Proven Resident Communication Strategies for State and Local Agencies

Hello and welcome. We’re delighted to have everybody here today and thank you so much for joining us as we discuss proven strategies for resident communications or how to break through the noise when you’re communicating with residents. This is part of our PayIt GovLab series where we engage with experts in public sector to hear about what’s working for them and what advice they want to share with their peers. So, thank you very much for being here. My name is Kelly Davis-Felner. I lead marketing for PayIt and one of the best parts of my job is I also work a lot with our clients and so does the rest of my team on communicating with residents particularly around some of the services that we provide together. So it’s always a wonderful topic. This is one of my very very favorite themes for us to talk about. But the good news is that I have two people who have really great expertise in this area who are going to tell you what’s really happening on the ground. So before we introduce our speakers, I just want to do a couple of little housekeeping items. We are going to send a link to the recording after the session today in case you want to share it with others or give it another watch. Everybody who is here today, your microphones have been muted just to keep the noise at a minimum. But if you do have questions, please use the Q&A feature in the chat. We’ll be more than happy to get answers back to you about anything that’s on your mind. With that, I’d like to go ahead and introduce our speakers. We’re really fortunate today to have Joshua and Kim with us. And what I’d love to do is Joshua, if you don’t mind, would you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your role?
 
Yes, my name is Joshua Robertson. I’m the director of sustainability and citizen services for the city of Fort Smith. The main things that I do in citizen services is our billing, collections, and customer service for the city.
 
Great. Kim, let’s take it over to you.
 
Hi everyone. Thank you for joining today’s webinar. My name is Kim Archuletta and I am the county treasurer in Pueblo, Colorado for Pueblo County. My role as county treasurer is to collect property taxes and disburse them. In a nutshell, that is what my office does. It is so much more than that, but we won’t get into the complexities of it. The simple version is I collect property taxes and I disburse them.
 
You guys have huge jobs that both probably involve a lot of communicating with residents. So, I’m absolutely thrilled to have both of you here. So with that, why don’t we just dive in? My goal here is to get the two of you talking as much as possible, but I do have a couple of slides to share as well. So why does this even matter? Why are we here? How you communicate matters a lot. This is true in life across the board. It’s true in business. It’s true in family life, etc. But in government, it’s especially important because what government does is very, very important. And oftentimes it’s really necessary to make sure that people are informed or that they are engaged or that they’re taking a required action. At a broader level, you know, effective communication helps you raise awareness. It builds resident trust. There’s all kinds of data about, you know, when a government agency is communicating effectively. Residents are much more likely to have confidence in them, have trust in them, feel that they’re achieving their mission, and so forth. And then of course this encourages participation and civic engagement and it becomes instead of a one-way conversation, a two-way conversation. So, the good news is even though it’s a little bit high-stakes to communicate well, there’s a few simple rules that can make a really, really big difference. So, that’s kind of how we are going to frame the discussion today. And I’m just going to dive in and talk about rule number one, which is to use plain language. Now, we’ve got a couple of examples here, where we took something, you know, that was kind of an original version of a phrase or a, you know, piece of guidance, and then made some edits to it to make it a little bit higher impact. I’m not going to read them, but what I would love to do is hear from first, Kim, tell me a little bit about how you guys think about this. How do you look at something that you know maybe you’re sending out whether it’s an email or a bill statement or you know a social media post or things like that you know do you have special tricks that you use to you know kind of simplify the language or how do you think about that?
 
Yes. So, I think plain everyday terms is extremely important. Especially in my role in the treasurer’s office, we do use some terms that if you didn’t work in the treasurer’s office, you wouldn’t understand what those terms mean. And so, education is a huge piece and it’s my favorite part of my job is talking to constituents and really letting them know what we do in the office and how we do it. And so, I think using those layman’s terms, something that everyone is going to understand is extremely important. And I really just try to put myself in the taxpayer situation. I try to remove myself as Kim as treasurer and I’ve been doing this for quite some time to the everyday taxpayer that doesn’t know what it is that we do. And so I just really once again just try to reverse that role and say okay what is going to be the easiest way to communicate this information and sometimes if I can’t find alternative words sometimes I will just say the word. So for example I’ll use the word redemption. Redemption means that you’re paying your delinquent property taxes. You’re redeeming that certificate. And so sometimes if I don’t have an alternative word, I’ll say the word but then explain what that word means. So absolutely, it’s extremely important because if they don’t understand what you’re saying, you have just wasted everybody’s time, including yours.
 
