How State and Local Government Agencies Move Residents to Digital Channels

Hello everyone and welcome to the webinar Digital Adoption That Works Best Practices for Moving Residents to Online Systems. My name is Megan Billingsley and I’ll be your moderator for today’s discussion. Studies have shown that residents across the country prefer to interact with government services online and it’s easy to see why. Online interactions are faster for residents and don’t require transportation or time spent visiting government offices. Online systems also streamline operations for state and local government employees. Less foot traffic in offices and lower call volumes mean those employees can spend time on more complex tasks. And it reduces the chance of errors, lost checks, and other snafus. But a difficult user experience and cybersecurity concerns too often hold residents back from fully using those online services. For local governments dealing with tight budgets and staffing levels, it can seem overwhelming to implement a modernized digital platform and guide residents on how to use it. Fortunately, there are several best practices that can support government agencies as they navigate these changes. And we’re going to discuss them today with our experts from the city of Seguin, Texas, and PayIt, a leading digital solutions provider for state and local governments.

Before we jump into our discussion, here’s a look at what we’ll be covering today so you know what to expect. First, some simple housekeeping items. At the bottom of your screen, you’ll find some application widgets for your use. These widgets are all resizable and movable, so feel free to move them around to optimize your desktop space. The slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation. To enlarge the slides, click the enlarge slides button in the top right hand corner of your presentation window. We encourage you to submit questions using the Q&A widget throughout the presentation. We will try to answer your questions during the webcast, but if we run out of time, just know that we’re capturing all of your questions and we’ll refer them to one of our experts to follow up with you. And with that, let’s introduce our speakers. I’m joined today by Nick Copelin, senior director of resident communications with PayIt. In addition to leading resident communications, Nick is also the director of adoption marketing and has nearly 15 years of experience in client engagement. Nick, we’re so glad to have you.

Hi everybody. I’m stoked to be here as well.

We’re also joined by Shane McDaniel who is CIO with the city of Seguin, Texas. Shane has been in his role for over eight years and he’s held leadership positions in cybersecurity and network security for over 20 years. Prior to working in the city where he also lives, Shane was an infrastructure leader with the city of McKinney, Texas. Shane, thank you so much for joining us today.

Howdy y’all. Pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

I like the cowboy hat in your picture, too. I feel like it suits you well. So, to start us off then, let’s talk about why digital transformation is valuable for local municipalities. Shane, I’ll start with you. How does this benefit residents?

How does digital transformation benefit residents? Well, ease of access. So like putting those services online and giving them more options as opposed to years past whenever they had to step into city hall or step into planning and development for those permits and licenses, things of that nature, going to our parks department to reserve spaces at one of the beautiful amenities that we have to offer our residents in the city of Seguin. All of that is virtualized now. They can still go into the office and speak to those professionals in those respective areas anytime they want, but if they prefer to do it themselves online or perhaps hop on the chatbot or give us a call as opposed to navigating that process online, we present that option to them. We have completely digitized our city over the past several years and it’s something invaluable that we offer to our residents.

Excellent. Thank you, Shane. Those are some really great points. Nick, what are some benefits of digitalization that you’ve seen for constituents?

Yeah, I definitely echo everything that Shane said. I think you know, a lot of times people have certain payments that they need to make with their local government. And finding the time and the space and the resources to be able to do that can be really difficult. You know, one of the examples that sticks out in my head with one of our clients is the need to go pay parking tickets, for example. If you think about people who are, you know, in labor working jobs or hourly jobs and trying to find time off from work or trying to find child care and then travel down to the destination where they need to pay and then hopefully find some parking and hopefully not get another parking ticket and then go in and make that payment. Like that is such a drag and such an inconvenience where the other opportunity is to make that payment online and you’re done in five minutes. You don’t have to go find additional child care, take time off work, cut into your budget or your earnings more. It’s just such a convenience and a labor saver that we really find a lot of value there.

