Overview:
POLCO is an advanced civic engagement platform with authentication and analytics designed for local governments. We provide citizens a convenient place to learn about and participate on their agenda items and policy polls. We provide city officials and city staff with insightful real-time data and civic analytics.
We understand the challenges of correctly engaging citizens at the local level. City staff spend a lot of money and countless hours trying to engage citizens via postcard mailers (slow and low response rates), landline polls (misses younger citizens), one-on-one constituent meetings, monitoring social media, acknowledging emails, and compiling all this into weekly reports per issue to augment the loud voice of the vocal few at town hall. Unfortunately, simple un-validated online survey tools’ results aren’t trusted, can’t provide relevant analytics, and don’t foster citizen-to-citizen sharing for additional citizen participation.
POLCO Solution:
City staff can quickly add agenda items, staff reports, and policy polls onto the POLCO platform. For larger cities, we also provide the ability to bulk upload agenda items from their legislative management system. Citizens get agenda items, multiple choice, and budgeting polls to help city officials throughout the legislative process (discovery, formulation, adoption, implementation).
POLCO helps citizens participate from anywhere. Officials and citizens can embed e-ballot voting widgets on websites, social networks, news media, blogs, and in emails for truly distributed engagement. POLCO is also available via mobile. Meeting citizens where they are helps spread correct information and collect broad constituent sentiment.
POLCO gives city staff and officials results and analytics. We allow officials to filter data to ensure only proper citizens’ input counts on correct issues, and that no one votes more than once. We are able to do this by cross-referencing users against voter registration lists during initial registration. The result is validated, accurate, real-time polling data, and analysis by district, demographics, time-trends over-layed with media share and combinations of these factors.
Our team comes from backgrounds in technology and public service and want to make combining those two areas an easy and empowering for your city staff and your citizens.
Contact Information:
Robert Kane
Robert@POLCO.us