Yeah, I love that idea of audience empathy. That’s such a important kind of piece of the puzzle. Joshua, how about you? Anything you want to add there?
 
Yeah, I mean Kim really covered it well and even though we both are a little bit separate as far as our roles, I mean in my city of Fort Smith, it’s billing and collections for water, sewer and sanitation, but the same kind of idea goes into that and a lot of communication that I saw with our customers when I first came to the city was using a lot of the language straight from municipal code or what the city attorney had provided. And again, when you’re looking at words like, you know, if you do not pay your bill, you’ll have a service termination instead of things like that, you don’t want to use those type of words. You want to explain it to where again, there’s more of an empathetic type piece that you know, if you don’t pay your bill by this time, you may be subject to service interruption, things like that. That’s a little bit more subtle, still gets the point across, but then also can be a little bit better on plain language than just taking the municipal code and using it. Now again, there’s sometimes you can’t get around that, especially in government. You have to use certain terms or actually put in the municipal code. I think then it’s also making sure that you don’t just do that, you try to explain that a little bit more in layman’s terms. You’re looking at potentially, you know, what the message is. You might want to look at what audience is it going to hit. Might want to put that more in a different you know reading grade type deal and you can have different tools that will help you put it in eighth-grade or 10th-grade reading level. And so those things like that can also help when you’re having trouble trying to rewrite it in a way that is a little bit easier to read.
 
You know, it’s funny. I love your example of copy and paste from the city attorney or the municipal code as, you know, not the best communication. But I also when you talk about reading level, you know, here you hear sometimes like, oh, you should communicate at an eighth-grade reading level or whatever. And I think the thing that people overlook is everybody prefers to read messages that are at a really, really simple level. This isn’t about are you a good reader or not or you know are you smart or not. It’s really just about ease of consuming the information. You know in today’s crazy world we are inundated with information from so many sources. You know you’re carrying around a phone in your pocket that has all of the world’s information in it. And between social media and radio and television and music and your email and your direct messages and your messaging at work, like everybody’s already overwhelmed, right? And so, you know, simpler is always better. I like, you know, we use the term barbecue language, like would you say it like that at a barbecue? And that it’s always, you know, when we’re writing marketing copy for PayIt, we always sort of look, you know, squint at it afterwards and say, would you say it like that at a barbecue? And if not, it’s time to make a revision. So, you know, I like that lens a lot. Okay, let’s move on to rule number two, which is using both digital and these sort of old-school channels like you remember mail, the newspaper, things like that. You know, we talk about this as, you know, it’s a little bit of a belt-and-suspenders thing, right? It’s if I missed you on my social channels or via email, if you didn’t catch that, at least you’re going to get it, you know, in your bill statement or in the mailer that we send out or things like that. You know, it’s both a way like some people prefer to get information on social media, other people, you know, would look for it in a radio announcement or things like that. And Joshua, I’m gonna throw this one in your direction first. Do you guys have kind of a way about that mix or like how do you guys in Fort Smith approach this sort of making sure both that you’re reaching everybody and that you’ve kind of got the right message in the right place at the right time.
 
We use all of them. I mean, you know, still use the old channels and then use the new and anytime there’s new ones that come up, we use it. Again, we’re government. We’re not an energy drink company or a tennis shoe company where we have a very small target market right you are serving your citizens within your entire municipality so all of those citizens get their information different ways. And so we use all of them. Now there’s times that there could be more of a target type piece of what we’re communicating, but when it comes to all of our customers in water, sewer, and sanitation, we use everything. Now I will tell you that, you know, as a government, we don’t want to exclude and the relationship that I have with our public relations team, sometimes they do just want to kind of get away from some of the old traditional ways of communication. But that’s what’s great about our partnership is that I come from the customer service side and, you know, let them know that we still have, you know, very, you know, large demographics that still get their information here and they’ll tell us, I don’t do social media or, you know, I don’t watch the news, you know, I get my news this way. And so, there’s still a big need for making sure that you’re using every communication outlet that you possibly can. But I will say that even in my role and especially with the city for the last eight years is that word of mouth will still be your strongest suit as far as getting the word out. Especially on things that you want your customers to adopt or certain channels of communication or getting their information you want them to get. But the only way that you can get that word of mouth out there is to still hit every single communication channel that is at your fingertips.
 
