Live Video Streaming and Your Local Government

This month we are featuring a blog post by Alex Hilleary, Market Trailblazer and local government expert with our new streaming video partner, Boxcast. He offers his insights on how our all new video streaming service can help open your government to everyone.

This is Why Your City Council Meeting Attendance is Low

Whether you're a council member, public information officer, or engaged citizen, you may have noticed a decline in the number of seats filled at your weekly public meetings.

Your local government isn’t alone in this struggle – low attendance is a regular concern of municipalities across the country.

As a part of my job, I’ve attended council meetings in various cities and have witnessed the problem firsthand. I’ve even shown up only to realize that I was the only non-government employee in attendance.

However, I’ve also had the opportunity to talk to residents. Time and time again, they’ve made it clear that they care about what’s going on in the community, but just can’t make it to council meetings in person.

This is what they’ve had to say about why that is....

"I'm already overcommitted."
There was a time when most people worked 9 to 5 jobs, came home, and filled their evenings with community and social events. Weekly schedules included regular events and activities. The American city council meeting was built to serve people with this lifestyle.

However, the 9 to 5 lifestyle is no longer the norm. People work all hours of the day. They travel more. They have more outside-of-work activities. With so many things pulling them in different directions, people are prevented from dedicating an evening to their city hall to hear about community happenings.

Streaming has never been so easy.

“I can’t be there in person.”
Even for the people willing to carve out time to attend meetings, there are obstacles that prevent them from being there.

Consider your resident-base. Are transportation concerns ever an influencing factor? How often do people get sick? Do people ever take vacations?

The fact of the matter is that, no matter how dedicated someone might be to community affairs, there are still things that keep them from attending your meetings in person.

By demanding your residents’ physical presence, you keep them from fully participating every time they want to. When you confine your public meetings to one physical space at one moment of time, you fail to reach, engage, and achieve transparency with your full community.

“Council meetings are too long.”

Suppose that your residents are able to find an hour or so in their busy schedules each week to attend a public meeting. Unfortunately, many municipalities have meetings that can regularly run anywhere from two to five hours.

The reality is that your residents don’t have time for that. If they care about an issue that won’t be brought up until hour three, what’s the point in even going? And it’s always uncomfortable to walk out of a meeting while it’s still going on.

How Can You Address the Issue?

Your residents have made it clear that they care about the issues that affect them. They want to be involved, but often feel excluded because they can’t drop their other commitments in order to attend council meetings.

To address this issue head-on, many municipalities around the country are starting to live stream their meetings. Doing so lets residents tune in live from wherever are. And if they’re busy at the time of the event, BoxCast will automatically record every broadcast and make it available online immediately after your event is over.

Over and over again, live streaming has proven itself to be a powerful tool to drive community awareness and civic engagement.

Ready to improve council meeting attendance? Start streaming!

GovOffice and Capturepoint Announce Strategic Partnership

Market leaders set to deliver integrated website and parks & recreation software solution for local governments

MINNEAPOLIS, MN and RIDGEWOOD, NJ – September 5, 2017 — GovOffice and Capturepoint, creator of CommunityPass software, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver an integrated website and comprehensive parks and recreation management software solution to parks and recreation departments across the U.S. The initiative joins two leading providers of local government software solutions in an effort to deliver state-of-the-art technologies at lower cost to local governments.  Together, the companies serve nearly 1600 local governments and departments in 44 states across the U.S.

“This initiative advances our goal of providing a broader suite of state-of-the-art web technologies to meet the needs of local governments at an affordable cost.” said GovOffice CEO Eric Johnson. “By collaborating with CommunityPass, we can deliver more comprehensive solutions at lower cost at a time when our local government clients are being asked to do more with less.  This partnership helps us help them.”

“We believe this partnership will leverage our complete parks and recreation software for more local governments across the country,” said Joe Oriente, Founder and Managing Director of Capturepoint. “In addition, it offers our clients a leading website solution to enhance their online presence.”

