Get it right from level one: Understanding your residents

Welcome, everybody. We’re delighted you’re here. This is episode one of PayIt GovLab, our series for the fall. It is back-to-school time, and we are going to start with a fantastic topic today. Our topic is going to be all about understanding your residents so that you can serve them better, and you can drive adoption of digital channels for transactions and interactions with your office.

My name is Kelly Davis-Felner, and I am the Chief Marketing Officer of PayIt, and I have two awesome panelists today. I’d love to introduce first John Globensky and then Becky Ryan. John, will you start with just a brief introduction of yourself and your role and the good work that you’re doing in Grand Rapids, please?

I’m John Globensky. I’m the City Treasurer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We’re a community of about 200,000 residents. I’ve been a longtime adopter of some of the tools that we’re going to talk about, and we actually implemented PayIt, awarded a contract in 2016, went live in 2017, and I’ve been using the system since then.

We’ve grown this from a $29 million a year payment processing to $200 million a year through iterative change and continuing to add additional services. So this is something that is a very much a passion of mine – the customer experience and community engagement – and look forward to further this conversation with today’s GovLab podcast.

Becky Ryan, let’s hear from you.  I serve as Deputy Director of Jackson County Collections in Kansas City, Missouri. We are the second largest county here in the state of Missouri. We have over, I believe, 730,000 residents in our county. I oversee four of the five units in our department.

And we bring in about just over $1.5 billion of taxpayer income a year, and then we distribute it out to the jurisdictions, to the schools, to everyone that basically has the levy where that money goes to. So that doesn’t all come to Jackson County. Only a small percentage helps us function.

The rest of it goes out to schools, fire, libraries, all of those. I have been here almost two years now, so, I’m getting my feel around things. We’ve been with PayIt since I’ve been here. And we’ve definitely seen, I don’t have numbers, but we’ve definitely seen a massive increase in our ability to gain the online support we’ve been looking for.

So let’s do level set. I have some data that I went and snagged for you guys. I’m going to have each of you talk about what you’re collecting online, but I went and grabbed the latest data that we have on digital adoption for services broadly in each of your jurisdictions.

And both of you have north of benchmark, both customer satisfaction, but also digital adoption. And so, you know, I’ve got my last data on Jackson County is a little bit old, but it looked like you guys were about 58%. And then John, I think that we are at about 85% in Grand Rapids. Does that sound about right to you guys?

Spot on. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s worth noting that this does not happen accidentally, right? And so what I’d love to do is hear a little bit about, you know, you’ve been at this for several years and so what I want to do is talk to you a little bit about the secret tricks that you guys have used over time.

But I think the first thing I want to make sure that we do is talk first about what holds people back. Not to start too much with the negative, but in your experiences, and Becky, I’m going to call on you first, just to give you the heads-up. What have you guys found holds people back from digital adoption?

Is it, you know, have you ever gotten feedback from folks, either anecdotally or across the board? What are the things that you’re trying to overcome when you’re trying to drive digital adoption? So for us, the most feedback that we’ve gained back as far as hesitance for the digital adoption our biggest barriers are honestly just the taxpayers who refuse to use their credit cards online, period.

That’s been a big issue for a fair amount of people. Even if they’re not saving their credit card online and saving the payment information. They just really don’t trust anything don’t want to do it. And we have a fairly large group of Jackson County people who are not vetted in a bank.

So they don’t own a debit card, they don’t own a credit card, they solely run on cash. And so that those have been basically our two biggest barriers here in Jackson County. You know, if they don’t have access to internet, they have a cell phone. So that really hasn’t been an issue. We’ve done a lot of education with our elderly community.

They get a lot of help through our library system, things like that. But our biggest two issues are just the people who just flat out refuse to put their credit card or debit card online, and then the ones who really don’t haven’t even adopted the system.