Yeah, for sure. Kim, what would you add here?
 
Absolutely. So, I think it’s very important first and foremost when you’re trying to figure out that communication channel is who is your audience? Who is your target audience? For me, it’s taxpayers, right? And taxpayers are all ages, all generations, different languages. And so, you have to get creative sometimes. And in government as well, we have budget restrictions. As Joshua said, we’re not an energy drink company where we can just spend millions of dollars on advertising. So, you have to get creative. And so, Pueblo is an older community overall. They fear change. And so, I knew this was something that was going to be a little bit of an obstacle for me, but I am always up for the challenge. And so I used direct mail, so making sure to include information with their tax notice. I host seminars for those old-school people that like to see it in person and be able to answer questions, things like that. And then of course, social media. It’s free and it’s going to be your biggest reach. And I think it’s just really important to understand as well that you have to do it multiple times. It’s about repetition. You can’t just post about it once and think that people are going to watch it or even catch on. And so every Tuesday I do a segment called Property Tax Tuesday. And every Tuesday I post a video to the Pueblo County Facebook page and it talks about what’s new in the treasurer’s office, what’s currently going on in the treasurer’s office. And I’m very good at saying things in very different ways, but still getting the same message across. So, it’s just not me reposting the same video. It’s me doing a new video and maybe just saying it a little bit differently or maybe I covered one part of our online payment system, but then in the next one I’m going to talk about maybe fees or setting up profiles, something like that. And so I just think it’s really important to know your audience, make sure that there’s repetition, making sure that you are meeting the demographic. So, English, Spanish, we do have a lot of Spanish-speaking residents here. So, it was very important to me to make sure that we had literature in both Spanish and English to make sure that we’re not excluding anyone from really understanding what Pueblo County Treasurer’s Office is doing and what services we offer when it comes to property tax payments.
 
That’s great. I mean, I really love Taco Tuesday, but Property Tax Tuesday sounds almost as good.
 
I will say it has really taken off and I really like to tell the story of I started doing Property Tax Tuesday. I started in 2020 during COVID and I was not treasurer but I worked in the treasurer’s office and I saw a really huge need for just some basic general information. And so I just started making these videos in my bedroom with my ring light. Sometimes I do them in my car. And it’s really evolved. Here we are 5 years later and they’re professionally edited videos by our media person here at Pueblo County Government and they’re beautiful. They’re edited and they’ve come a long way, but let me tell you, everybody knows about Kim’s Property Tax Tuesday because it really is a wealth of knowledge. And I gave it, you know, kind of a little sprinkle with the title. I wanted to make it catchy and that was the first thing that came into my mind. I was like Property Tax Tuesday. We’re going to start posting these on Tuesdays.
 
So how long are these videos?
 
30, 45 seconds max. They’re short, sweet, and to the point.
 
Perfect for the TikTok generation, right?
 
Exactly. Exactly. So, we don’t have TikTok. I’d really like to start doing that because once again, right, knowing your audience, that younger audience is going to be on TikTok. The older audience is going to be on Facebook and then you’re going to have kind of a hodgepodge of everybody on Instagram and then more of the professionals on LinkedIn. So once again, gearing your message for the right platform. Yeah. Because what I post on Instagram, what I post on Facebook, what I post on LinkedIn are entirely different content, but it’s the same message and I get the same point across just in a different way.
 
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. That’s awesome. All right, let’s keep going. We like to talk about the tone that you use and how they’re different. Kim, you alluded a little bit to how you kind of decided you wanted to make it a little bit fun and so you called it Property Tax Tuesday and you made these videos. You know, property tax is typically not the most fun topic for residents, but at the same time, you know, you don’t have to worsen it, right? And I think one of the things that we spend a lot of time working with clients on is like how do you strike that right tone in between? Yeah, I’m using barbecue language. I have my communications really kind of simple and concise and clear, but it doesn’t have to feel like watching paint dry, right? And you know, there’s also different situations where, you know, when you’re telling somebody their tax bill is late, you’re probably taking a different tone than we’re extending the hours at the library or something like that. Kim, I’ll hand you first on this one. Any observations here or anything you would add here?
 
