Elbert County, CO Uses CivicClerk^® as Part of Collaborative Meeting Agenda Process

With a growing population of over 25,000 residents, Elbert County is located just to the southeast of the Denver metro area in Colorado. Thanks to its easy commute to Denver and its bustling metropolitan area, the County of Elbert is enjoying rapid growth as well as growing expectations from its expanding citizen population. When Dallas Schroeder, the County’s Clerk, realized that the County’s previous agenda and minutes management workflows were generating too much manual work to build, distribute, and publish documents and packets, he helped to lead the transition to the CivicClerk agenda and meeting management solution.

Before CivicClerk

The process to create agendas for meetings in Elbert County is extremely collaborative, which made the need for a transparent, and automated digital solution vital for time management success.

“Before CivicClerk we used an agenda template that we had created previously,” said Schroeder. “People could either contact a commissioner or the County Manager, or me if they wanted something added to the agenda. Then we would all meet together to go through each item on the agenda and discuss supporting documentation, so the process was a bit disjointed. From there we would create separate templates for the agenda and meeting minutes and document items such as recorded votes and motions. It was all done in a Word document. The process to post the agenda and minutes online was manual too.”

Before every meeting, the entire agenda preparation process took Schroeder 60 to 90 minutes. Also, according to Schroeder, the most time-consuming aspect of the agenda creation and preparation process involved creating board packets for commissioners and the public.

“Collecting documents from the various departments to put into our packets and post to the website for citizens to access was a time-consuming and challenging process,” he said.

The Switch to an Automated Solution

Schroeder says that he conducted significant research before deciding on CivicClerk.

Elbert Co, CO Uses CivicClerk as Part of Meeting Agenda Process

After CivicClerk

Today, Schroeder reports that some key processes have improved since the implementation of CivicClerk.

“With CivicClerk, now we can install the kinds of hard deadlines for agenda items and supporting documents that we weren’t enforcing before,” said Schroeder. “We still have our agenda collaboration meetings, but now when we sit down with our County Manager and representatives from the BOCC we’re reviewing a more developed agenda, and we can see if content contributors have uploaded supporting documents. I love that we can email follow-up tasks directly to content contributors to request documents. If they don’t meet our deadlines, then they know that their item will be bumped to the next meeting.”

Schroeder further states that CivicClerk has made communication between Elbert County’s departments easier.

“Our departments are located across five different buildings around the County. For example, I can’t just walk down the hall to talk to our IT team, so being able to use a single agenda management tool for collaboration is helpful.”

Schroeder also appreciates the support of the CivicPlus^® Technical Support team.

“I really like the live chat feature. When we’re working on something and have a question we can jump onto the chat and get a quick response. I know we’re in different time zones, but even when it’s 4:45 p.m. here in Colorado, I still get a quick response.”