Awesome. I think, you know, one of the things that we are doing is we every summer run a big poll of US consumers to try to get a feel for, “Hey, what do you think about transacting digitally? What has your experience been like? What’s important to you?” And so as we have our discussion today, I’m going to share a little bit of data from that. The report is out now, so, folks will, you know, obviously send this as a follow-up to everybody who is, hanging out with us for this discussion today. But let’s dive into that.

So one of our questions was, you know the first thing we ask is always: Have you ever transacted online with a government agency? And then if so, you know, how has that been for you? And so about 22%, so about one in five of the sample said, “Oh, you know, we transacted offline last time or most recently.”

And then among the ones who have completed transactions online we asked them later, “Have you ever had to give up on one where you were trying to do a government transaction and it just didn’t work out?” And so as we dug into those numbers and started looking at some of the drivers, so the things that hold back people from using a digital channel in the first place and/or that can cause trouble along the way were very, very consistently there’s an awareness problem, “I had no idea that I could do this online.”

There are security concerns always come up as kind of a big one, and, Becky, you alluded to this, like, you know, either a, “I just don’t do anything online,” or, “I am not sure that this is the official service or that this has the right kind of security protections for my credit card data and my personal data,” and so on.

Whether or not a service is actually available online. In our experience, what we found, and I think this is true pretty universally, is it’s sometimes not every single bill that you can pay online, right? Sometimes things are online, sometimes they’re not. Maybe if something’s a little bit more complicated or has a, you know, an application step involved, sometimes, you know, jurisdictions have not made brought those kinds of services online.

So people who encounter sort of a service availability or an eligibility hurdle, sometimes that drives abandonment, kind of midstream. And then finally, usability, right? Like the system has to be really, really straightforward, like, you know, talking about elderly populations who aren’t as internet savvy, for example.

You really have to have this user experience or this customer experience that is pretty easy and straightforward and very intuitive. I’m curious, John and Becky, does this resonate for you? It sounds like you were talking about several of these themes as well, but anything jump out at you from this?

 It sounds very consistent to what we get from our constituents, our taxpayers. You know, one of the biggest things I think we’ve done to help convert people is just we have people walking the lines, you know, end of December when everything comes due, and we have two-hour-plus waiting lines. We love Bradley. Bradley is our guy. He always comes out, and he’s got his tablet, and he’s working the line, and he’s giving out the cards. And so when people are standing there and you see them on their phone, and you see them just waiting to pay, you know, he can walk up to them, “Hey, do you want to get out of this line? Pay online and you’re good to go.” You know, a lot of it is they didn’t know that was an option or they physically want that receipt and so they can’t maybe don’t have access to a printer or something. And so without coming in, they don’t have that. But we can, we can always get that out to them. So that’s always been that kind of, if it’s not a card safety issue, it’s a little bit of a technical issue or they honestly just are oblivious even though the sign’s right in front of them that says, “Here, pay online.” They’ve just never really noticed it before.  

John, anything to add there?


Yep. And I think when I when I look at this I think when I see a response like the system was too hard to use, whenever I hear a customer respond that way, we always will call them and try to walk through the process with them because it just there’s some type of technology issue or understanding issue and I think once you take the time to hand-hold and walk through some of this it all of a sudden this these clouds disappear and this ray of sunshine beams through. And, but I always want to go back and we always test and we look at the conversational language that we have to make sure that are our steps clear? Is it easy for somebody to use? Can I hand this to somebody who’s never used it before, a relative? “Would you do me a favor and try and go in and pay my water bill or my refuse bill?” And actually ask them to give that a test. When I look at something like service availability, I can easily figure out that we’re 99.9%-plus available. There’s usually only a couple times where I know that we set outages up to refresh data or refresh a message. Our outage experience has been so few, I mean, I don’t think I can count it on one hand. So I know it, it’s not so much a service availability or even with our services because we now have expanded to do nine different functional services to be paid online. So it’s not for lack of that, section being available for somebody to pay. We can always address security concerns and we’re very, very well-versed of the secure nature of our payment processing.
But we also are very well-versed when somebody asks the question, “Well, are you selling my data?” And no, we’re not. That data is not sold. We made sure of it. It’s in our contracts. I can spell that out to them. For those that say they didn’t know they could go online, we say, “Hey, listen, I want you to go out to grandrapidsmi.gov,” and it’s our website, “and I just here’s a couple spaces where you can look to say I want to and say pay a bill.” I said, “You can see how easy it is that it’s available online for you, and we will tell you whether it’s online, telephone, in person, or mail-in payment options to make sure it’s very clear.” So, you know, when we think about this gap, we’re trying to demystify the gap. You know, it’s a lot of it, I think, comes down to where someone is just uncomfortable and they don’t know. They hear the horror stories of where the data’s going. They hear the horror stories of getting, something compromised. We want to demystify that and give them comfort to know we’re watching those things, and we really are here for their benefit so that we can help them get activity done with the city as quickly as they can on whatever device and whenever they want to get it done, 24/7.

