Granicus Recognizes 13 Government Organizations for Excellence in Civic Engagement

Granicus Recognizes 13 Government Organizations for Excellence in Civic Engagement

Granicus’ annual Digital Government Awards honor transformational achievements improving civic engagement, service delivery, and government efficiency and effectiveness

Denver, CO— Granicus, the first and only civic engagement platform provider for the public sector, today announced the winners of its 12th annual Digital Government Awards. In the face of unprecedented adversity, this year’s winners have risen to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, embracing modern technologies that drive awareness of community programs, improve resident experiences, transform outdated processes, and inspire civic action.

Granicus recognized winners across 11 award categories, including the COVID Response Award, Tech Trailblazer Award, Digital Efficiency Award, Website of the Year and Innovator of the Year. Winners were selected by an internal Granicus advisory board and were evaluated based on a number of criteria including: audience growth and engagement, government efficiency and effectiveness, program performance, customer satisfaction, and overall customer experience.

The full list of Digital Government Award winners is below:

Tech Trailblazer Award: Hollywood, FL — As a result of its Virtual Inspection Program, Hollywood completed a greater number of inspections in less time, moving from 5,226 inspections in 2019 to more than 6,800 in December 2020. This award is presented in honorable memory of Dean Decker, Chief Building Official, Hollywood, FL.

Innovator of the Year: Kevin Goodwin, Chief Technology Officer, San Antonio, TX — The strategic use of low-code technology empowered Goodwin’s team to create a user-centric, COVID response and recovery portal that increased the city’s website accessibility score from the mid-60s to 94 and could be easily updated with minimal training for employees.

Website of the Year: Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VDEQ) — In partnership with the Granicus Experience Group (GXG), VDEQ conducted dozens of internal and external interviews to inform information architecture, brand tone and voice workshops to inform the way the organization speaks.  That work informed a 4-part content strategy that enables residents and businesses of the Commonwealth to access accurate and up-to-date information. The new website features intuitive navigation and user-focused design to help constituents find the information they need quickly and easily.

Website of the Year: City of Raleigh, NC & Aten Design Group — The City of Raleigh redesigned raleighnc.gov just in time to deliver crucial and timely information throughout the pandemic. 75% of residents ranked the website as their top source for local information.

Short-Term Rental Compliance Award: City of Nashville & Davidson County — Nashville achieved exceptionally high (90%+) tax compliance rates due to a strong compliance letter and owner communications managed through the Granicus Host Compliance software. Within its first year of using  Host Compliance, Nashville’s finance department achieved 10x ROI and brought in an additional $2.8 million from its 5,700 local short-term rental properties.

Digital Efficiency Award: Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE)— SVCE streamlined mandatory customer communications using Granicus govDelivery software to save at least $50,000 annually in traditional mailing costs, increase efficacy, and reduce environmental impact. Since August 2020, SVCE has sent over 940,000 emails with an open rate of 33.7%.

Digital Efficiency Award: City of Sugar Land — By developing applications in-house and using PowerBI to create a replacement for the city’s previous manual census tracking, Sugar Land achieved an 81.6% census response rate while saving more than 1,000 hours of staff time via automation. For cities with populations over 100,000, the City of Sugar Land ranked number one in Texas and eighth nationally.

Digital Government Experience Award: State of Hawaii Department of Transportation — With a no-cost, monthly email newsletter called Connecting the DOTs, the agency was able to share internal success stories that fostered connectivity and improved team spirit and morale, with high engagement, including 26% open rates since launch.

COVID Response Award: Oakland County, MI— Oakland County responded to COVID-19 with a host of digital services and tools. In addition to organizing virtual press conferences and board meetings, it developed a dedicated COVID-19 website, redesigned its workforce development website to connect job seekers to employers, and created a digital vaccine hub with a ‘save your spot’ online form that has generated over 2 million page views since its launch.

Superior Civic Engagement Award: Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) — ADEQ developed a new section on the website called My Community solely dedicated to information about community environmental issues and actions from the ADEQ. This easy-to-use online tool includes a dashboard where residents can filter by county to view environmental data.

Communications Resilience Award: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) — When the pandemic hit, demand for print periodicals dropped dramatically, just as LANL was finalizing its Summer 2020 magazine issue. With the launch of a new podcast National Security Science, LANL created an engaging medium that highlights features from the National Security Science magazine. Increasing in popularity, the podcast has led to thousands of online magazine downloads.

Most Impressive Subscriber Growth: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — The launch of the My HealtheVet newsletter led to exceptional constituent engagement amid the pandemic. Led by Chip Harman, the newsletter team utilized Granicus govDelivery to send and receive 6.9 million secure messages.

Digital Communications Innovator of the Year: Veterans Health Administration (VHA) — The VHA utilized Granicus govDelivery software to disseminate COVID-19 information, charts, and maps of cases throughout 2020. The one-page briefs provided cases by county, disparities alerts, and recommended actions, and they allowed VA medical facilities to monitor infection rates by race/ethnicity in specific regions and periods of time.

For more information about each of this year’s awards recipients, visit the full list of winners here. To learn more about how Granicus can help your agency embrace technology to transform the resident experience, visit https://granicus.com/.

About Granicus

Granicus connects governments with the people they serve by providing the first and only civic engagement platform for the public sector. Over 5,500 federal, state and local government agencies and more than 250 million citizen subscribers power an unmatched Subscriber Network that turns government missions into quantifiable results. With comprehensive cloud-based solutions for communications, government website design, meeting and agenda management software, records management, and digital services, Granicus empowers stronger relationships between government and residents across the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. By simplifying interactions with residents, while disseminating critical information, Granicus brings governments closer to the people they serve—driving meaningful change for communities around the globe.

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