Wayne County, NC, Drives Trust and Transparency Goals with Integrated Solutions and Services from CivicPlus®
Keys to Project:
Integrated and streamlined communications
County:
Wayne County, NCPopulation:
117,286
Challenge:
The County previously followed manual workflows and used siloed systems.
Solution:
The County implemented an integrated technology stack using CivicPlus software and bolstered its resident engagement with a community engagement consultation from CivicPlus.
Result:
Residents benefit from modern, online self-service features, staff benefit from easy-to-use, time-saving tools, and its leaders better understand residents’ communications needs.
With over 117,000 residents, Wayne County is situated in eastern North Carolina, about an hour outside Raleigh. It is home to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, agricultural activities, and is North Carolina’s unofficial pickle capital. Rich in history and culture, the County is named for General George Washington’s most trusted soldier, General Anthony Wayne, who was nicknamed “Mad Anthony Wayne” for his courage and valor.
Choosing Community Engagement Consulting Service by CivicPlus to Further Community Trust and Engagement Goals
As the Public Affairs Director for Wayne County, North Carolina, Joel Gillie’s main goal is to bring trust and transparency to his community. While attending a conference, Gillie became aware of CivicPlus’ community engagement insights and consulting, which provides quantitative and qualitative research to help communities uncover insights to help them make informed decisions. At the same time, he had been looking to find ways to further engagement goals.
I’m the public affairs director here, and we’re a small team. We put out information, but we’re not necessarily, other than Facebook comments, getting any information back from residents. We don’t know what they like and what they don’t like. If we’re engaging our community and we’re keeping them informed, we should be listening to them, too. Often, people lack trust in their government, and so I think that if there is anything we can do to change that narrative at the local level and be like, ‘Hey, your local government is working for you every day. Here’s what we do. What would you like to see done differently?’ It is good. It’s good information for us and the elected officials to have.
Joel Gillie
Public Affairs Director for Wayne County, North Carolina
Community Engagement Consulting Survey Process and Results
To kick off the process, Gillie met with Brenden Elwood and Spencer Turkin from the CivicPlus Research team to develop a comprehensive survey and plan. However, this isn’t just any type of survey; it would take their goals and provide the County with significant and measurable results,
“You are not going to get the same level of data and the same results you will as using this service from CivicPlus. I sent them what we were looking for, and they were able to formulate it the way it should be written for a survey. They study the results. They can take inferences from the data and really get granular to follow the train of thought from respondents.”
Here are a few examples of what they received:
- Hard data that shows where and what the public is listening to, such as newspapers, TV stations, and more. This data assists the department in understanding where to go for sponsorship and media buys.
- Sentiment and trust the public feels towards the government and the specific departments.
- Feedback and sentiment towards technology solutions the County is using.
In fact, through the process, Gillie learned about the positive sentiment the public had toward their website,
“People were saying ‘I like the website, and I can find everything I need very easily on there.’ In fact, eighty-eight percent felt the website was easy to use and navigate,” Gillie said.
In addition to using the data to assist with things like media buys and technology evaluation, Gillie says that has assisted the county on how best to share information and further their trust and transparency goals and enabled them to narrow in on how specific departments can improve their service delivery.
“It will help us make decisions on how we get information to our residents. Now we know what social media channels they’re on, and so we can better align our messaging. Also, one thing we found out in the survey is that many people don’t know what the County does. We’re taking this data and sharing it amongst our different departments. As an example, how many people have a library card? Out of the people surveyed, only fifty-five percent had a library card. What library programs do they like? So, they are using that data to make strategic decisions to better their departments,” says Gillie.
Utilizing CivicPlus’ Integrated Solution Set to Enhance Civic Experiences and Drive Trust
Wayne County utilizes a great deal of CivicPlus products to offer its residents seamless interactions.
Keeping residents informed is ultimately our number one mission in life. We are the public information office, so they should be able to know what’s going on, and us telling that story increases trust and transparency.
Joel Gillie
Public Affairs Director for Wayne County, North Carolina
With a CivicPlus Municipal Website, residents can easily find everything they need and engage with Wayne County’s services. They can pay their taxes, access news and announcements, interact with an events calendar, learn about the different departments, and much more.
“Our website, of course, is a big communications channel that we use,” said Gillie, “We have found that the vast majority are happy with our website and feel that they get the information that they need. So absolutely the website is like number one up there to driving our main goals.”
Another big driver for trust and transparency for the County is the CivicPlus Agenda and Meeting Management Solution.
For us, too, when we talk about trust and transparency, we include Agenda and Meeting Management. Beforehand, we were doing our minutes and our agendas just in a PDF and uploading them. Now, you can go and deep-dive into those agendas more by searching. Everything is searchable by keyword. And so, I think for people who want to dive that deep, it now makes it easier for them.
Joel Gillie
Public Affairs Director for Wayne County, North Carolina
In addition to making life easier for the resident, the Agenda and Meeting Management solution has helped drive internal efficiencies,
“Our Clerk talked about how it makes not only her life a lot easier but also internally all our lives a lot easier. Because it used to be that we had to email her our items for the agenda and attachments and stuff like that, and then she had to put it all together. We had to worry about when the due dates were on stuff, which meant a ton of email follow-ups. Now, it’s just all online. Our managers log in. They can see when the due dates are and the fact that agendas are open in advance for them to put stuff on. So, it’s helped our managers a whole lot; they have adapted it very well to it, and it’s keeping them ahead of the curve versus behind the curve a lot of times. It’s made life a lot easier.”
In addition to utilizing a CivicPlus website and its Agenda and Meeting Management solution, Wayne County is using CivicPlus’ Municode Codification services, which furthers its transparency goals by publishing ordinances online in an easy-to-use platform for all to access. Having these solutions integrated, such as within the main website’s search results, is one example of how the solutions have made life easier.
What is so nice for us is that everything integrates together a little bit better when the solutions are with that same company. You can literally go to our main search box, and in one click you can see where we have web content and then also meeting minutes and ordinances. We’ve gotten very positive feedback on that. Being able to integrate everything together like that just works so much better.
Joel Gillie
Public Affairs Director for Wayne County, North Carolina
A Valued Partnership with CivicPlus
Perhaps one of the biggest advantages to choosing CivicPlus for consulting services was the team Wayne County worked with,
Spencer would be calling, saying, ‘We need to keep pushing. We need some more results. What can we do?’ He’d say, ‘We’ll hop in and help where we can.’ And so, it really is a team approach, which I think is big. I literally felt like I was the only client in the world that they were dealing with, and I think that’s super important.
Joel Gillie
Public Affairs Director for Wayne County, North Carolina
It wasn’t just Spencer and his team, but the customer-service-oriented mission that CivicPlus has across all solutions is apparent to Gillie.
“With CivicPlus, I’ve always felt like no matter what we’ve done, we have a good relationship with account reps,” he said. “With any of our changes, like when we did our website redesign, any of those kinds of things, you feel like you connected well with that team. And I think that’s huge. Right? Customer service is there. If we had a problem, support has been amazing. It’s been quick. When neighboring cities ask if CivicPlus has a dedicated support person? It seems like not a lot of other providers do. Whenever I do a live chat, I get an answer like that. And I don’t even need a dedicated support person when I’m getting an answer that fast. The support has always been there, which makes me a lot more comfortable in dealing with more CivicPlus products.”
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