For civic-minded leaders, creating great digital services starts with a simple question:
How are we doing — and how do we know?
When people visit a city website or interact with a local agency, they’re often doing something that matters. Paying a parking fine. Reporting a pothole. Looking for housing assistance. But too often, governments only hear from residents when something has gone wrong — and even then, the feedback is piecemeal, anecdotal, or arrives too late to fix the problem.
Local leaders know that understanding community needs is crucial. But the way we’ve historically collected that insight — annual surveys, one-off consultations, public meetings — hasn’t kept up with the pace of digital expectations. This is the reality for many local governments: Community needs are evolving, but the feedback loops haven’t kept up.
That’s where GXI Foundations comes in.
GXI Foundations, part of the Granicus Government Experience Insights (GXI) suite, enables local governments to gather real-time, contextual feedback from residents — not once a year, but every day, across every digital touchpoint.
Rather than relying on a few loud voices, it brings a broader set of experiences into view. What do residents in a lower-income zip code think about trash collection? Are users with limited English proficiency struggling to access services? Why are Gen Z residents less likely to complete an online application?
By capturing feedback in the moment someone interacts with a service, GXI Foundations helps reveal where services are working, where they’re falling short, and how that differs across key audience segments.
This richer view leads to better decisions grounded in what people actually experience, not what we assume.
One of the most powerful features of GXI Foundations is benchmarking.
Peer-to-peer benchmarking allows governments to compare performance across metrics like service satisfaction, trust, and usability — not in isolation, but in relation to similar communities. That perspective is critical. Through ongoing peer-to-peer benchmarking, agencies can pinpoint which service areas are thriving, and which are falling behind.
Let’s say your city scores a 68% satisfaction rate with emergency services. Is that good? Could it be better? GXI Foundations helps answer that by comparing your results to similar jurisdictions — revealing both areas of opportunity and places where you’re already excelling.
This helps local leaders:
A key reason traditional feedback methods fall short is the effort required: designing surveys, collecting responses, analyzing results. It’s slow, expensive, and often yields data that’s out of date before it’s actionable.
With GXI Foundations, the process is continuous and automated. It collects sentiment data passively, at scale, while still adhering to rigorous research methodologies. That means more reliable insights, faster — without ballooning staff time or budgets.
And these insights don’t just live in a spreadsheet. They’re delivered through an interactive dashboard that helps departments understand trends over time, compare with peers, and explore differences across audience segments — all in one place.
This shift is more urgent than ever. In the Granicus 2024 Civic Engagement Trends Report:
That’s a huge missed opportunity — especially when digital expectations are only growing.
When governments don’t listen consistently, they risk falling out of step with the people they serve. Trust erodes. Problems linger. Resources get misallocated.
But when insights are always on and actionable, governments can respond faster, adapt services in real time, and build stronger relationships with their communities.
GXI Foundations isn’t just a tool; it’s a new approach to understanding public experience. One that helps civic leaders move from anecdotal feedback to statistically significant insight. From static surveys to dynamic measurement. From reactive fixes to proactive change.
Because in the end, better data isn’t about the dashboard. It’s about delivering services that feel intuitive, responsive, and inclusive — for everyone.
