Public Advocate of NYC: Streamlining constituent communications
The Public Advocate For The City of New York ensures that all New Yorkers receive the City services they deserve and have a voice in shaping the policies of their government.
The Public Advocate was challenged with the problem of tracking constituent communications (suggestions, complaints, even praise) and disseminating the responsibility of responding to them.
“Public Advocate’s role is to push our bureaucracy to become more responsive and hold our elected leaders accountable to the needs of the people.”
rayogram implemented a modern web-based Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system to replace the legacy system; saving costs to the City and implementing new desired features without creating future dependency on outside support. Built on the open-source Drupal and CiviCRM software platforms, this solution, empowers Public Advocate to create constituent cases starting with communications delivered via face-to-face encounters, e-mail, phone, 311 calls and more. These cases then follow a prescribed workflow and timeline and are disseminated among staff for optimum resolution.
The Public Advocates CRM is itself an example of reuse — it was based on code developed for the New York State Senate. This software could be reused by any agency interacting with the same city agencies.