Anything else that you guys have done that, you know, addresses barriers to adoption? You know, Becky, I love your story about Bradley coming and working the line with you guys. Bradley is a PayIt employee, but I think he just enjoys also being out there on those busy days and getting to meet people. He’s a wonderful people person, and he you can just see he’s in his element.


Yeah. Like, he’s in the zone.  We always have a couple of our own county employees that will also help walk the line, get bills printed for people- Yeah … if they don’t have their bills printed, like that kind of thing. But, you know, it just amazes me how responsive people are to Bradley and just that effort of PayIt coming out to our lines to be an additional hands-on. We get a couple more of our people. We usually have three or four people running with tablets up and down the line so that they can get people, “Here, just pay here.” You know, this is, “Then you don’t have to sit here and wait for another two hours.” And, and Bradley’s just such a people person that you just always see him smiling with people, so he’s wonderful to have.  

John, anything that you would add there?

You know, I think that’s the most important thing is that the behind-the-scenes is where people drop out. So I, I think when we talk about that gap, you know, that’s where we could stress test our GR PayIt backend system to find out how many people are dropping out at what point. Is it as a registered user or as a guest? And if it’s to a guest, what service were they looking to connect with? That’s important feedback to us because then we really want to look at is there something really in the way that they’re not wanting to step through?

It could just be the sheer amount of the bill that they went out, they looked, they saw, and they backed out. They were just going to do a confirmation on how much they owed. That I think is probably going to be a lot of what we see, is that they might go in and see that their ticket is worth– is $30 versus $60, or their property tax bill is $3,512, and they just wanted to know back on July 7th. Our due date is July 31st, and so they’re just confirming how much is still owed before they have to make that payment. So that could be a large thing. It’d be nice to if we could figure that out where they drop, but I know the backend detail is there. The other barrier to adoption is that not having enough connection points.

So, you know, as Bradley’s walking up and down the line in Jackson County, all of my staff have these beautiful little business cards they can hand out that gives not only the grpayit.us, it gives the app, it gives the phone number for an IVR payment because we have IVR payments now through PayIt as part of a single source. And then also we put out the QR code and what bills they could pay. And it’s messaging over years, right? It’s not, it’s not a one and done. So Bradley’s going to walk up and down the line multiple years, but just like we’ve had different advertising within our different message boards in our primary collection locations, “Hey, skip the line. Click the QR code.” You know, something catchy that people are reading right away and going, “I, you know, I’ve got better things to do with my time than stand here for 30 and 40 minutes.” And when you really find out that one of the barriers I think of the resident barrier when I talk to people that took a bus and two transfers it took 40 minutes to get here to pay their water bill. And they have to take the same two buses for another 40 minutes back home. And you’re talking about a significant amount of time out a person’s day, especially if they have to get off work, to come in and pay a water bill, and now they’re two and three hours not getting a paycheck because they either– Well, maybe they got a paycheck ’cause they used three hours of vacation pay.

