SUCCESS STORY | Dunedin,FL
How Dunedin, FL, created the community’s go-to information source
OVERVIEW
When the City of Dunedin, Florida, looked to update their digital presence while also modernizing their communications strategies, the tools in Granicus’ Government Experience Cloud (GXC), specifically Service Cloud, which combines web, forms and workflow, communications, and engagement tools, not only met their needs but helped spark new approaches to informing and engaging residents.
SITUATION
Located in Pinellas County, the densest Florida county by population, the town of Dunedin is home to 36,000 residents, just north of St. Petersburg.
“That population has stayed pretty consistent since probably 1990 with some fluctuations,” said Sue Burness, Dunedin’s director of communications. “But it feels like there are a lot of new residents.”
Especially since the pandemic, she said, the town has seen an influx of new residents from the East Coast and Midwest, including herself, joining Dunedin’s team in 2021.
“It’s for a very good reason,” she said of Dunedin’s charm. “It is a very beautiful old Florida coastal community with about 10 miles of coastline, and we have a vibrant, artsy, eclectic downtown, with a lot of entrepreneurs, great restaurants and retail. Dunedin’s home to the first craft brewery in the state of Florida and we have a rich history of Scottish heritage.”
When Burness arrived in Dunedin to build the communications department, she found the strategies and branding were “a bit all over the place.”
“The current city website was more than five years old, antiquated and in dire need of an update to be responsive to city’s communications needs, both internal and external,” she said.
The city had communications tools at their disposal, but Burness found the lack of branding and strategy was preventing effective communication, partly due to having no director managing communications previously.
“They were utilizing it, but it wasn’t branded and there were too many messages going out,” she said. “It wasn’t cohesive and centralized. Without a director, it was just a lot of decentralization with everyone communicating in their own way.”
Especially in a coastal Gulf state, where frequent weather events require a more centralized, easily accessible approach to delivering communication, Burness knew that an early goal in her role as director would be to reimagine the digital presence Dunedin had in both connecting to residents and providing them the resources they needed.
SOLUTION
“The website is the hub of information,” said Burness. So, it was no surprise Dunedin’s Communications Department spent nine months vetting government website companies to find the core of the new digital communications approach.
Working alongside staff from different departments, Dunedin chose OpenCities, which is the web component of Granicus’s Service Cloud. For Burness, the choice not only reflected the ways OpenCities could meet Dunedin’s website needs, but also how it could help better connect departments in a more positive digital experience for residents.
“Some key features include resident user testing modules; an OpenForms plug-in that allows us to convert antiquated PDFs forms — which are also not ADA compliant — to easy-to-use online forms for programs; camp registrations; Commission Feedback prior to meetings; and more.”
Service Cloud’s communications tool provided the means to better centralize communications for both email and text/SMS messages to targeted groups interested in city topics, events, updates, and emergency notifications.
That integration stood out as valuable to Burness, who had been struggling to gain momentum for “The Dunedin News,” an award-winning newsletter sent to residents via email.
“When we saw the opportunity to integrate govDelivery with a new OpenCities website, we wanted to move in that direction for a couple of reasons,” she said. “We were finding that the spam laws for firewalls in [Dunedin’s previous solution] were a real problem. And as we got to learn about govDelivery, we knew that the security and the connectivity, the systems … was not going to be a problem.”
Burness said the promise of easier inter-agency connectivity through govDelivery was also a strong incentive for implementing the new solution with hopes of growing subscriber lists for “The Dunedin News.”
RESULTS
The new digital communications strategy was put to the test almost immediately after implementation, when what would become Hurricane Ian began forming in September 2022.
“We probably weren’t completely trained on the platform when Hurricane Ian was approaching Tampa Bay,” she said. “Fortunately for us, it was overhyped by media, but Tampa Bay looked like it was going to be a direct hit. So, we were all in an emergency state and in our emergency operations center. We really saw the effectiveness and the convenience and the power of using govDelivery for communicating to our residents.”
During the storm, Burness said the team was able to use Service Cloud’s communications tool for daily updates from the town’s Emergency Operations Center, including embedding a Facebook live with the mayor, commissioner, and city manager.
“We included that video in those updates,” she recalled. “And that was actually our first use of govDelivery.”
Based on that success, Dunedin began using Service Cloud’s communications tool for the weekly newsletter, and in roughly six months doubled their subscriber numbers from 4,000 to 8,000.
“We look at govDelivery as making ‘The Dunedin News’ into the No. 1 best source for our residents and our business community to get information about what is happening around them,” Burness said of the service, which now reaches more than 11,000 subscribers.
“We can’t rely on the media anymore. They are fragmented and have reduced resources. We have the ability to be the news source for the City of Dunedin.”
This approach also helped Burness achieve her goal of creating a more centralized approach to city communications, integrating departments such as Parks and Recreation, which was previously sending out, by her account, two to three messages per day.
“We’ve worked to train other departments to use ‘The Dunedin News’ as the way to get their message out,” she said.
The positive impact can be seen in the metrics. “The Dunedin News” has open rates ranging from 45-50% — well above industry averages — and more than 100 new subscribers per month in 2024. Burness said the communications team is also developing monthly updates dedicated to specific neighborhoods and the city projects impacting them most.
“Our project information and any initiative, any big project underway lives on our website,” said Burness of the interconnectivity of Service Cloud. “But we find people get there through govDelivery because we’re putting that information in the weekly news and then driving people to the page. We see which pages are getting the most engagement on the website. People aren’t going to just go to your website; they have to be led there, they have to be driven there. And so that’s why we love that weekly newsletter.”
Driving that trend now, she said, makes it easier for residents to know where to go for emergency information as well.
“The amount of information that we have to update and that we are fed from the state, from the county, from FEMA, from the National Hurricane Center, a lot of that is filtered through the county, but it’s enormous,” she said. “We have a separate template for that, but we still want residents to get direct updates with information targeted to them.”
As with any success, Burness said that her new problem is “having too much information” from organizations that want to leverage the digital reach the new communications strategy has created.
“We try to have boundaries on what we can include,” she said. “Many non-profits and others want us to include their information in our newsletter, but we’re not the Tampa Bay Times. We’re a municipal news source. That’s been a challenge, but we are a government communications network, and we have to create policy and filter what we include, or we will dilute the impact of the information. We don’t want to just create a bunch of neighborhood newsletters.”
The early success of the communications strategies put into place through Service Cloud isn’t the end for Burness, who has set a “goal for every resident in Dunedin to be subscribed.”
From social media posts to rack cards at city events and City Hall, she continues to spread the word about the digital options.
“There’s always one response on social media posts that says something along the lines of ‘I wish I would have known about this,’” she said. “And we like to say that the only way we can really guarantee that you’re going to be informed with the information you need is if you opt in.”