Developers, tech support and web content experts in both companies will cooperate to serve a growing local government market with these innovative solutions and world-class support services.

About GovOffice

GovOffice is a leading national provider of websites and online services for local governments. With its cloud-based, mobile-friendly platform, GovOffice offers proven, easy-to-use web technology tools to enable a more efficient and responsive government. Based in Minneapolis, MN, GovOffice was launched in 2001 as the centerpiece of a unique public-private partnership to bring website technologies to cities across America. GovOffice serves over 1400 local governments in 44 states.

About Capturepoint
Capturepoint’s CommunityPass is one of America's most well respected and complete online recreation management solutions. CommunityPass, originally released in 2003, provides highly configurable cloud-based registration, membership and facilities software. Our community-based approach allows residents to participate in an unlimited number of organizations via a single login, while each organization benefits from autonomous, streamlined operations and payment collection. Headquartered in Ridgewood, NJ, the company’s clients include park and recreation departments and districts, public and private schools, sports organizations, and more. 

Contact us today to learn more!

Easy Content Strategies for Your Local Government Website

Most local government websites require several website administrators to maintain content on specific sections. This makes sense as municipal websites are often deep with rich content which can become too much for one person to handle. Also, it is common for some departments to have their own unique requirements and a need to control their own identity. But with so many cooks in the kitchen, ensuring consistent and quality content throughout your website can be a challenge. That is why it is important to establish some ground rules, or what is known as a content strategy, for all web administrators to follow.

Content strategy encompasses all of the content that can be added to your website, from basic text to images to videos and more, and how that content is presented. With that in mind, below are some basic content principles and best practices to help guide your own efforts to establish “rules and standards” for your web administrators. You’ll notice a common theme, simplicity. So I’ll do my best to practice what I preach, and try to keep this simple.

A content strategy can keep your website from falling apart.

Review your content

First things first. Proofread, edit, update, and remove outdated information. This is perhaps the single most important rule for any content strategy. It will establish a baseline for where your content is and where it needs to be. If you adopt only one rule, let this be it.

Write for the web

The basic tenant of this rule is simplicity and here are the primary components:

• Create short, simple, relevant headings/section titles.
• Break up long blocks of text with paragraphs and bulleted lists to highlight the main points. This treatments is called “chunking”. It’s easier on your site visitor’s eyes and much easier to read. Using page or CMS Items (link) is an excellent tool for this. A lot of text is too much on the web.
• Use plain language for longer, more technical information. This is actually a good practice for any text on any section.
• Never underline text unless it is a link. It causes confusion for site visitors. Find other ways to highlight text such as bolding or italicizing.

Let the Content Management System (CMS) do the work

Every design has its own built-in combination of font types, styles, sizes and overall colors scheme. Since content editors function much like MS Word, it’s tempting to play around with formatting. But this is where trouble can arise as each administrator may apply different formatting styles to different areas. The easiest way to keep your content consistent is to let the CMS do the work.

• Use the default fonts and associated styles built into the design. If you decide to change any of these elements, be sure to decide as a group so everyone is doing the same thing.
• Add content directly into the CMS content editor. Do not create an external Word doc and then copy/paste.
• Only use ALL CAPS for a short title or if that style is built into the design headings.

Follow accessibility (ADA) standards

ADA guidelines are kind of a “twofer”. If you apply them to your content, you get a website that is both consistent and more accessible to all visitors. How can you lose?

Set a content review & update schedule

Admittedly this one can be a big challenge to establish staff-wide, but if it is, your content strategy just became that much easier to implement. Even if you just convene the web administrators once a year for a site review, that will pay big dividends.

Ensure new web administrators are trained

This isn’t a true content strategy principle per se but it definitely falls under the large umbrella of maintaining a professional local government website. Remember to have new web administrators trained on the CMS and the ways of your in-house web guidelines. Consistent content is the key to a great site. One errant admin and the whole thing can fall apart!