But I mean, I don’t want people to have to jump to be here at City Hall. So a barrier is to make sure that we’re not causing a challenge to them to have to drive here or ride a bus to come see us to pay a bill.

Let’s talk a little bit about feedback from your residents. When we were in the prep call, we were talking about this as well, and, you know, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to mount a huge, you know, gigantic survey, for example, for your whole community. But there are some other ways that you can kinda gather insights and feedback from folks. So let’s talk a little bit about the, about that. Becky, I think I’ll, I’ll call on you first for this one as well and see, you know, what have you been able to learn about folks over time and about your community?  

So we do a little bit with surveys. We have surveys set up after any of our phone bank interacts with customers. And that, you know, one, it tells us how we’re doing customer service-wise, how our call, our phone bank people addressing things, addressing people.

But then it also kind of tells us, okay, how is our clarity of information? You know, how clear are we? Are we walking people through or are we just telling them to go to our website? Are we showing them once they get to the website what to do? And so that’s been very beneficial for us. We have really awesome people in our phone bank that go above and beyond to get people on the website to say, “Okay, scroll down, you’re going to click here, and then this is going to take you here.” And, you know, give them the information and the tools they need so that they don’t feel reliant on our 8:00 to 5:00 hours to be able to verify amounts that are due or bills that need to be paid or anything like that.

And so I feel like the better we can do with that service, that also helps build that online presence in our in our county as well. We’ve seen great growth every year for the amount of people that we have adopting the PayIt plan and getting online and not only being the one-time user, the guest user, but then also honestly registering and keeping track of their properties.

It’s been a huge benefit. We hear a lot, especially with our, like our landlord community that has multiple, multiple properties and then they have their own personal property as well. They can go in and set up everything so that- When they’re getting their bill, they can see every one of their properties and just pay one bill and have it done.
And that’s been huge for them to keep track of because otherwise they have a mailing bill, and then they have to, you know, did they come in with all of them or did they miss one? And they’re trying to keep track. And, you know, as much as we love the US Postal Service, it is not as accurate as we need it to be and not always as fast as we need it to be.

And so there’s a lot of drop in communication with that. Whereas, when we get somebody online on PayIt we get those email addresses, we get those connections, we see that click rate to all of whatever we send out, which, you know, we do a minimal send out mostly just around our billing season as reminders.

And we see an amazing turnaround that just soars past what the average is for clicking on the emails, clicking into their accounts, verifying things. And I really think it’s just it’s the people here that we have working for us that not only do they want to make things easier for our taxpayers, but their main goal is really educating people so that this tax process isn’t as big of a struggle as it can seem.

John, what would you add there?


So with resident feedback, we do conduct a survey through PayIt every two years or so. We actually go out and we reach out to the resident, the actual registered users. You can’t exactly reach out to a guest because that’s just something you don’t do. It’s spam. I’d rather just reach out to the registered users to ask about our system and what they like about it, what they don’t like about it, and it’s a quick hitter, all right? It’s five questions within an actual text box that they could offer suggestions. And we’ve been blessed with the fact that we’ve got over 90% approval rating from our registered users. But then we also look at whatever the feedback questions are or comments are. And so we take that and we actually look to see is that something that we can implement? Is it – an enhancement we hadn’t thought of? How could we address this with our residents? Because, you know, they’re taking the time to offer suggestions. We respect that, and we want to look through. Some things we can do, other things we can’t, but at least we’re taking the time to do that. Our resident feedback, though, is also every single day. We have a generic Grand Rapids treasurer inbox that folks can email us any of their concerns, whether it’s about a parking ticket, a water bill, a, a tax bill, payments.

I had somebody come in, email just the other day saying, “This says Grand Rapids. It’s on my credit card bill for $79.95. I don’t know what this is.” And, you know, it’s taking the time, and so for me, it’s just my own persona. I answer those on the weekend, because I know it’s their concern, and we’re just so respectful of the resident who’s reaching out in fear that something got hacked or their card’s been compromised.

