Our biggest update yet

Over the last few months we’ve been quiet and heads-down building new features driven by customer feedback. You talked, we listened!

We recently rolled out our biggest product update yet, including some very useful new tools:

Automating Staff Communication

Managing decision-makers takes a lot of communication: letting them know when to review comments, sending them the public hearing agenda, reminding them of any unread comments the day of the hearing, etc. Now that whole process is automated, eliminating staff work while increasing the utility of the communication by including stats and deep links to specific places on the site.

Increasing Workflow Flexibility

When should the comment period close? When should reminder notices to be sent? Who should receive comment moderation notices? Those and more can now be easily managed by staff admins.

Exposing Engagement Metrics

To make it easier to track down which decision-makers have unread comments, we now display this in the admin for staff to get a quick snapshot of the status.

Advanced Page Editor

This release introduces the first module of our advanced page editor, which allows staff to add as many PDF files to a page as they need. Drag and drop controls make it fast to change the order and make the page support the necessary content and flow for each case.

Messages Dashboard

What happens if one of your staff is out sick or on a holiday and citizens have submitted questions that have yet to be responded to? We’ve added a new section in the admin for each case where any staff can see the messages sent through the site, whether to staff or applicants from citizens. Messages are grouped by email threads of related messages comprised of replies of the original email.

Multi-body!

By far the most expansive update is support for multiple bodies. For example, sites can now support cases from both a Planning Commission and City Council on the site. Filters allow citizens to select the cases relevant to them. Under the hood, staff for each body are able to login and manage cases just for their body but all via the same admin site. Agendas are also separated by body, so decision-makers only see the cases for the public hearing to which they are a part.

We’re excited to see the impact of these new features in the coming months!