Really important points, Nick. Thank you. And government agencies benefit from digital transformation as well, right? Like it’s not just the constituents. So Nick, I’ll stay with you first. How does this improve their operations?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest thing that shows up for us is the time to collection. When you know local government agencies, they’ve got to handle anybody who’s coming into the office. That is somebody who’s in office and receiving those people talking through any of the questions that they might have. Going through the paperwork, taking that payment, documenting it, storing it, updating records, all of those sorts of things. That’s time. That’s a lot of labor. That’s a lot of physical and mental and you know money investment where again the alternative is that’s done online. It’s done almost instantaneously. All of that documentation is on the back end. That money gets into the government faster. They’re able to collect faster and turn that money around to make an impact in their local areas. So much faster.

Yeah. That efficiency is a really important call out. Shane, have you seen this in your experience, too?

Oh, absolutely. Nick completely nailed it there. Just like he was saying, you know, you got to get the babysitter, you know, it’s all about time. My goodness, we’re all so busy these days, it seems. The world is just a busier place than it was when I was growing up, right? So by putting these services online to make those utility billing payments or to get that permit or to reserve that park space or whatever you’re trying to accomplish it all about the efficiency and what just offering it if they choose if it makes their life easier to reserve that park space for that birthday party as opposed to carving out a couple hours their day or making that trip on their lunch break or what have you. So, it’s the convenience of it and it’s just an option that obviously people have gravitated towards and we continue to build it out in this city and every other city out there.

You know, and another thing that really I think benefits the city is it frees up those resources. People who are, you know, in a traditional payment environment who are doing all of that documentation and the facilitation are freed up to do things that are a little bit more skilled, a little more high-touch and requiring, you know, additional people, right? Like there’s people who have really in-depth questions or really specific needs. Those government resources and agents are able to be freed up to help those people that is not something that could be done alone right so one additional you know benefit there that frees up those employees to be able to handle somebody who really needs that high-touch.

Yeah it’s a great call out and we’ve touched on some really important benefits so far. So now I’d like to talk about how government agencies can make this happen. How can they make it clear to residents that their digital channels are the first way to engage? Nick, I’ll start with you.

Yeah, I think this is really important. And this is something that aligns with my role a lot with PayIt. What we’re trying to do is just to make sure that people are aware of an opportunity and then encourage them to do so and kind of free up or erase those concerns that might be holding them back. We like to start with just really the basic practices, right? Like it’s got to be simple. It’s got to be clear. We want to try to avoid any of the government language that might you know eek in there into you know the way that a government agency might be expected to talk or familiar but speaking about things that don’t necessarily overlap with the way that you know everyday resident might be thinking or speak themselves. So just making sure that we’re staying clear and concise and, you know, just really good with the language.

Yeah, those elements sound really important. Shane, how does your team make it clear that online portals or pages are the right ones?

We invest heavily in our branding. Several years ago, we brought in a consultant and we went through the whole dog and pony show, if you will, and everything down to the colors and the font and the tagline. And I believe my city has done a wonderful job to put that out there. And it extends beyond the virtual presence. It’s on every city vehicle, has the city logo and the colors of, you know, team Seguin green is what I call it. If you go to our website, it’s very distinctive. So, as it ties to extending our digital transformation and those services online, everything rides off of the city’s primary website and we ensure that the branding matches for everything that we do. I think whenever I’m working with partners and what have you and even my own team and folks around the city, I think it gets almost comical at times because here we are talking about high technology and these amazing things that we can do and there’s the CIO bringing up the colors and the font and the branding once again because I know it is so important to my city in turn, to my council, to my city manager, to our residents, to those doing business with the city of Seguin that trust and that branding that’s there, which all kind of ties into our reputation. If they’re clicking that link on our website to go make that payment or go reserve that space or whatever they’re trying to accomplish, that very much factors into the conversation and how we build these things out. I view it as a critical thing. I want them to have that comfort that they are on the right page and doing the right thing with the right organization and not any of the crazy cybersecurity things that are gotchas for people. Right.

Gosh, Shane, I am very excited that you touched on branding and brand guidelines. That’s something that we focus a lot on ourselves. With PayIt, we’ve got almost 70 other clients. And so as we put together these materials and platforms for them to interact with and their residents to interact with, it’s something that’s forefront for us as well to think and make sure that we’re putting that user experience for those residents forward. And when they go into that process, it’s really important not to shake confidence, not to confuse them, not to make them think that they’re going through a third party, a different company. So, we do everything we can to make sure that all of the materials that we put out into the world are really aligned with our client agencies brand guidelines. And also we like to build off of our client’s domain and just utilize a subdomain so that we’re not feeling like we’re jumping the resident around website to website to website introducing more friction where they feel like oh wait a second I’m not on that website anymore did I go to another site this feels a little bit fishy or scammy so brand guidelines color voice tone button styles making sure all those things are consistent I love that you went there and we definitely focus a lot on that too. Wildly important.