And, you know, you win customers over and every interaction you have, you win them over, and you continue to win them over. And I can go back to old management school days when you talk about delighting the customer. What do you want to do? I just want them to be delighted in the fact that, yes, a city treasurer responded to you on a Saturday or Sunday, or at 10 o’clock at night on a Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday.

You know, whenever I see something that’s kind of an urgent thing like that we pick up and we respond. You know, we didn’t know. We had no idea what was going to happen in 2020. We had no idea that COVID was going to hit the country, the world, right? But we had PayIt in place in 2017. So what that allowed us to do is we were able to retrain staff to be more educational, less transactional-based.

You’re not just processing a check and a stub. You’re actually talking to people. And so that wound up, we wound up being a voice on the other end of a phone. We were answering the phone, we were answering emails when everything was shut down. People were just absolutely gobsmacked that they got a person.

And so, you know, I think the transactional nature of our business then changes to where we’re now a resource for folks, and we’re a voice, you know, you could sayin the ether that’s ready to answer. And that’s where we’re getting the feedback from our customers. That’s how we’re taking it all in.

My staff will bring resident feedback to us. I’ll have other departments who will say, “Hey, we got this, communication from a resident. What do you think?” And we look at every single one of those. We never, never just discount it. And so when you’re holding their feedback in the highest regard and you’re responding, you’re taking it all in, that, that really means something.

And so that’s where we’re really engaged with our residents. Okay, I’m going to move us forward. Let’s talk about anything that people want that you have not been able to do online for them. John, you go first. It’s the request of different payment types. So for example, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo, people wanting to pay in crypto.

You know, those are some of the harder ones to meet now as, as all these different things are being offered for people to pay a bill. I can’t necessarily open it up and let’s go wild western, collect money hand over fist wherever we can get it. You know, we’re watching very closely how the crypto market is evolving.

You know, somebody like Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, PayPal, they’re going to come up with a solution that will allow us to take crypto, that at the point of the transaction, if I, if I’m collecting $1,000, I’m getting back $1,000. It’s not going to matter with the, as the market moves on crypto, that we would then lose money or gain a benefit.

Yeah. But there should be some type of cost associated with it. So that’s the harder one, is as technology changes faster than we can, how do we, how are we preparing to adopt those changes? Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about reaching residents. One of the things that we asked in our survey was, “How did you find out about the digital services that you used?”

And, you know, this was a multiple select, which is why our, you know, totals add up to more than 100%. We said, you know, “Select all that apply.” But the most commonly selected, not surprisingly, internet search, notification on the bill. So, you know, always want to put that QR code and URL on the bill, the government agency website.

I know, John, there is a lore of, you know, this story that’s kind of legend around PayIt about, oh, you went and you looked at what is everybody who’s coming to your website there to do, and I think it was, like, 80% or 85% are there to find a bill or pay a bill. We’ve talked a little bit about email and text messages, and that those also are, you know, for people who have created that account, have opted into those reminders, that that’s a really effective way to get them aware that it’s time again to pay and get them kind of right into that flow to do it online again.

I do want to flag also AI search. So this is the first time we asked about this explicitly, but we said, “Did you find this using an AI tool like a ChatGPT or a Claude or Perplexity?” And you know, it was only about 12% of our overall respondent pool that said, “Yeah, that’s how I got there.” But when we break it out by age cohort, surprise, surprise, Gen Z that youngest pool of your adult constituents, they are already using those tools at a disproportionate rate.
And so there’s a whole other, you know, kind of body of work that has to get done to make sure that your website isn’t just findable on a traditional Google search, but also that all of these LLMs can read your website and find their way to you. And I think some of that how do you promote a digital service like this is going to evolve over time as these Gen Z kids are, you know, buying houses and cars and doing all the things that will then, of course, require them to transact with your agencies.

And I’m curious, you know, anything that you guys have found that did not make our list here that works pretty hard? I think, you know, the one that jumps out at me that we failed to ask about was social media. Do you guys use social media or are there other channels that we’ve forgotten to list here that have been really effective?