You know, going back to that educational piece. I’m huge on education and so I think just starting at a basic level of just educating people about property taxes and how they work. Joshua, I love it. You know, you’re a sanitation district, correct? He deals with water and sanitation. And so, right, part of property taxes goes to sanitation districts, water districts, school districts, library districts, and so many others. And so I think when you just start at a basic level and educate people on property taxes and how they work, it then opens up the door to have those discussions about property taxes. Like you said, nobody wants to talk about property taxes. It’s the most boring subject ever, but I make it fun. I make it interesting. I engage them in learning. Hey, do you have children that go to school? Great. Did you know that your property taxes go to this school district? Go to this library district. And so I think it’s just really making them a part of the conversation and letting them know, hey, you don’t have to work in the treasurer’s office to understand this. You as a property owner pay property taxes every year and you should be informed on where that money goes. And so once again, it’s just really bringing them in and making them feel almost like they’re part of the treasurer’s office.
 
Yeah. You know, it’s funny you mentioned that because we did some research about a year and a half ago and we were researching consumers and saying which of these messages kind of is the most motivating for you and one of the messages that was kind of at the top of the list was this idea that when you pay your property taxes online it means that fire, police, schools, libraries, whatever get funded faster. And that was one that was like, oh, okay. And I think people don’t necessarily they’re not thinking about where that money is going at that moment. And so reminding them is great. Joshua, what would you add to this?
 
The same thing that Kim and you both are, you know, relaying there. Especially on the water and sewer side, whenever some, you know, customer looks at a bill, they don’t necessarily know as long as the water is turned on when they turn the faucet and, you know, everything goes down the drain and it’s fine. They don’t realize that especially when you’re trying to raise rates. And so the education piece and then also just not doing it just when you’re raising rates, but also letting the customer know what their bill is going towards. And again, water and sewer is all underground. You don’t see it. It’s not something that’s in your face every day like a trash cart that gets picked up and taken off. And so doing those type of videos and educational, we’ve been going into the public schools and teaching kids about it. And so that way they have a better understanding as they grow up. And just as Kim had talked about before, looking at your different demographics and language barriers and try to break those down in your communication. Not only do we have a large Spanish community, we also have a very large Vietnamese and Laotian demographic in the city of Fort Smith. And so, those can be a little bit more difficult. Spanish translations, you know, the words, they’re not an apple to apple, right? Cut off, you know, translated to Spanish is not the exact same word. And so you have to be very careful too when trying to meet those demographics that not only are you getting a good translation and sometimes Google Translate and some of those aren’t the best. Utilize people within the ranks. There’s been different bill inserts and things we put out on social media that we wanted to put in Spanish and we had two to three different employees sit down and kind of work together on that translation to make sure it was the best. When you go into other languages like Laotian and Vietnamese the dialects can be very different between those. It’s not just, you know, one different new language and you have to be very careful there as well. And so that’s when you, you know, maybe spend a little bit of money like we have and get a translation service. One for our call center when the customer calls in to help with that kind of communication. But also too with some of the written translations we’ve sent those off especially for larger type pieces when we have some of our low-income programs and different things they have to fill out on the forms. Those are the ones that we have sent off to the language translation companies to help us out with and that way you have the inclusive part. You’re not impartial to anybody on that sense.
 
You know, I think the translation thing is such an interesting topic because our communities are diverse and you have English language learners, but if you’re not careful with it in all the safeguards that you just described, it’s a really easy place to allow tone to slip, right? If you’re telling somebody, you know, heaven forbid, like you’re doing an emergency management thing and there’s a flood that people need to evacuate from or things like that, you know, that’s a very specific and urgent tone and, you know, you want it to land exactly that same way no matter what language it’s conveyed in. And so, you know, Google Translate isn’t necessarily going to pick up on that right off the bat, right?
 
No. You still want to have the empathy within some of those situations, especially low-income or things like that. You want to make sure in translation that you still have some of those tones and empathy. You don’t want to come across as a, you know, robotic, you know, government official. But I tell you, hitting those translations for some of those other ethnicities can go a long way. It can really make them feel like that your government, your city does actually care about everybody that lives within the city and that you’re reaching out to all pieces of the community, trying to make sure that they’re all informed.
 
Right. Right. All right. I’m going to keep going. Rule number four, make sure people don’t miss any action steps. So, you know, this is about making it really clear what it is that they need to do if it’s something and frankly if they don’t need to do anything, making that really clear as well. And so, you know, we do a lot of email campaigns on behalf of our clients and you know, we always look at them and say, okay, is it clear what is required? You know, it is the first sentence. Your bill is past due or, you know, property tax bills are coming out in two weeks or your vehicle registration is going to be due for renewal in a month or things like that. And it’s like at the top and then again at the bottom and we’re just really clear this is what you need to do. And sometimes we’re just informing and it’s like you do not need to take any action at this time because not being clear about that I think certainly generates support calls and confuses people and frustrates residents and things like that. Curious if you guys have ever had experiences with that. Joshua, I’m gonna hand to you first just because I’m alternating on this.
 