Yeah, I do think it’s key and it probably helps build that foundation of trust with the customers using those portals to know that they’re in the right places. So, thank you for bringing that up. So, let’s talk about cybersecurity because we see in surveys and data that residents are concerned about entering payment information or personal information because of potential cyber threats. How should local agencies handle cybersecurity? Shane, I’ll stick with you to start here.

Well, cybersecurity is top of mind for myself and my peers and every organization out there, right? There’s just a litany of things that can go wrong. We’re all just a click away as one of my go-to statements. So, we invest heavily in what we do as far as cybersecurity. I’m very fortunate to have access to the resources and the people and the team that we have and the partners. But you start to think about it and so what does a cybersecurity incident look like, right? Essentially it takes your digital services down potentially and you have to revert down to old paper and pen processes to conduct business. Now you think about the situation as that ties to the city of Seguin, Texas. You can go out and right now there’s something called the U-Haul movability index that references that the city of Seguin, Texas is the 14th fastest growing city in the country right now. Everybody’s moving here. We’re in the Austin-San Antonio region. It seems like this entire region has just completely blown up just within the city limits. We have 60 subdivisions and 18,000 homes in development. We’re the number one manufacturing city per capita in the state of Texas. We have a lot of factories and whatnot, so a lot of jobs and what have you. And they’re constantly building more. Our economic development folks work overtime in addition to our planning and development folks. So we think about what does that mean? A cybersecurity incident as far as taking those services down. We’re stopping progress if that’s the case. Business cannot be conducted if those services are no longer available online. So they can get those permits, move that new development that’s bringing 500 jobs to the community through its process, which is all digitized, right? So that is why it’s critical for our organization as we partner. I basically have a couple of questions that I run through with potential partners as we’re standing up new services or working on new digital transformations and what have you that address it. But it is a conversation that we have with every single partner as we’re going down this path and it’s something that happens very early in that conversation too I would say.

Excellent. Thank you Shane. I think that those are such great examples of how to emphasize cybersecurity in the digital world and the real world so to speak. Nick are there other measures governments can take to ensure cybersecurity?

Absolutely. You know, I think the first place that you would start is just making sure that you and your partners are following the industry standard frameworks. I think that’s like just a given. Any partner that you work with ought to have those basics in place. But beyond that, I think you know, make sure that they’re clearly documented on your website on your landing page is another basic step. Something else that we’ve done, and I touched on this a little bit earlier, is just, you know, related to the domains and the subdomains. We do things like Jackson County, in Missouri is one of our clients. And our product branding with them is myjacksoncounty. So, we utilize a subdomain of their jacksongov.org, that is payments.jacksongov.org. But there are important steps that you can take there to ensure that your residents aren’t potentially being phished by ne’er-do-wells and bad actors by securing domains that might be typos or one-offs or sound-alikes. Those are I think you know above and beyond. Secure those domains. You can set them up as redirects or just own them. That prevents other people from potentially securing those and routing people to lookalike systems or platforms that they themselves might be intercepting and taking advantage of those people. You know that’s kind of like the cyber element in there but there’s also a human element that ties in in place of online payments that we’ve been talking about today. I think a lot of people think to do in-person payments and in-person payments awesome dope continue with your in-person payments if that’s your path. But I see a lot of benefit and a lot higher security in making those payments online. Writing checks for instance a lot of our older demographics have a hesitancy to make payments online and prefer to do things like checks through the mail. AP did a really cool study in publishing few years back now. I think it was about in 2023 where they were encouraging their readers to please, please, please stop writing and mailing checks. There’s just too many instances of one, those checks just not being delivered. We’ve seen that happen recently with some clients in the North Carolina area where the mail just was never delivered. But alternatively, those checks, like people can, you know, get that mail, wash those checks, steal that information, fill out those checks and cash them separately, that’s a huge deal. And when I think about the information that’s on a paper check, and I urge my mom to think about this as well, right? Like here’s this piece of information that has my bank account number on it, my routing number on it, my signature, my home address, my first name, my last name. That’s a little scary sometimes. Your driver’s license number is on there. That makes me hesitant to pass all that information out willy-nilly. I’d rather push that through online where I know there are practice in place to take care of that, protect me in those instances.