John, I’ll go to you first. So we do use social media. I don’t publish it. I’m not on social media, but we have a communications department that I will create messages around property tax time, around due dates, something that just bubbles up, bam, here it is, in case we’ve got people looking at the city’s social media pages.

And our communications department will send them out accordingly, and I usually work with the PayIt marketing staff to, to create those catchy little quick hits. the other thing, we did a long time ago is we Google tagged all of our webpages.  And so if you just type in G-R-P-A-Y-I-T into your search bar, the top 10 hits are our payment website.
So that’s, that resonates with anybody doing an AI search or an internet search. I typed in just, recently as we’re talking here into Claude, I said, “How does, how can I pay my bill electronically in Grand Rapids, Michigan for city services?” And it bubbled up a complete idea of what it, to expect and how to do it, and that it’s through, a GRPayIt, and here’s a phone number if you need to call. And so it’s all there, and so when you start seeing that, you know that you’re in the forefront of their mind when they’re trying to do a quick hit and find you.  


Becky, how about you? Anything that we missed here?  Other than sending your own people out to help us as well as ours. You guys pretty much had it covered. Other than just, you know, word of mouth. So much communication happens that is not directed by us, but, you know, Mary Sue at her church group coffee session on Sunday had to tell all the ladies about how quick and easy it was to go online and just she got her taxes done. She didn’t have to drive to the courthouse.

She didn’t have to stand in line for hours. And, and I feel like we have so many different tight-knit, community bubbles here in the bubble of Jackson County, that, you know, that’s just something that, that happens, that transverse of knowledge within bubbles. We’ve done a lot of… Our, our prior, director here, he’s no longer with us now, but he was amazing and, he did I think it was like 35 different, basically taxpayer interaction nights or town hall meetings, across Jackson County to all of these different, public libraries, and he’d, he’d sit for an hour and people would come in.
He’d give his little presentation. Most of it centered around, the senior tax credit program that we adopted. But then just the onslaught of other questions that you get and, you know, just taking the information pamphlets to them, taking the business cards with the QR code, all of those things. Letting them walk out with a handful of things to look at and to go home and look into.

and then that’s something that, “Oh yeah, I shared that with my ladies at the Red Hat Club today,” or, or whatever, and it just, it just grows exponentially from there. And, that kind of word of mouth in communities is huge.  Yeah. It’s like you have to find influencers in your community. That’s, that’s the mo- I mean, it kinda feels like it sometimes
logic of the church. Yeah. I love it. we went and grabbed a couple of examples here. So these are your pretty standard things, you know, social media posts or digital ads, and then, you know, examples of some of the emails that you guys are sending out where it’s, like, really clear, “You’ve got a bill.

Here’s how you do it.” But I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to also show Jon’s novel approach that he has taken. Jon, do you want to talk a little bit about this, about this program that you have put together? Sure. You know, when, when you’ve got a program out there for many years, you want to make sure you can refresh that notice in front of your, your population.

And so because we save a lot of money in what we’re doing and we’ve seen the cost savings in the city, I can invest money in a different way. And so this is our third year running a bus campaign, and so it travels throughout all the different neighborhoods within the city of Grand Rapids. It’s not on every bus, but in Grand Rapids, if there’s no ad- no ad that is there to replace it, this ad will continue to run all the time.

So what we found out was our 90-day, $30,000 investment with putting ads on our buses and in our buses got 33 million views, unique views the first year it ran because there was nothing to replace it, so it ran for 12 straight months. And so we did it a second year. We skipped a year, and we’re doing it again.

This is our latest one this year, but we also added more buses to the mix. So it’s $40,000, but just to keep our name out there, just to keep grpayit.us out there for people to connect. It’s not just on the side of the bus, it’s on tail panels also, and there’s also messaging inside our, some of our buses. So it, roughly is run on 60 different buses through the city.
We have more than 60 because notice that buses do go out of service, so sometimes they’re in the garage getting service, but then they’re back on the street. But that helps keep you in the forefront, and we make sure that our message is kinda catchy. We change the images, so we’ll have eight, nine, 10 different images of people to capture all demographics and to run that.