Yes. And you’re right and some of those communications we’ve seen as far as you know your bill’s coming up or your autopay is going to launch. You just don’t want to also get into an oversaturation and you know you got to find that happy medium of making sure that you’re communicating all those type of things so customers and citizens don’t miss anything but again you don’t want to oversaturate because then it’ll get ignored and also too I like the pieces and it’s one of the reasons that you know the city of Fort Smith you know went with PayIt is because a lot of the things we had an issue with is there was too many steps in our former bill pay process. And so it was very hard. But now you simplified that. You’ve also simplified your communication. Does that make sense? And so sometimes your communication can be a product of your current process. And if your current process is way too many steps for a customer to go through and they’re going to get aggravated, well, it’s going to start with you communicating multiple steps to get through just one small thing that they want to get done and move on with their life. So, a lot of it, you know, your communication will have to be a byproduct of what your system is or your process. And so, we also like what PayIt does. We’ve kind of learned a better way to communicate to our customers because of the way that PayIt has done that with us and which is, you know, keep the first communication very simple. You know, couple lines that really alert and then a link if you want to get more information or for the rest of the steps. And so there’s different ways that you can do that to make sure that nothing is missed, but you’re not also doing a communication that’s almost overwhelming to where they just don’t want to even start reading it at all.
 
Oh yeah. You see that wall of text and you’re just like ugh or at least I am. Maybe that’s a me problem.
 
No, I think it’s a problem when people see that. And you know, your first piece of your communication needs to capture their attention. Once you’ve got the attention, then you can provide other things that will keep their attention to make sure the full communication is delivered. You don’t miss any steps. And some of that time can be more of you know bigger letters to kind of capture but then you know some of the fine print down the bottom or you know the same deal you know large font and then a link if you want to learn more and sometimes you’re still going to get more people to click on that link to learn more finish the communication than you would if you tried to put everything into one large medium.
 
You know, you mentioned something that we kind of have neglected to talk about at all, which is the visual dimension of effective communication when you alluded to a large font, right? You know, information has a hierarchy and people’s attention gravitates towards different things. And so, you know, there’s all kinds of, you know, user experience science behind font size and colors and, you know, that kind of thing. And I think that is another thing that is so important, right? It’s that whole idea of like there’s a reason that when there’s a button on a website to do something, it’s a different color. It’s easy to spot, right? And you know, whether it’s a social post or a digital experience or things like that, there’s a visual dimension of effective communication as well. Kim, how about you? What’s happening in Pueblo around action steps and how you’re making sure people know what they need to do and are able to do it?
 
Yeah. So, I’m glad you kind of touched base a little bit on the different fonts and things like that. I’m pretty sure this is just a Colorado thing. I could be wrong. Where our websites, any postings, any videos, they have to be ADA-compliant. So, that means that anybody, you know, with a disability is able to get that communication. So, for example, I’m going to reference my Property Tax Tuesdays a lot because that is a lot of my communication. And so, for example, when we’re posting these videos, they’re also, you know, have the captions there for people to read. And so, our Pueblo County government does really well at making sure color schemes are ADA-compliant, right? Making sure you don’t have a really light or small font against a smaller font. And so all of these things that a lot of people probably don’t think about that it’s because they don’t have that disability, right? They can see fine. They don’t have any impaired to their vision or anything like that. And so I think it’s things that we take for granted that I have become really more cognizant and aware of when I’m communicating. And so we really try to strive to make sure that everybody is able to understand the message that I’m even trying to get out there. And so I wanted to start off with that. As far as communication through the treasurer’s office, I do a little handholding because property taxes are so important. They’re important for everyone. They’re important for my office because that’s really what funds our community. And they’re important for that assessed owner because if they don’t pay their taxes, they could be in jeopardy of losing that property. And so the minute property tax notices go out, I let people know, hey, you should be receiving that in your mailbox within the next week. If you haven’t, contact our office, you know, and then the next one’s going to be, hey, first half deadline is approaching. Remember, we must receive your first half by February 28th. And then I let them know if we don’t receive it, what happens? Then there’s interest. And so I really do a lot of handholding because of the importance of property taxes for everyone. And so I am once again really repetitive in my communication, but in very different ways. It’s the same message, but it’s worded completely different. So it doesn’t seem like, oh my gosh, this girl just keeps talking about February 28th. I let them know maybe the first one is just going to be hey deadline’s coming up February 28th. These are the different payment options in how you can pay your property taxes and then maybe the next one might just be hey have you ever used our online system to pay your property taxes. Remember February 28th is first half deadline. Pay from the convenience of your home. Click this link and I’ll put the link there. And then maybe the next one will be about the online system again, but then I’ll talk about the fees associated with that and the difference. They can use an a and that’s going to be one fee. They can use a credit card or a debit card and that’s going to be a different fee. And so once again, I am very repetitive but in a very different way to ensure that people don’t miss steps because there’s a lot at stake when you’re missing steps in paying your property taxes.
 
Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you brought up the accessibility topic, too, because it’s so important. And I think, you know, people who don’t do those kinds of things for a living maybe aren’t even necessarily aware of that. But I’m glad that you mentioned that because that’s something that certainly at PayIt spend a lot of time, you know, kind of thinking about and paying attention to. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s like the arrow in the FedEx truck. It’s like all of a sudden I’m like, “Oh, the contrast.” It is. It’s not the right color. It’s not bright enough, you know, or whatever. And, you know, you wouldn’t necessarily have known until you see it. Right.
 
Correct.
 
Yeah. Okay. I’m going to keep going. This is my last rule and it is that transparency fosters trust. You know, we hear a lot about trust in government and it’s, you know, on the decline, etc., etc. And sometimes government has to send difficult messages, right? Like, you know, there’s going to be a service interruption or there are fees associated with your payment or, you know, again, back to the old your bill is overdue. I would love to hear and Kim, I’ll have you go first, are there any things that you kind of use as your rules to make sure you are being as transparent as possible? And how do you tackle sensitive topics like when you’re talking about, you know, like one of the things that we have been talking about a lot at PayIt is how residents feel about AI in government. And so like talking about where you’re using AI or not or fees or system changes or delays or things like that. How do you guys tackle that stuff?
 
So once again, it is just really educating them. When we launched PayIt, I was a little bit concerned about how the residents were going to react to the increase in the fees. So, the percentage was a little bit higher from what our old online payment system offered. And so, we are an older community, a lot of fixed incomes. And so, I was a little bit nervous about that, but I didn’t let it deter me. I didn’t try to sugarcoat it or anything. I just, you know, kind of came out and said, “This is the new fee structure.” And when I got pushback, I said, “I understand. I understand that everybody’s budget is different.” And so that’s why I’ve offered several different ways for you to pay your property taxes. You don’t have to use our online payment system. You can mail in a check for free. You can come into the office for free. You know, all of the different ways that’s going to fit everybody’s budget. And so, I think what I also try to do is to let people know that you pay fees everywhere you go. They’re just not as broken down sometimes, right? When you go to purchase groceries, there’s not a separate line item that says, you know, a fee for using your debit card. The fact that it’s broken down in the online payment system. It’s right there in flashing lights. And what people don’t understand is that there’s fees everywhere you go. You’re just paying for it in the product. Let’s say if you’re at the grocery store or you’re at a restaurant, you’re still paying those fees. You’re just paying for it in the cost of the food. And so, I just really try to let people know that fees are just the cost of doing business. It’s the cost of convenience. And for every one person that doesn’t want to pay for it, there’s going to be five others that will. And I can absolutely say that although I was very apprehensive about the fees, my numbers definitely showed a different story. We collected, I believe, three more million and close to 3,000 more transactions than we did with our old online payment system. And so that right there tells me people are willing to pay for convenience. And once again if it’s not within your budget, that’s fine. We have alternative ways to pay your taxes. They’re absolutely free. And so, when I did get the complaints that, you know, the fees are too high and, you know, government already gets a bad rap as it is. People think that I get these property taxes and then I go vacation in a foreign country for months. And unfortunately, that’s not the way property taxes work. And so, once again, I think it’s just really about giving people options. People like options because online payment doesn’t work for one person, it’s going to work for another. Mailing in a payment is going to work for one person, it’s not going to work for another. So, I think just really giving people the power of you get to choose the way you want to pay your property taxes with whatever fits your budget.
 