GovOffice offers a wide variety of content services to help keep your municipal website in tip-top shape. Contact us today to discuss your needs!

How to Gather High Quality Images for Your New Website

GovOffice Design Series, Part 1

In a recent GovOffice eNews article, we touched on the importance of incorporating high quality images into your local government website design. However, according to our lead designer, acquiring such images is a common challenge for clients. They take on the task entirely themselves and sometimes resort to generic photographs gleaned from the Internet, old snapshots from the area, or even clip art.

Our designs offer many distinctive ways to showcase your community’s brand, so populating these spaces with exceptional photos is crucial to ensure your new design really shines. This article provides a few ideas on how you can gather high quality images for your new website. Your collection of stunning images is closer than you think!

Choosing the right subject

Choosing the right subjects for your images is a critical first step before you start the gathering. Your photos should be community focused and promote your local quality of life. Think about what makes your city unique: historical landmarks, distinctive landscapes, a bustling main street, an elegant capitol building, cozy neighborhoods, community events, local businesses, etc. What is your city’s slogan? Perhaps a theme or feel can be built around that. The answers are usually right in front

of you.

Prosser, WA highlighted their annual balloon regatta.

Tips for the Do-It-Yourselfer

If you choose to go it alone and take your own photos, or have your in-house staff take care of this task, here are a couple nuts-n-bolts articles on how to compose and take effective photos. The articles are succinct yet thorough.

8 tips for taking great photos

Ten Tips for Making Interesting Images

Hire a professional
Many of our clients have had great success hiring a professional photographer to get the job done. Even the smallest communities find exceptional local pros that are eager to do the work. And based on our anecdotal evidence, they always deliver!

Canyon Lake, CA hired local pros to capture the essence of their city.

Conduct a community photo contest
If you don’t have or want to spend the money hiring a pro, asking community members to submit images is a great and fun way to gather images for your new website design. You’d be surprised how many budding photographers live in your area. They are usually very eager to show off their work and like the pros, the results are often quite stunning. The bonus here is community members may find that little extra inspiration as they really know the area and know what is important to your city’s identity. Make a city-wide announcement on our website, they will respond!

Community members contributed gorgeous photos for the new
Ashland County, WI website.

Use stock images that fit your community brand
There are many online catalogs of diverse stock images waiting for you. The photos included in these collections hit all of the marks described above. You could a gather many to shape your entire design or perhaps just a few to supplement what you already have. The key is finding the right images that fit your community brand. The other advantage here is the potential time savings. Look through the selections, make your choices, and they are design-ready. Contact us today to learn more about our stock image packages.

As you can see, finding and gathering high quality images for your local government website design is not too hard. It just takes a little planning and using the right resource. Before you know it, your new design is on its way!

Where's Your Website?

Simple SEO Tweaks to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine's "organic", or unpaid, search results. In general, the earlier and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.

The process of completely "optimizing" your website to appear (and perform well) in search engine results is quite complicated, but there are some easy ways to make improvements using the GovOffice CMS.

Here are some simple steps you can take to get started, and well on your way to improving, the search engine ranking of your GovOffice website. You’ve work hard to build and maintain your awesome municipal website. Make sure this valuable resource is available for everyone!

Essential Steps

1. Add a Title, Description, and Keywords to the backend of your website. We have seen many instances where a GovOffice website went from non-existent to the top of the heap in search engine rankings by making these changes alone.


2. Create Friendly URLs for sections. These are shorter Web addresses that are easy for search engines to understand, e.g. GovOffice.com/design.


3. Add Alt text and title text, to images and icons. This step is often overlooked as it is for more “advanced” users but fear not, this image text how-to guide will walk you through the process. Adding this text gives a label (a text identity) to graphic images which search engines love. Search engines don’t recognize images on their own. It also improves site usability and conforms to ADA Web standards.


4. Keep your site content current, dynamic and relevant. Create links to local organizations, businesses, etc. in your community or surrounding area. Like Friendly URLs, your links should be descriptive. Descriptive links are also easily understood by search engines and will help visitors find specific content they are looking for more quickly.