Yeah, that’s a great point, Nick. Thank you. And it leads us right to our next topic, which is making it simple for people to use digital resources with their local governments. How can agencies make the digital experience simple? Nick, I’ll stay with you here.

Oh, yeah. So this aligns with what I was saying earlier. I think a lot of it comes down to language and then just the user interface of your application. Obviously we want it clear, clean, quick, as few as clicks as possible. Just really focusing on those elements and the transparency as well. All of those communications and those touch points really impact I think that point.

Thank you, Nick. I think that makes a lot of sense to focus on how you communicate these changes with residents. Shane, what are your thoughts?

Thoughts on efficiencies as far as what’s happening inside my municipality? Well, on the last question, I alluded to some of the growth that we’re experiencing here and many cities within the Texas Triangle are experiencing the same thing. Essentially, what that means is that we’re doing more with less. So we’re adding police officers and firefighters and utility workers and you know the pace of growth for those more support departments for the IT and HRs and the finance departments. We’re playing keep up to for all this new staff and hardware and the things that they need so they can be successful as these positions are created and whatnot. Right. So, all told about a 35% population increase since the 2020 census and our rate of increase for staffing is more like 25 to 30%. So, there’s a little bit of a lag there. So, like I said, doing more with less. So the efficiencies that are gained as far as leveraging the digital transformation and whatnot. Essentially it’s the innovations, right? Which with innovation you identify a gap you leverage technology you marry labor with the workforce and you try to close those gaps and that is innovation in my mind and that’s exactly what we’re doing with this digital transformation by making more access and availability for all these new citizens and the folks that are doing business with our city and whatnot. Just giving them more flexibility so they can get their jobs done, get their tasks and what have you. While staying within the confine, the parameters of how the city operates as well. So it’s a tough job. It’s not easy all the time. You know, you got to make those investments. You got to have the infrastructure ready to support it as well. You got to find amazing partners that are willing to work with you. And somehow we just all seem to make it work.

I agree. Thank you. And what about in terms of communicating with your constituents about this digital transformation? How are you getting them on board with the changes that are being made and comfortable to use those online portals and pages?

You know, that’s a funny question to me. And so I live in the community I serve. I’m so fortunate. My neighbors are also our customers essentially, our residents, our citizens, what have you. So, I’m always out and about in the grocery stores and the restaurants and whatnot. And it doesn’t matter the age anymore. I see couples that are older than me and they’ll be in the restaurant and both of them have their phones out. They’re doing something, right? So I will extend that over to our social media presence. My goodness, we have a lot of people that follow our pages on social media and it’s just a fact. Facebook is probably our most popular outlet for sharing information. So that is one way. We have a shared calendar on our web page that lists all of the activities that very busy city. We’re always doing activities down. We have a beautiful Central Park and there’s always farmers markets and you know things to do with the kids and car shows always something. So all of that is shared by the city website and it often extended out to social media as well. So that is the number one way. We also offer a text service where residents can text in. We have the chatbot on our website. So there are quite a few different ways to communicate with the city and we’re still old school too. You can still call in and you’ll get a human voice. You call into the city of Seguin. We have a team that is dedicated to citizen actions. So you can still reach us by phone as well.

Fantastic. Thank you so much Shane and Nick. I’d like to thank you both for a really enlightening conversation today. We do have some time left, so I’d love to take some audience questions here. And just a reminder to our viewers, if you have a question, now would be the time to submit that. So I would like to start with sort of a wrap-up before we get to those questions of what we’ve discussed. If you both had one piece of advice for agencies starting their digital transformation journey, what would it be? Nick, I’ll start with you.

You know, I think I would just urge people to get started now. Right now is the time to go. Let’s get started. Don’t get caught in paralysis by analysis. The longer you wait, the more opportunities you’re going to miss for faster payments. So, just get going. Get there. Faster payments, more security, more efficiency. Get going.

