How the Village of Niles, IL, Modernized its Records Request Process with NextRequest from CivicPlus®

The Village of Niles, Illinois, is a small village northwest of Chicago. The Village’s roots go back to the 1700s when the Potawatomi Indians first settled there. The Village is home today to around 30,000 residents and boasts an enormous retail base — all compacted in just 5.8 square miles of land.

As the Village grew, its leaders needed a streamlined way to manage FOIA requests. They implemented NextRequest, now part of the CivicPlus Civic Experience Platform, in 2017.

Ditching Spreadsheets for Automated Records Requests

On average, the Village processes approximately 550 records requests per year. In the past, to handle records requests, Village staff had resorted to a pen-and-paper organization system, which they eventually upgraded to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Even with the Excel spreadsheet, staff found fulfillment time-consuming and difficult to streamline across their departments and between their many FOIA officers.

Easier Record Request Management

When the Village of Niles’ leaders recognized they needed to modernize their system, they embarked on a six-month search before deciding to implement the NextRequest solution. Since implementing our technology, they have experienced easier records request fulfillment processes. Kathy Thake, who oversees all FOIA processes in the Village, loves the reports function because it makes tracking performance across the organization easy. She also thinks it is making her officers’ lives much easier, saying, “Before we had the NextRequest redaction tool, we used a manual process to redact records. The tool here makes it easy to redact along with an audit trail.”