Extra Steps

1. Purchase a custom URL for your local government website, for the same reasons Friendly URLs are beneficial. They are descriptive and help identify your site. 


2. Done with applying the SEO fundamentals above and ready for the next level? Go nuts with MOZ's very concise, yet thorough Beginner's Guide to SEO.


3. After you have completed the implementing the first steps above, keep up with what what pages are being visited and what pages aren't. Our get started with Google Analytics guide will help you configure this "behind the scenes" monitoring of your municipal website activity. It's a great way to see your work in action!

So where is your website? It’s somewhere out there, but making these few simple SEO tweaks can bring it much closer to your intended site visitors.

Can you help these people find your city's website?

Need some additional SEO guidance? Contact us today, we can help!

New Website Exceeds the Needs of a Growing Community

The Village of Bolingbrook, Illinois has enjoyed substantial growth in recent years and as a result, they had outgrown their municipal website.

Coming to GovOffice as a new client, it was very important to them to retain their 100% transparency rating. Therefore, they hired our content professionals to ensure that all of their existing content was transferred and structured according to established Web design and usability standards and immediately “findable” for their citizens. We also added custom icons and an enhanced film strip to link directly to high priority information for even greater efficiency.

And of course, the site content is wrapped up in a high-end, engaging design that showcases the now and the future of this vibrant community. With unlimited pages, an updated CMS, and a streamlined framework, their new website is ready to grow right along with them.

When asked for feedback on their GovOffice experience, the Bolingbrook staff jumped at the opportunity to express their satisfaction.

An Easy Process

"The one thing that was missing was a website to represent what Bolingbrook has become. We looked at many companies to help with the website design but only one actually made sense for us. GovOffice made the entire process smooth and quick.  Not only did we get a top notch website that the residents could be proud of, but we got a website that was user friendly and visually appealing. Mike, Janelle and Ben held my hand the entire time and made me feel confident that we were getting a top notch product!" - James Farrell, IT Director

More Efficient Government

"Personally it is such a nice thing to be able to direct people right to the visible pay online button. In the past, I always had to tell people to scroll all the way to the bottom, look for the kids getting off the waterslide, and there to the right, in small print was the pay online link. Same applies to the FOIA requests. Having the garbage pickup information right there on the buttons is great too!" - Diane Kloepfer, Records Clerk

Better User Experience

"What a great experience working with your organization! Simplicity, functionality and ease of use and affordability! A complete package." - Steve Miller, PW

The Village of Bolingbrook (pop. 76,000) is a southwest suburb of Chicago spanning Will and DuPage counties. It is known as one of the Best 50 Towns to Live in the Country according to Money Magazine with a growing community of new homes, corporate companies, parks, and a healthy school district.

Had a great GovOffice experience? Tell us your story!

5 Ways to Improve Your Website User Experience

Help your citizens find what they are looking for

"I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls…
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for" – U2

Classic song or earworm? I guess that depends on whether it is blasting during spinning class or running through the head of a frustrated visitor as they browse your municipal website. According to a recent Accenture survey, 41% of respondents cited "poorly organized information that doesn't provide clear answers to my questions" as a top obstacle when using local government websites. Sure, your site is beautiful, visually engaging, and showcases your community brand, but if site visitors can’t get their problem solved (I need to register my dog!), get a question answered (How do I submit a service request?), or complete a common task (I need to pay my utility bill!), the site is failing one of its primary purposes.

Therefore, it is vital that the information on your site is easily "findable" and that there is a clear road map to the critical content each site visitor needs. This road map is called information architecture which Mozilla Development Network defines as, “…the practice of organizing the information, content and functionality of a website so that it presents the best user experience it can, with information and services being easily usable and findable.” And it all begins with intuitive, streamlined navigation menus and well organized homepage content.

Ashland County's website is very user friendly.

