How CivicPlus is Helping Governments Build Trust and Satisfaction with Their Residents Through Innovative Technology

Most resident-government interactions now happen online. Gone are the days of driving to city hall during one’s lunch break to apply for a permit or calling a recreation department to reserve a park pavilion. While expedited by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, this shift in digital-first government continues to be fueled by residents’ growing expectations. As governments expand their online service portfolio, residents’ appetite for such services grows exponentially, putting pressure on local leaders to compete with the private sector for best-in-class technology innovations.

While such expectations are pushing government leaders to invest in technology and digital workstreams, they are also eliciting some unexpected but highly valuable benefits.

Based on a recent survey CivicPlus conducted, residents indicate that they feel more trusting and appreciative of their local government when the administration provides frictionless, personalized, and singular access to online services. Such online conveniences create positive civic experiences — or the interactions between local governments and the residents they serve.

How Do Digital Civic Experiences Impact Resident Trust and Satisfaction?

Civic experiences happen in every government-resident interaction, including outside the digital sphere. People purchase permits, attend municipal meetings, participate in recreational programs, book facilities, make payments, and more. Government staff members process requests, administer programs, issue public safety communications, and handle other tasks that keep communities governing, operating, and serving their residents efficiently.

What makes digital civic experiences vital is the expectation of their availability among busy community members influenced by the private sector’s investment in online services and Generation Z digital natives coming into adulthood.

What makes digital civic experiences capable of elevating resident satisfaction is their ability to:

● Enhance access to services

● Provide transparency into operations

● Eliminate barriers to revenue sources

● Streamline processes through automations and cloud-based access

Residents with online access to government services not only report higher levels of satisfaction with government responsiveness and transparency, but they also report being prouder of the communities in which they live.

Powering Government Technology and Empowering Resident Trust

At CivicPlus, we empower leaders to transform interactions between residents and their government into consistently positive experiences. In our recent survey, people who reside in communities served by CivicPlus shared that they can access everything from their city online more easily than those in communities not powered by CivicPlus technology.

How are we doing it? With our integrated suite of technology.

We’ve created the industry’s first Civic Experience Platform, which governments leverage to deliver services to residents in personalized, one-stop, and frictionless ways. Our solutions work together seamlessly and securely, leveraging existing data and reducing the number of information silos within a municipality while increasing efficiency and decreasing redundant tasks. As a result, our government customers tell us they now have an empowering, effective, and easy way to get things done — and positive feedback for their services is at an all-time high.

 ​"At CivicPlus, we empower leaders to transform interactions between residents and their government into consistently positive experiences," States Emily Harnish, Chief Marketing Officer 

Our Civic Experience Platform includes our core, innovative solutions designed to empower governments to efficiently govern, service, and operate their administrations, including the following technology solutions:

● Municipal Websites

● Mass Notifications

● Accessibility Compliance and Web Governance solutions from Monsido

● Agenda and Meeting Management

● Municode Codification services

● Social Media Archiving from ArchiveSocial

● FOIA and Open Records Requests technology from NextRequest

● Recreation Management

● The SeeClickFix 311 CRM system

● Process Automation and Digital Services

● Code Enforcement, Permitting, and Licensing solutions

With over 12,000 global customers, CivicPlus solutions are used daily by over 100,000 administrative staff members and over 340 million people in the U.S. and Canada alone.

Communities that choose CivicPlus benefit from inter-departmental collaboration, time-saving workflows, and the support of a multi-Stevie^® Award-Winning Technical Support team. Likewise, residents benefit from the ability to self-service their needs online, resulting in positive civic experiences and fostering sentiments of trust and satisfaction.

To learn more about CivicPlus and our Civic Experience Platform, visit us online at CivicPlus.com.

Emily Harnish

Emily, currently the Chief Marketing Officer at CivicPlus®, has over 20 years in technology marketing and can “scale skill-sets” from pre-IPO startups to global 5000 corporations.

She can identify, capture and manage all aspects of a business, drive and optimize customer experience, and constantly scale revenue to meet the needs of the current C-suite. Her abilities have been valued in both the public and private sector industries.

Emily’s data-driven mindset allows her to understand information at a large scale and share it with her peers while presenting it as an understandable and vital driver to revenue and company progress. 

Her cross-functional leadership style collaborates well with the members of the C-suite to explain how marketing inputs can be translated into meaningful and measurable outputs instead of “black box programs.”

Emily understands and recognizes the technologies available for advancing digital transformation allowing for the previously unimagined possibilities for predictive marketing and personalization. This skill allows her to enhance the brand engagement and personalization that should be present throughout the customer journey from acquisition to retention and monetization.

She has demonstrated these abilities with world-renowned corporations such as Texas Instruments, Cisco Systems, Dell, T-Mobile, and Qualtrics, a former division of SAP leading to their 2021 IPO.

Emily has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Bowling Green State University and a master’s degree in Business Administration from Texas Woman’s University.

Outside work, she and her husband run an equestrian farm and follow their daughter as she competes in equestrian events. She’s active in her local community by volunteering with 4H events and mentoring her alma mater’s college students as they explore their path into marketing.