Yeah. Joshua, what do you have to add here?
 
Well, in the piece of transparency, I mean, especially in government, if you don’t tell your story first, you know, the media and people on social media will tell it for you. And the disinformation and things can get out and you’ve almost lost before you started. And so, a lot depending on what it is. And so, I’ll just go ahead and use the example of recently we did both water and sewer rate increases. And as Kim probably knows with taxes, I mean, raising rates is never something that is just overwhelmingly accepted by your customer base. Especially when it comes from your local government. And so one thing I think is starting to happen which is governments are actually including public relations and your customer service people at the table along with your finance department, your city administrations, your municipal government and, you know, communication strategies, PR campaigns need to be a part of a lot of these things at the very start and that way you can when it comes to rates again especially in water and sewer everything’s underground people don’t understand why you need to keep raising rates for infrastructure. Well, I mean, our sewer infrastructure is aging and having problems and we’re getting into issues with the EPA. And then also, if we want our city to grow, and it has been growing, we have to get ahead of that. We have to be proactive, not reactive, but that can be very hard to explain. So, transparency, education, it all goes back to the empathy. Yes, we know that this could be hard for some people financially, but this is why. And it could help our city one stay out of any kind of regulatory issues but also two it could help with economic development. And as far as you know when you do make mistakes I mean there was a time that we billed a certain amount of customers a 20% late fee instead of a 10% and that was a mistake on my billing team’s side. Now, we could have went in, fixed it, and just said nothing about it and just waited for somebody to call and complain. But I said, “No. We’re going to notify each customer. We’re not only going to send an official letter, but we’re also going to look on the account, and if we do have customer contact information, email or phone, we’re going to do both. And we’re going to make sure that we do call the customer, let them know. We’re going to apologize and let them know how we fixed it, how it’s going to reflect on their bill.” And I think having that approach once again gets ahead of it. That way, again, if somebody calls to complain, they get mad because they weren’t contacted by the city, all of a sudden they’re calling their local media, they’re calling their local city, you know, elected official. So again, it really is better to get out in front, be transparent. And when we did that, we actually earned more customer advocacy and respect from our customers that we contacted them directly and let them know. And so, transparency really does, I mean, I’ll let you know, especially in the municipal world, it does foster a lot of trust with your citizens.
 
Man, between what the both of you said, there’s just so much great kind of advice in there. Like I think about, you know, sort of the message control, the best defense is a strong offense, get in front of the message, own your mistakes and errors and make them right. And just be factual and open and, you know, provide options like on the fee topic that you brought up. But I love, you know, you don’t have to be cringy and kind of hide it in the fine print. It’s your fees are going to go up and it’s because you’re getting a better customer experience and we’re modernizing and this isn’t necessarily any different to what you’re already paying in other circumstances, but I love that just sort of forthright, open, straightforward approach. Lots of great stuff in there. You guys have already given us a ton of great advice, but what I’d love to do to bring it home is imagine you are advising somebody who is new to a role like yours. What advice or you know these can be things that you learned the hard way too. What advice would you give to your peers who are tackling some of the same challenges that you are? Joshua, I’m gonna let you do this one first.
 
Well, again, I mean, probably the only thing that I feel like we haven’t really touched on yet or myself anyway, is use your partners. You know, we talked about target audience and even us, we do have some. So, even though we are a municipality and we have, you know, all the citizens to communicate with, but even like with our low-income program, when we put out social media posts, you know, Kim was talking about it too, you don’t want to saturate, but you want to also make sure that you don’t just post it once. But also we like to use our partners. So when we do low-income, we will then message our nonprofits within the city and say, “Hey, we’re posting this on our Facebook or our, you know, different social medias. Will you help share it?” Well, that’s a target. I mean, they’re the ones that are also trying to help low-income. And so use your partners to help with your communication within the community. One thing too I’ll tell you on a bigger scale, the partnership with PayIt. When we went from our old bill pay system and went with PayIt, the partnership between the city of Fort Smith and PayIt was great. We did a huge communication and PR campaign. I mean, you’re making everybody go from one system to another, but the biggest challenge was our autopay customers. I’ll admit, my wife and I, we do a lot of our bills autopay. We are paperless and I’m really bad about not checking my email to see if the payment was made. I’ll just be honest. And we knew that a lot of customers were probably not going to get the message even though as much as we were blanketing out there the communication. We knew that some autopay customers were probably gonna not get their bill paid. And so it was getting ahead of that too, trying to look through those autopay customers, trying to communicate with them directly and then just working with PayIt on other ways that we could try to communicate that out even using the new platform. So partnerships can be great with getting your communication out there.
 
