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:
- Paying for municipal services like utilities using a credit card
- Filling out applications for permits and licenses, online. Not having to print the PDF, write the check and go hand it in at town hall.
- Transcribing meeting recordings, to produce meeting minutes, in half the time! (It’s possible, I promise!)
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.
See a Live Demo
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! 😆
Read below for the backstory of the HeyGov app and our latest progress on providing it to our municipal customers.
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.
These are the three main features of the HeyGov app
- Enabling residents to accept credit card payments using the residents payment portal.
- Streamlining license, permits and application processes by providing digital platforms.
- Creating meeting minutes, in minutes, using the AI tool ClerkMinutes.
How We’re Developing Based on Your Feedback
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.
- How to reimagine the payment process, which is largely paper-based for things like utility billing, operators permits, and boat launch permits.
- How to assign workflows or tasks to different people or departments, as some applications need to be passed from one person to the next. Most people were forwarding an email or passing a message to another person.
- How to keep residents in the loop when something is being worked on. Keeping residents informed was a massive pain point that people had! They said there were not enough hours in the day to inform the residents about everything that was being worked on. A large part of this problem is that administrators felt they needed to pick up the phone and speak to the resident who applied for a license, permit of facility rental booking, or type up a formal email. It was a time-intensive activity.
- How to report the items to the elected officials. Many people wanted to share a weekly or monthly report of items reported and items addressed and did not have a system that made this easy to do.
Formal Coding Started October 2020
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:
- Enabling residents to accept credit card payments using the residents payment portal.
- Streamlining license, permits and application processes by providing digital platforms.
- Creating meeting minutes, in minutes, using the AI tool ClerkMinutes.