New York State Senate: Connecting 19 million New Yorkers to their representatives

The New York State Senate’s “Open Senate” initiative is a series of award-winning technology solutions that seek to maximize the transparency and accessibility of legislative information for all New Yorkers, and provide new ways for citizens to participate in the legislative process.

We New Yorkers count on 62 district senators to meet our needs state-wide. And today we expect to communicate with them via phone, e-mail, even social media networks to discuss everything from important statewide policy changes from mandatory preK to potholes. 

The problem
The New York State Senate’s 62 senate offices were relying on a 20 year-old Mainframe-computer based Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system to manage 15 million constituents.

The solution
rayogram created a modern, web-based constituent relationship management (CRM) system on the open-source Drupal and CiviCRM software platforms to replace the New York State Senate's 20 year-old mainframe- computer based Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system.

This CRM empowers senate staff to track registered voter’s complaints and comments delivered via phone, e-mail, Web forms and more. At the same time this information is consolidated into distinct constituent’s records, it is disseminated among the entire senate office’s staff for easier case management and quicker resolution of voter issues.

The reuse
The source code for this solution, branded Bluebird, has been made public and was reused and adapted by The Office of The Public Advocate of New York City.