So the one, the one warning, do not try this and put a QR code on the tailpipe of a bus because you don’t want somebody driving and trying to snap a QR code as they rear-end a bus. So those are some of the things that are comical about when you’re, when you’re doing this, but this is how a city treasurer versed so well in finance and public works and our, our area becomes what?

A marketer. And really thinks about the resident impression, and you don’t want that resident impression being rear-ending a bus. Yeah. Word to the wise there, right? We’ve done a little bit of research over the years into what are the most kind of compelling messages that get people to consider transacting online.

The number one is official way to pay. Like, people need to be really, really clear that this is not some, you know, kind of weird scam, third party phishing or, you know, something else that’s not a government website and doesn’t have anything to do with your jurisdiction. So, that’s something that we really emphasize.

Obviously, the convenience factor, quick and easy is a huge one. We’ve talked some about the security concerns, and so we always try to keep the security messaging really prominent, like, you know, if we’ve got seals or, you know, the various certifications that we have, we put those front and center and really reassure people we don’t ever sell your data.

You know, we have the, the very most advanced protections for your credit card data, et cetera. Other messages that kind of bolster those kind of three core ones are others in my community use the service, so this is back to Mary Sue or Mary Lou, I can’t remember, Becky, what name you gave her, but you know, that kind of word of mouth and knowing this is something that people do.

The efficiency message of, you know, if you pay your bill online, we can do things like fund services more quickly. I think there’s a great story in Jackson County. I can’t remember, Becky, if it was your school district or your 911, but there was something where you funded a service on day one of your tax season, and this is the kind of example of like, you know, it’s making us more efficient, it’s helping government work better.

Did you have a comment on that one, Becky?  Yeah. I, I know which one you’re talking about. It was one of our 911 services. And it was just to see people’s reaction that for once government wasn’t super slow and you know, it was like, “Yes, we, we can.” And, you know, once we jump into these times and we can get more efficient, like we can be sending money to the people who need them these jurisdictions that need it almost instantaneously.
And, and that’s, I think, was a huge proponent for people to be doing things online versus, you know, mailing in a check. And it’s like, well, that can take two months before we get it processed and then it goes through our process, and then gets sent out to the jurisdiction through our finance department.

And so it’s, you know, once you can eliminate and some of those delays and make things shorter it really does create the efficiency that I think we’re so used to in the private sector, but the government sector is just that much slower adopting it.  Yeah. John, the last one I know is near and dear to your heart because you’ve actually done the math on the environmental impact.

You want to share a little bit about the analysis you did there?


You know, we’re so focused on collecting monies and tax bills and whatnot, sometimes, we miss the overall impact of the work we do. And I always say on a Saturday morning, I kinda nerded out and I found this, this website that does a calculator. It’s a paper calculator, and so I could take and say, okay, usually three checks from businesses would cover a page of paper. An envelope is a page of paper. A bill is a page of paper. And I started building, you know, what has this looked like since 2017 when we adopted GR PayIt? And I go down and I can plug in all of the numbers, and you start realizing that there’s a lot more impact than you think is there.

And so when you can raise to your city commission or to your sustainability managers or anybody that’s got environmental concerns, I was able to show that we’re now up to six pallets of paper. And when I say paper, that’s 10 reams are in a box. There’s 40 of those boxes on a pallet times five six pallets.

That’s 240 boxes of paper. And what this paper calculator would do is it would then tell me how much did I just remove from or saving the environment by how many trees, how many acres of forest, how much water it would take to produce the paper, how much, heavy elements were removed from the process, how much carbon dioxide.
It will tell me basically how many cars we’ve taken off the road for a year or, you know, it’s really kind of intriguing because you then find out that it’s more than just saving your customers money and being more efficient, but there’s also an environmental impact that was kind of unique to discover.

