1,000+ New Subscribers in Months: How the Borough of Red Bank, NJ Reconnected with Residents on CivicPlus

Lea la versión en español del estudio de caso.

A Small Town With a Big Communication Gap

The Borough of Red Bank, New Jersey, is only about two square miles, but it does not act small. The Borough is a transportation hub along the Jersey Shore, drawing commuters, visitors, and a resident population that is diverse in age, language, and background. About a third of residents speak Spanish, and the town regularly hosts large public events, including watch parties tied to the 2026 World Cup at nearby MetLife Stadium. Prior to this initiative, a meaningful share of Red Bank’s Spanish-speaking residents weren’t regularly hearing from their government at all, a trust and access problem that no website redesign could solve on its own.

Adriana Medina Gomez joined the Borough as its first Community Engagement Coordinator and has since become Director of Recreation and Human Services, a department that also oversees community engagement and communications. When she started, she found a website that had not been meaningfully updated in years and a set of communication tools that were only partly used.

A couple of module audits turned up licensed features the Borough was already paying for but had never turned on, including CivicPlus Mass Notification. The real problem was not a lack of technology. It was that the Borough of Red Bank was not yet using the CivicPlus tools already available to its full potential.

Rebuilding the Website Around Residents, Not Just Departments

Medina Gomez led a full revamp of the Borough’s CivicPlus Municipal Websites site, working closely with the CivicPlus team to identify missing links, add the Agenda and Meeting Management solution, and reorganize content so every department could manage its own pages while keeping a consistent look across the site. 

The redesign leaned heavily on features residents actually needed. Built-in translation stood out immediately. Red Bank is home to a culturally and linguistically diverse community, including a significant Spanish-speaking population, making multilingual access an essential component of effective public communication.

Staff also welcomed practical, day-to-day improvements. Drag-and-drop content management meant departments no longer had to rely on one person to make updates, and a consistent template kept the site looking unified even with dozens of contributors. 

The results showed up quickly in the numbers residents care about. Within months of the relaunch, the Borough had to add subscriber capacity twice, first by 500 and then by another 500, to keep up with resident sign-ups for alerts and updates. A new community events distribution list grew by several hundred subscribers in the same stretch, and the Borough’s social media following climbed alongside it. 

Reaching More Residents, in More Languages, When It Matters

Red Bank approached its digital transformation as more than a website redesign. The Borough prioritized a resident-centered communications strategy focused on making government information easier to find, easier to understand, and more accessible to the communities it serves.

With the website rebuilt, Medina Gomez turned her attention to a tool the Borough already owned but had barely used: CivicPlus Mass Notification. Before the relaunch, emergency and routine updates were scattered across whatever platform was easiest at the time, which made it hard to guarantee that every resident received the same information at the same time. 

Today, Mass Notification is one of the Borough’s primary communication solutions for reaching residents by text, phone call, and email, whether the message is a water service interruption, a snowstorm update, or a recreation program announcement. The feature that surprised people most was automatic translation. During a recent snowstorm, members of the governing body received the same alert in different languages without anyone manually translating a word. 

That combination of speed and multilingual reach has made Mass Notification a tool residents and commuters both rely on, especially for the road closures and public notices that affect anyone passing through the Borough’s transportation corridors, not just the people who live there. 

Making Forms and Documents Accessible Without Adding Staff Work

Accessibility has become central to how the Borough of Red Bank approaches every piece of content it publishes. For a multilingual, multicultural community, Medina Gomez sees accessibility as more than compliance. It is what allows residents to actually participate in local government. 

The Borough uses AudioEye, part of the CivicPlus Web Accessibility suite, for ongoing website remediation, and DocAccess, also part of the Web Accessibility suite, to make PDFs accessible without manual rework. The impact showed up in an unexpected way. Shortly after DocAccess went live, the Borough clerk began fielding paper applications that staff did not recognize. Residents were filling out an accessible, adjustable version of a form they had never been able to use before and using it immediately. 

DocAccess also translates documents automatically, which lifted a task that previously fell to staff to translate PDFs by hand. Staff still review translations for accuracy and regional language differences, but the starting point is no longer a blank page. 

One Integrated Platform, Fewer Silos

Looking back at the vendors she considered during the website revamp, Medina Gomez points to something less visible than any single feature: having CivicPlus Municipal Websites, Mass Notification, and Web Accessibility under one platform reduced the complexity of running a small, multi-division department. 

For a department of about a dozen people covering parks and recreation, the senior center, and community engagement, that reduced complexity has translated directly into more residents reached, more forms residents can complete on their own, and more trust in the Borough’s ability to communicate clearly with everyone it serves. 

Ready to Bring Your Community Closer Together?

See how the CivicPlus Municipal Websites, Mass Notification, and Web Accessibility solutions work together to help local governments expand communication reach, support multilingual access, and deliver a more connected experience for residents and staff.