The Best of 2017 For Local Government: Top 10 Favorites

The Best of 2017 For Local Government: Top 10 Favorites featured image

Public Sector leaders work hard every year to build and grow their communities into something worth talking about. Whether pushing for innovation, growth, or engagement, each year they set out to discover the best new practices, technology, and tools to reach the goals they set earlier that year.

2017 introduced a world of opportunities for the public sector and a growing passion for smart city technology that brought leaders around the country together and will continue to push us into the next year. We thought we would end the year with a quick list of useful information from 2017 that will help you reach your goals in 2018.

[bctt tweet="Get a quick list of useful information from 2017 that will help you reach your goals in 2018" username="Rock Solid"]

1. Email Course

We initiated this email course in 2017 to educate local government before they take the plunge into the mobile app world. What we found was, local government leaders weren’t always thinking about all of the options they had when considering to deploy such a useful platform. Here are 5 things to consider when deploying a mobile civic app for your government that you may not have thought about before.

2. Mobile App Strategy

Governments should be starting to think about user experience as a part of their overall strategy and budgeting. The leaders of local government organizations need to consider a lot more than they did in the past. Citizen engagement and connection need to become part of the overarching strategy. If not, organizations stand a chance of getting to the end and realizing there was no consideration for engagement and stumble into a massive amount of app sprawl. In an effort to help reduce app sprawl, we talked about why your city needs a mobile app strategy.

Click here to read the article

3. Digital Milestones

Every government organization has hurdles to cross when it comes to going digital. You would think that each of these hurdles can be good on their own but if you get stuck or road blocked at one, how do you get out? What are the next steps? Our digital milestones blog series helps you know which milestone you are at and where you should be going next!

4. Leadership Traits

If your city isn’t looking to become a smart city yet, you will be very soon. To get there, it will take leadership, guidance, and persistence. There are so many different types of leaders in local government, so here are 3 traits needed by leadership to build a successful smart city.

Click here to read the article

5. Launch of 2.0

In late 2017 we were excited to launch mobile version 2.0, which was our new UI and updated experience for the Rock Solid (previously CitySourced) mobile app. We redesigned the UI to be clean and clear for the end-user so that they could find and connect with their government faster than ever! We have come a long way since first launching our product in 2009. See what other changes came with the launch of our mobile version 2.0 update.

6. City Hall Selfie Day

City Hall Selfie Day was created to celebrate local governments across the country, entities that rarely get enough credit, in an exciting, modern way. To spice things up, the Rock Solid team decided to beat the previous year’s record for the most city hall selfies taken in one day—13 selfies in a single day. We made it to 18 different city halls within Los Angeles County and made it back to the office just in time to find out we wouldn’t be setting the record for City Hall Selfie Day 2017. Even though we didn’t break the record this year, it was awesome being able to explore parts of Los Angeles we had never been to before and being able to showcase how diverse the city and county of Los Angeles truly is.

7. Civic Reporting

Traditionally, residents make a call, send a letter or e-mail about a problem, and they never hear back from the city or county regarding their service request. As a resident, this is extremely frustrating, but in reality, back-and-forth communication for every issue would be impossible. By displaying the service requests submitted with real-time status updates, residents know the exact status of the requests that have been submitted. See how your organization could be saving ~$24K every year on truck roll verifications while improving efficiencies, responsiveness, and transparency with an enterprise platform mobile app like Rock Solid.

8. Promote Your Mobile App

So let’s say you’ve decided that you’re going to invest in the future of your organization, and now you need to get your citizen excited about submitting issues; sometimes this can be difficult.

Did you know? You already have some methods in place for spreading the word within your community. We built a guide to help you take advantage of the 5 ways that you can promote your city app. This guide shows you how other municipalities are promoting their mobile apps across their websites. Use the link below to see how easy it is to promote your mobile app.

5 Ways to Promote Your City App

9. GovConnect

We started GovConnect as a source of education and communication in local government: a way for government leaders, citizens, and partners to talk about how we can all reach a goal for the future. No matter your goal you can talk about your challenges and see how others have faced them head-on in our community publication on medium.com called GovConnect.

Read more articles now

10. New Faces

From new babies to new employees, Rock Solid is growing. We hired some very important roles in 2017 and 2018 will be no different. On the list of new hires is a front-end engineer, sales executive, and account manager. The goal of these new hires will be to continue improving customer success and experience.

Our CRO/COO also welcomed his second baby boy into the world this year so congrats to him and his family! We were happy to be a part of that journey with you.  

Other 2017 local government lists worth checking out:

Top Ten Local Government Innovations of 2017 - National Research Center, Inc.
Top Ten Reasons to Transform Local Government in 2017 - Alliance for Innovation
State and Local IT Spending to Outpace Federal in 2017 and 2018 - GovTech

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