Great point, Nick. Shane, what would your advice be?

Internally, I’d say communication and collaboration, a unified front, understand the vision of your council and city management in my case, and you advocate with respect to that. And I would extend it over to whenever that decision is made, that funding is gifted and you’re ready to tackle that next innovation or that next digital transformation, absolutely paramount that you find the right partner to do that. That company that is going to work with you to match the branding, to understand the vibe, understand the mission, and help you find that common goal together.

Great pieces of advice. Thank you both for our audience. We do have some questions rolling in. So, just to get to our first one here, how do you get internal buy-in for new systems or ways of operating? Shane, I’ll turn that one to you.

Oh, okay. Well I kind of just gave the answer but I’ll say it again. So that is part of my role here in the city of Seguin, right? So I am a facilitator. I have the relationships. I have a wonderful council, our mayor is one of the best human beings you’ll ever meet in your life, our city management, but it’s those relationships across the organization. My fellow department heads, things of that nature. And I think it helps that you know you kind of understand that culture of your organization. I would say being in Texas, we’re very relationship-based. And so, yes, we can email, we can call, we can do all these things together. We can break bread together, but those relationships are the foundation for anything that we do in the city of Seguin. Absolutely paramount for the innovations and communicating as such and getting the funding. And I would say extend that over to the trust that is put into us that we’re going to do right by the community. We’re going to do a good job. We’re going to finish this project and we’re going to deliver on the things that they want us to deliver on, but it starts with communication and relationships.

Excellent. Thank you, Shane. Our next question is along similar lines and Nick, I’ll hand this one to you. What sort of training do employees need when launching these services? Do they need to field technical questions from residents?

You know, ideally, no. They shouldn’t have to field those questions. But undoubtedly that comes up no matter how much we refine and make our platform as smooth and as easy as possible. Those questions are always going to come up. So what we do at PayIt is we make sure that we take those people through a training. We take those employees through kind of a technical training of the platform of the questions that may come up. We teach them how to respond and how to work through those answers. We also have support on our site as well that is like a call center ready to field those questions and walk people through to their answer. We also produce a number of materials. So in addition to that government agent and our call center we produce things like walkthroughs and handouts and videos for our support center. Just making sure that you know we constantly see questions come in and we build materials from those questions to make sure that we are reducing any of those questions that come through in the future and we make sure that those materials are out there for people to be able to find answers to their questions as they come.

Fantastic. Thank you, Nick. Okay, I think we have time for one more and it’s related to those internal capabilities. If you have a small IT team or no IT team, what do you do? Shane, I’ll hand that one to you.

Internal capabilities. Okay. I can kind of relate and I can kind of not. I have a team of 15 very talented people in the IT department. Another five folks, analysts that are embedded in other departments. So, a total of what I would call 20 highly technical people that kind of oversee everything in the city of Seguin. And so, I can offer the example of whenever we’ve redone our entire infrastructure. We’re now in the second phase of that during my tenure over the past eight years in the city of Seguin. And the way that we’ve addressed it is we have those partners and we often go through resellers and what have you. Investments are made on the front end. Once we make that decision that we’re going to go with technology ABC, we start sending the right team members to training to conferences to begin the knowledge process of starting to build it up in preparation for that eventual migration to the new platform. And that is done in conjunction whether we’re talking training courses, actual certifications, sit-downs and like lunch-and-learns with those partners. There’s a number of different conduits that we take to ensure you’re never going to be fully ready, but therein lies the value of having that great partner, too, because they’re very likely through professional services be sitting right there beside you as you’re making this transition to another platform. So, that’s how we tackle it here in the city of Seguin and I think a lot of my peers out there do the same thing.

Excellent. That is all the time that we have for today. I’d like to thank our panelists again, Nick and Shane. Thank you so much. This has been a really enlightening conversation.

Thanks so much.

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you.

I’d also like to thank our listeners as well and we hope you’ve gotten some great perspectives on how to make your city or agency’s digital transformation a success. If you’d like to learn more about what you heard today, please contact PayIt about digital solutions designed for your agency or department. Today’s webinar will also be available on demand if you want to review anything that we’ve talked about today. Thanks again for watching.