Maybe you have had your site a long time and your navigation is a bit unruly (aka, too long?) and/or your homepage content is a bit cluttered. Or maybe you have received complaints from citizens. No matter the situation, now is a good a time to evaluate these critical pieces of your website information architecture. Fortunately, most immediate issues can be corrected by you. Read the following 5 steps, use what you need, and you will be on your way to building (or rebuilding!) a user friendly website to that will leave your citizens singing a happy song.

Limit your primary (top level) navigation menu items to 10 vertical and 7 horizontal
This is a great place to start. By imposing such limits, it forces you to prioritize what items are essential and immediately focuses the info for website visitors. The common standard is to organize your primary navigation items by department or topic. Follow this tutorial on how to move sections.

Check the depth of your navigation menu structure

Once you have your top level navigation established, make sure your subsections, aka interior pages, are "nested" no more than three levels deep. In come cases, that might even be pushing things. If you find this occurring on your site, that is the time to evaluate the content on each page. Not every piece of content warrants a new subsection. Often times you can consolidate many pages using Items, into one single page of related information. Follow this tutorial on how to Add Items.

Add short descriptive navigation labels

Remember, we are talking about your site visitors being able to find the information they need without having to think too much. Short, descriptive labels should be able point visitors in the right direction, clearly indicating what they will find once a navigation button is clicked. "Resources" is vague, "Event Calendar" is pretty clear.

Don't guess what your site visitors need, ask them

Create, post and promote a survey to find out what is working and what isn't on your website. Citizens, the people actually using your city website, can provide the most direct and invaluable insights. In fact, negative responses can be in the most valuable! It is easy to generate a simple survey using our Quick Forms module.

Use Google Analytics to gain insight on user traffic

Although slightly more technical, Google Analytics - a free service - tracks visitors to your site, and summarizes those visits into a wide variety of reports. Which pages are most popular? How are users locating specific content? What time of day is your site most visited? These details, and many more, can help you prioritize your top level navigation items and homepage content. Follow this tutorial on how to incorporate Google Analytics on your municipal website.

Need additional help? Chat with our team today!

A Message from Our CEO

GovOffice 4.0 – the Next Generation is coming!

GovOffice was launched in 2001 as the centerpiece of a unique public-private partnership to bring website technologies to cities across America. Founding partners included the International City-County Management Association and League of Minnesota Cities and Avenet, which developed the GovOffice technology. Eventually, an additional 15 state municipal leagues joined our partnership!

In those 16 years, we’ve seen local government websites evolve from being a novelty to a necessity. We’ve served over 1500 local governments in 44 states and stayed true to our mission of providing state-of-the-art web technologies that meets the needs of local government at an affordable cost. Now, we’re excited to announce that we’ve initiated a major development initiative to create the next generation of our technology. The new GovOffice 4.0 will meet the needs of our local government clients and your constituents well into the future.

This major upgrade will be implemented in multiple phases, which will help users absorb and adopt to changes over time. User interface upgrades will maintain a priority on ease of use. Current sites will be seamlessly upgraded to the new system with no or minimal disruption.

Phase 1 results:

• a faster, more responsive Admin system
• even faster client sites (we believe our current sites already load faster than our competitors!)
• a new Search system
• refresh of the Admin look & feel aimed at enhancing ease of use
• a state of the art code which can be extended rapidly to add new features in subsequent phases

Additional incremental upgrades will rollout new content types to meet the unique needs of local government.

Subsequent phases:

• new file (photo) upload software
• eNotification/eAlert system
• New, more robust bulk-mail/messaging system
• Upgraded Superforms & ePayment
• Document management/repository
• Customized content types, like Council Packets/Agendas

The initial version of GovOffice was informed by a “beta group” including 30 cities across the country. We continue to value and seek your input and ideas on how to make GovOffice even better. Please share your thoughts on how we can better meet your needs on our feedback form. We’ll provide further updates along the way.

Thanks for being our client, and partners in preparing for the next generation!