One-Person Revolution in Digital Agenda & Meeting Prep

Located in northwest Colorado, the town of Parachute takes its name from a mispronunciation by settlers of a nearby creek that the native Ute people called Pahchouc, meaning twins. However, Lucy Spalenka, Parachute’s Town and Court Clerk, finds herself as a one-person department, meeting the town’s demands for creating board meeting agendas and packets.

“Our town itself is small,” she said of the more than 1,800 residents in Parachute. “But the community is big. With us being such a small town, that just goes hand in hand with having a very small staff. We’ve got no depth on our roster. It’s one person per department, per responsibility.”

When Spalenka took on her role with the town government eight years ago, she inherited a paper-based process of gathering board meeting agenda packets, a manual routine that created a great deal of work.

“It was the paper packets and the problems that everyone talks about,” she recalled. “The town clerk that was here before me was about to retire, and she’s walking me through how she’s doing it, and my brain was not grasping. ‘Put a colored page here, and then you put this page here, and then this is the next one.’ I had to relearn how to do something on paper. It was an interesting experience. The tedious nature of the process extended to packet distribution, as well,” Spalenka said. “We hand-delivered packets to councilmembers. We had a police officer drive around town and drop off packets at people’s houses.”

Initially, Spalenka transitioned the process to one that she called “semi-digital,” using Adobe tools to scan documents, receive emails, and post it to a website. But even that process required too many manual steps that created confusion and inefficiency.

“You’ll gather all the information, go the website and have to upload and download packets that could be 300 pages long,” she said. “Even though it was a more digital process it still wasn’t easy to keep up with the changes that sometimes needed to be made. People would download or even print out packets ahead of time and often not have the most up-to-date information.”

Spalenka knew that a new approach to expanding the digital experience for creating, distributing, and reviewing agenda and meeting packets would not only free up time to better do her job, but also better serve their community.

“Innovation is the name of the game,” she said. “If we stay still, we’re going to die, and that isn’t our intent. That’s not what we want. We want to be transparent with our residents. We want the trust that they are willing to give us. We want to show them all the things that we are doing and give them full and updated information.

“There are so many other things that we could spend our money on,” she added, “than paying me to be standing at the copier all day.”

After slowly building increased interest in making a change, the town was ready to look for a new solution.

“It took me a while to squeak enough and make enough noise to have some money to put toward it,” Spalenka laughed. “We decided to go with Granicus. It was not the cheapest. But you get what you pay for, right? The quality of the product is what we decided to go with and really try to do it right.”

Implementing Granicus’ govMeetings platform immediately brought an impact not only in creating new digital pathways to more efficiently building agenda and meeting packets, but in customizing solutions to meet Parachute’s specific needs.

“It can be a little intimidating to take on what for us is this huge project, a huge leap, changing things 180 degrees,” she said. “’How am I going to do it?’ That initial anxiety about taking on this project was holding me back a little bit. But once we started talking, that just went out the window because of how easy it was.”

With the help of the govMeetings design team, Spalenka was able to easily create a digital experience that matched the existing look and format of Parachute’s current agendas, enabling a seamless transition to this new approach for meeting preparation.

“Learning how to use software is not what everybody thinks of as exciting,” she said. “But my representative’s ability to keep us engaged and to make it easy, make it simple, and to just talk through things made it seamless.”

Spalenka also appreciated that the relationship with Granicus extended beyond the initial implementation, with ongoing training and resources that she continues using.

“Granicus University is something that offers so, so much information,” she said. “If you have a question, you can talk to someone, but if you have an extra couple of minutes, you can easily find the answer to how to do things and learn more about what you can do in the software.”

For a staff of one, Spalenka added, having such extensive training and continued learning resources provides an extra cost benefit for continued development.

“That’s really enticing because small staff, small funding, right?” she said. “I can’t always afford all the training. And with nobody else here, I can’t take off and go to a training for a few days. Having the ability to do it on my own time and learn what I needed to learn when I needed to learn it was a big deal.”

“The digital interactions created by using govMeetings also shift the overall approach to creating packets,” Spalenka said, “no longer placing the bulk of responsibility on her alone to gather information and hold departments responsible for providing materials.”

“It helps with the accountability, and keeps everyone on the same page,” she said. “Even when we were using Adobe it was such a manual process of getting up from my chair, hunting someone down and making sure they reviewed and approved materials before it was added to an agenda. Using govMeetings takes that responsibility off just me and puts a little of it back to where it’s supposed to be.”

The change to a fully digital, interactive process for meeting and agenda preparation has shown dramatic results. Spalenka said that the average agenda preparation that previously would take a week now can be done in one day.

While saving over 2,000 sheets of paper per meeting makes a significant physical and financial impact, SpaIenka said that the change has created a shift in how the town approaches the work.

“It has just really freed up so much of my time to do other things,” she said. “We all wear 20 hats here. And now not just me, but our town can more easily get the work done and be as transparent as possible.”

Agenda changes and last-minute additions that Spalenka said were “put-out-a-fire types of moments” no longer create the panic that previously came with adjustments.

“You go in there, replace the attachment, and just hit ‘publish,’” she said. “No one even knows that there was another version. The updates are live. You have the newest version. It’s just not a hassle anymore.”

With easy integration to the town’s website and applications for board members, updated information is easily transmitted, a time savings that Spalenka said she had not previously considered.

“I didn’t realize how much time it took to actually post agendas and changes on our website,” she said. “In my mind I thought, It’s not that bad because I can do it. But thinking back on it now because of the embed code that we have on our website [through govMeetings], the moment that I hit publish it is there. I cut out that entire step, which can take a long time when you have a 300-page packet to rearrange, update, and republish.”

For a town that, per Spalenka’s estimate, would go through “reams and reams of paper for one meeting,” Parachute is now all in on the digital transition. “I don’t think I’ve printed out a packet in two years,” she said. “None of that is necessary anymore.”

In the end, Spalenka is glad to have made the “noise” needed to fund the digital transition and connect with Granicus tools. Not only because of the results, but also because of the reliability of the product.