Yeah, for sure. My husband is my go-to. I’m like, can you just come read this? Does this make sense to you as a layperson who has no idea what this is about? He’s sort of my test bed for messaging sometimes. Kim, what about you?
 
No, I agree. I think there’s two sides of this, right? There’s the communication side to your team and then there’s the communication side to your constituents and you know, in my case, my taxpayers. And they’re two entirely different types of communication or advice or lessons, right? I’m trying to think. Yes. So going from our old payment system to PayIt was kind of my first big integration and so I was new to all of this. I didn’t think of a lot of things on the back end of it when it came to it and alerts and communication. There was a lot of stuff that I just didn’t thoroughly think out from A to Z. And then when we were in it, it was like, oh, I didn’t think about that. Oh, didn’t think about that. And so, I think just understanding that it is a process and it’s not going to be a clean process. It’s not a messy process by all means, but there’s going to be some bumps and there’s going to be some headaches. And so just making sure that your team knows, you know, this isn’t going to be perfect, but we’re going to work through these bumps until it’s a fine-tuned machine. And because on the flip side of that, when your taxpayers, you know, are upset because it’s a new platform and once again, my community does not like change. And so I just really try to hold their hand as best I can and really just kind of tell them, hey, please allow the treasurer’s office a little grace and mercy. We are transitioning to a new system. We are here to help. We are also learning and so let’s learn together. And so once again, if you make them feel like they are a part of your team and you know with my office, it was turning that fear and anxiety into excitement because it was going to make our job easier. And once we’re in it, like everything else, you get it and you understand it. And you know, I hope that next year my taxpayers really understand and take advantage of the full benefits of PayIt by creating an account so that it stores their payment history. This way when they go to pay their bill next year, it’s the click of a button. They already have their payment information. So as long as their payment method has not changed, they get to just click a button and hit pay. You know, that convenience of storing receipts. We, you know, we fielded a lot of phone calls, especially around tax season, hey, I need a receipt on, you know, the property taxes that I paid. Can you email that to me? Can you mail it to me? And so now, this allows that taxpayer to take control and do things on their terms, on their time, and not Monday through Friday, 8 to 4:30 when somebody’s in the office. And so, there’s going to be bumps. There’s going to be learning curves. And it’s the way you react to them. As Joshua stated earlier, being proactive is so much better than being reactive. But sometimes we do have to be reactive. And as long as you know how to word that and with transparency, people are pretty receptive to that. They’re pretty understanding. Now, you’re never going to win. You know, anybody who is in public service, anybody who is in government, anybody who is a politician, right, understands that I’m never going to please everybody, and that’s okay. I know I have done my best with what I have been given, and I can sleep very well at night knowing that I have given my taxpayers everything that they need in order to pay their property taxes and to be transparent.
 
Yeah. Yeah, it’s a lot of change management. And I think there were two things that you mentioned. One was the importance of internal communications because there’s a lot of change management internally whenever you’re making a change whether it’s a payment system or something else, right? But then you know the folks who work in your offices are then another opportunity to amplify the message to the resident, right? Then they’re explaining it whether they’re working in customer service line or in the office or encountering residents in other situations. They can also sort of be a little bit of the voice of the agency. The other thing that I really hear from both of you is you’re bringing a very human kind of dimension to how you’re communicating that you know give us a little bit of grace. It’s a new system or just you know using that kind of barbecue language and being a little bit more relatable and I think nobody would say you know typically the thing oh I relate so much to my local government but at the same time like there’s you know a little bit of humanness can go a long way. I think it helps people see the empathy and maybe return it a little bit as well. Any other parting thoughts before we move on? Final words of advice? Well, my final word of advice for our audience is that the PayIt GovLab is open for business. We have a whole series of webinars both on demand and ones that will be coming in the future. Using this QR code is a great way to sign up. And I would love to just once again thank Joshua and Kim. You know you guys have big jobs and you’re busy so making time to be with us today and to help the folks who are attending the webinar is a real gift part of this and I know I learned a lot listening to you guys and I know that the audience is going to really enjoy it as well.
 
Thank you. Thank you so much. You know I hope everyone finds value in this webinar.
 
Thank you so much for having me.