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OpenCities: Helping cities deliver better digital services

102_OpenCities Benchmark ReportU.S. cities are starting to look “down under” for help in creating better websites. Microsoft partner OpenCities, whose parent company is Australia’s Seamless CMS, recently completed a comprehensive national benchmarking report that assessed 3,036 websites for every U.S. city with a population of more than 10,000 residents.

“The big takeaway is that there’s a lot of room for cities to improve how they’re engaging with citizens,” said Cynthia Francis, OpenCities’ U.S. managing director of Business Development. “The purpose of the benchmarking report was to give cities a baseline so that they could better understand what’s working well and where they have more to do in terms of creating better digital services for their citizens.”

First presented at the National Association of Government Web Professionals (NAGW) conference in September, the city website benchmarking report looked at eight essential performance criteria: prioritization of top tasks, search experience, content readability, mobile friendliness, page speed, privacy, search engine optimization and accessibility. “When we looked at the variability of those factors and at every U.S. city over 10,000 population, it gave us a good sense of where there were areas for improvement,” Francis explained, noting that the report took four months to develop, using both automated and manual reviews of each website.

After NAGW, where the report received “very positive” feedback, Francis and OpenCities U.S. Managing Director for Product Jack Madans presented their findings at the 2016 Code for America Summit in November. “(Cities) like the idea of being able to give their citizens the tools that they’re going to need … to use that city website exactly as they would if they had the time to walk into city hall,” Francis said. “They should be able to transact that business online, using any device. It’s encouraging to us as we talk to cities to see how eager governments are to shift from an information website to a transactional, digital services website.”

The U.S. benchmarking survey builds on a similar study on Australia’s “councils” (equivalent to cities) conducted last year by SeamlessCMS, which powers more than 20 percent of Australian local government websites and a total of 500-plus client websites, portals and intranets. In June, SeamlessCMS launched San Francisco-based OpenCities to serve the U.S. market, where the company already has projects with three U.S. cities, including Grand Rapids, Mich. “We are committed to providing a mobile-responsive, well-designed and effective digital services website for the City of Grand Rapids community and visitors,” said Becky Jo Glover, ‎311 Customer Service Center manager. “OpenCities offered us the needed ‘digital functionality’ in one package, with an emphasis on the ‘user experience’—the City’s core mission. Grand Rapids is a Microsoft shop and we appreciate that OpenCities is hosted on Azure for security and stability.”

Microsoft CityNext is excited to support OpenCities to drive easy-to-use digital government services and transactions, all powered by our Microsoft Azure cloud platform. “Our goal as a company is to transform the experience of government service and to make it a better experience for the end user—the citizen or the visitor—but also make it better for the government employees so that it’s easy and effective for them to update and manage web content, without a lot of hassle,” Francis said.

“When we did an evaluation of open platforms and partners it was kind of a no-brainer for us to go with Azure,” she added. “The reason that we went with Microsoft has everything to do with stability for our government clients, the safety for our government clients and the opportunity to partner with a company that is forward-looking. We see that Microsoft is working in government in a way that is consistent with how we are working.”

I encourage you to download the unique U.S. benchmark report and take advantage of OpenCities’ offer for a personalized online report rating your city’s website on each of the eight criteria by clicking www.opencities.com/benchmark. Citizens are articulating a desire to go online for government services rather than standing in line, and OpenCities can provide a path forward to seamless, elegant digital services that thrill and delight citizens.