But, you know, for us coming into the office each day we might not be thinking about that, but really there is some much more meaningful and impact, things that we can call out on our work. So my last question for you both is there are folks who are listening today who are, really thinking about their payment strategy and maybe about to embark on digital payments for the first time, or about to really lean into trying to grow digital adoption.
So, you know, what is your 20 words or fewer quick advice for your peers who are listening today? You’ve been there, you’ve done that, you’ve seen what works, and what, what would you share with someone who is maybe a little bit earlier in the journey? John, I’ll have you go first.

20 words or less, it’s all about the data, right? We each have a lot of different systems that we use. We usually don’t have a single one, but each one has data in the background. And so really it’s starting to have that engagement and that conversation. I think my epiphany moment was when I started taking the data files from each of our systems and then saying, “These are the six or seven columns that I need to export to be able to engage with PayIt.” It’s not a huge, elaborate, mind-blowing thing that you have to go through and do. It’s understanding what are the critical pieces of information and pulling it out of your backend systems to be able to communicate, to be able to set a system up like this. The team that I had for implementation at PayIt, demystified all this for me. And so it came down to a point where we launched our four biggest payment channels, our four biggest services were launched in four and a half months. And it launched and just took off, and it was all about understanding the data.


Becky, how about you? What’s your advice to your peers?

 My advice is to know the specific dynamics of your target audience. When you get into looking at different companies that provide these services, there is a plethora of options, of bells and whistles, of all the things that can be done. Very many of them are the same. Some of them are very different.

Fees are different, all of those things. But know what’s important to your taxpayers, your clientele because that’s what you need to focus on. It’s really easy to get wrapped up in the, “Oh, I want to go with this company because look at all of these things. They, like they have kiosks, they have all of these things.” Well, when we have a large community that runs off of cash, a kiosk isn’t really going to help you because it’s not going to be able to take your cash. Or, you know, handheld devices, well, is that really going to be beneficial for you? And I feel like, you know, look at those, look at those scenarios of find out why your taxpayers are paying the way they are.

Find out what their needs are. Find out the accessibility of the system to your people. You know, you need to understand your taxpayers, the dynamics of your clientele so that what you are going to then offer them is something that actually meets their needs and they are going to be excited for, and they are going to be happy that you’ve done this.

Because the worst thing you can do is offer something new and everybody go, “We didn’t need that. Why did you do that?” You know, give them what they’re asking for. Find a way to meet those needs that they’re looking for. And, and if it’s you looking at whether this is good or bad for me, what are the benefits?

What are the benefits of paying online? Is it saving you time? Is, is that a big thing or are you retired and that’s not a big thing? Is it saving you from having to drive. You know, Jackson County is huge, and we have one location that has an assessment department for your vehicles. Is it that you have to drive 40 minutes to go get there and you don’t want to pay the gas because it’s four or five bucks a gallon?

You know, like really look into what, what benefits you the most and getting people to think about those things versus, “Well, this is always how I’ve done it. I’ve always gone in. I’ve always paid my bill in front of a person, gotten my receipt.” Right. But with everything evolving, is that the best option for you still or are these other options More, you know, profitable for you, better venture for you.

You don’t have to take time off work, all of those things. And I think just evaluate your situation or evaluate your target market situation and then you can’t go wrong with what you do.  Yeah. Really starts with understanding your community and what it needs and so on. Well, I thank you both.

I think what you’ve really brought home for me is the reminder that, you know, it’s not an if you build it, they will come type of experience. You know, driving resident shift into digital channels and maximizing that is, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and there’s a, you know, it’s a journey, right? And the work is never done, but the impact of it on your communities and on your operations is really significant.

So, I thank you both for spending time with us and sharing with the folks who are attending the webinar today, all of your wisdom, and, really appreciate everybody’s time. So thank you very much for being here.