and much more. Citizens/residents are the backbones of local governments, and cities that engage their constituents through civic action, civic skills, social cohesion, and civic commitment are typically more successful communities. Cities with robust citizen engagement foster better quality of life.
However, involving citizens/residents in key decisions and community-wide initiatives can be challenging. That’s why more cities across the country are embracing new technologies to meet people where they are: on their mobile phones. Apps are an interactive tool to keep people abreast of local happenings and public forums. But particularly for smaller municipalities with tighter budgets, building an engaging app from the ground up can be an expensive, lengthy process.
These four budget-friendly apps can help local governments create feature-rich mobile experiences for a fraction of the cost of a custom app build, and help officials understand how citizens/residents feel about important issues for more trustworthy and transparent governance.
1. Bleesk White-Label App
For many cities, tourism is a significant income driver. But it can be difficult to share with visitors exactly how to get the most out of their trip. Ideal for tourism boards, Bleesk builds white-label apps with self-guided tours to help visitors see the best local sites, museums, restaurants, hotels, and shopping districts. In addition to special deals and engaging features that drive sales such as push notifications and in-app scavenger hunts, Bleesk also has an emergency/safety functionality that alerts users of important citywide happenings.
Cities can also use anonymized data collected by Bleesk’s platform to create heat maps — visual representations of customer locations — to learn where and how visitors move through a new city to identify bottlenecks and improve the visitor experience.
2. CivicPlus Mobile
CivicPlus Mobile is a feature-rich application that powers engagement solutions for over 250 million citizens/residents in the United States. A secure, cloud-based app, CivicPlus Mobile helps cities and municipalities of all sizes create a WCAG & ADA-compliant app experience. Cities leverage CivicPlus in a variety of ways. The City of Portland, Maine uses the app to answer upwards of 2,500 citizen questions per month via a live in-app chat functionality; Kitsap County, Wash. uses the CivicPlus app to respond to potentially hazardous spills in Puget Sound. Additionally, CivicPlus supports features that enable citizens to view and vote on city issues and share relevant videos and images with city officials.
3. Elucd by Zencity
Elucd by Zencity rapidly polls and surveys citizens/residents, and enables municipalities, elected officials, and more recently the private sector to gauge local sentiments in the communities they serve. While traditional citizen research returns data in days or even weeks, Elucd’s Pulse product can return local attitudes in under 24 hours. Elucd’s Blockwise product helps police receive reports of community criminal acts, and share their progress on crime mitigation with citizen/resident watchdogs.
4. Info Grove Mobile App Platform
Info Grove’s cloud-based, white-label mobile app solution can work in partnership with a municipality’s website to drive civic engagement and create a personalized user experience. Info Grove’s features allow cities to provide updates on road conditions, push emergency notifications, post schedules for events and volunteer opportunities, and display refuse collection information. The app also has a “report a problem” service, allowing citizens/residents to notify city officials of issues such as potholes, minor vandalism, graffiti, and more.
Feature-Rich Apps for Citizen/Resident Engagement
Apps aren’t a silver bullet for solving a local government’s citizen/resident engagement issues. While such technology can open communication channels between city officials and their constituents, cities must also incentivize citizens/residents to download and use their apps. Targeted communication campaigns can help improve measurable app metrics such as monthly, weekly, and daily active users. And assigning dedicated personnel to update the app and field user issues is a good idea.
Ensuring your city’s app solution has engagement-boosting functionality such as in-app chat with city officials or chatbots, low-latency activity feeds of timely events and volunteer opportunities, and intuitive UI/UX will ensure your city’s civic technology will be well worth the investment.
However, it’s important for municipalities to understand that while apps can drive engagement, not everyone has a mobile device or the technological know-how to seamlessly navigate an app. Apps are just one solution to engage citizens and residents, but they are not the complete fix for boosting civic engagement.
Jenna Blumenfeld is a product content strategist at Stream, maker of enterprise-grade activity feed and chat APIs. Stream is the fastest, most scalable solution on the market today, enabling application product teams to increase user engagement and retention and decrease time to market.