I’ve got some great news to share with all towns, village and cities. Our team is building a new GovTech software that will be interesting for you. It’s called HeyGov! This is a new project that complements your municipal website.
I've got some great news to share with all towns, villages and cities. Our team is building a new GovTech software that will be interesting for you. It's called HeyGov!
This is a new project that complements your municipal website. In short, it's an app that allows your residents to accept credit card payments, streamline license and permit applications and report issues in your municipality.
Here are some examples of how your residents would use it:
The purpose of the app is to streamline communication between your residents and the crew that goes out and fixes things. I'm ready to have more municipalities involved with our HeyGov app development. Your feedback and opinions would be very valuable.
To see more about what we’re working on, come join me for a live demo. Just fill out the form on the app page here to get the Zoom link: https://.com/drop-in-demo You can see that the name of the app is called HeyGov. Isn't that a clever name? We really think so! 😆
I had always wanted to build a dedicated municipal app ever since the iPhone came out more than a decade ago. Several municipalities had even asked me about it years ago too. At that time, I didn’t really have anything unique or compelling to offer that was better than what a website already provided.
All that changed earlier this year. I spent a lot of time stuck at home during the lockdown in Wisconsin due to Covid-19. This gave me ample time to think about how residents can interact with a municipality remotely in a safe way that did not require face-to-face communication and didn’t require visits to the town hall.I was also thinking of ways that could help municipal staff that were efficient and helpful. You see, I didn’t want to build a platform that just sends more and more emails to municipal staff. Heck, I know you already get so many emails and are probably doing loads of more work for the same pay as you were pre-pandemic. I wanted to fix that for you and your municipal colleagues.
I wanted to build an app that solves two main problems and which augments the existing website you already have with us:
1) I want you to work more efficiently in a way that is helpful: to help you with Clerk-work!
To accomplish this task I needed to find a way that doesn’t just stack up more emails in your inbox. Instead it has to be a platform that allows you to process payments, licenses and permits fast and without any effort on your part. It has to actually help you while also helping your residents. And this is what we are building for you.
2) I also want your residents to be happier
I interviewed residents and asked them about their experiences in interacting with their municipalities. They said it sometimes felt like a “black hole.” They had little insight into whether their inquiry was received or whether it was even going to be addressed. People also complained about not knowing if their email would even be routed to the appropriate person or department.
Therefore I started thinking about how to design a platform that didn’t leave residents in the dark. Instead it would need to be something that provided more transparency.
The other focus is to build out a system that would treat residents more like “customers” than simply participants in a conversation with a municipality. This means that we are spending a large chunk of our time understanding how and when residents would need to interact with your municipality. We can then build a platform that they’d actually enjoy using, which in turn, helps improve their satisfaction and makes them happier.
In early 2020, we sent out surveys to 550 municipalities to solicit their feedback. We really wanted to see what everybody’s thoughts and ideas were about an app that could help with issue tracking. I have to say that the feedback was incredible!
We got a lot of great info about how municipalities would use the app, and what features they really want it to do. This feedback gave me the green light to hire a dedicated team to focus on building out the app for our municipal customers.
In the last three months, the team worked on the design aspect and showed visually how the features would look based on the feedback so far. This became the foundation for what we are building.
Several municipal managers and staff members were kind enough to get on one-on-one calls with me to talk about the project idea by looking at the design foundation. I collected more info about the issues and problems that they faced in their municipalities. We talked about things like traditionally paper-based processes like payments and licenses, how to do them, and what can help to improve and streamline the process. More importantly, we dove into how to keep residents happy.
Below are some highlights of things that we discussed on our one-on-one calls with different city, town and village managers/administrators.
The month of October 2020 has been a major milestone for the team. After more than three months of market research, client validations and product planning, we started work on the development of the app.
Kind regards,
Dustin Overbeck, Town Web
P.S. To give you some quick info about the HeyGov app, there will be three main features:
