T O O L K I T F O R

ELECTEDOFFICIALSIN THE DIGITAL AGE

IntroductIon

Now more than ever, technology is providing opportunities for

increased connection, efficiency and empowerment. But because the

tech world is booming and start-ups are starting up in full swing, it

can be challenging to find the platforms that fit the needs and agenda

of an elected official. This toolkit aims to identify key categories and

companies that exist to serve you in your quest to strengthen local

democracy and innovate effectively.

Community Action Toolkit - Contents

Connect with Your Constituents and Other Elected Officials

1 Twitter

2 Facebook

3 GovLoop

Enhance Public Participation

4 POPVOX

5 MindMixer

6 Granicus

Empower Your Constituents

7 SeeClickFix

8 CitySourced

9 Citizinvestor

Campaign in a Box

10 WordPress

11 Organizer

Leverage Technology to Drive Change and Innovation

12 Esri

13 Code for America

Get Rewarded

14 Ashoka Changemakers

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twitterTwitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, people, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting. In an effort to inform and stay informed by your constituents, you can use Twitter and the 5 step strategy to figure out how to make a difference in the community and the world around you.

With twitter you can:t Target: Find a goal for your account.

W Write: Make sure you get on Twitter and start writing without over-editing yourself.

E Engage: Reach out to others and making sure you’re not Tweet-ing in a bubble.

E Explore: Find influencers and new ideas on Twitter that you can engage with.

t Track: Figure out how your strategy is going and if it’s been working for you.

Visit: Twitter.com

Connect With Your Constituents

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Connect With Your Constituents

FacebookFacebook is a social networking service that boasts over one billion active users and has become the 21st Century ‘Public Square.’ If you want to shout it from the mountaintops, then go no further than Facebook. Besides being a way to keep in touch with your friends and share experiences, Facebook can be a great way to promote your efforts, build an audience or solicit feed-back via their Group feature.

use Facebook to:• Create a group to build a community around an initiative.

• Invite you friends and network to support your work and join the community.

• Keep constituents informed by uploading photos, video and updates.

Visit: Facebook.com

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GovLoopGovLoop’s mission is simple: connect government to improve government. We inspire and inform public sector professionals as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop serves more than 60,000 members, enabling them to collaborate with colleagues, solve society’s most perplexing problems and advance in their government careers. The GovLoop community has been widely recognized across the public sector -- federal, state, local, industry and academia -- as the leading site for addressing public sector issues.

Public sector professionals visit GovLoop every day in order to:• Engage with colleagues to solve similar challenges and make

career-changing connections

• Read blogs and guides, and listen to podcasts featuring insights from colleagues and experts

• Participate in online training and in-person events designed to infuse innovation in government

• Get quick answers to on-the-job questions

• Share best practices and break down bureaucratic silos

In short, GovLoop is the premiere online community powering government productivity and innovation.

Visit: GovLoop.com

Connect With Your Constituents

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Enhance Public Participation

PoPVoXPOPVOX is a neutral, nonpartisan platform for advocacy and legislative information.

POPVOX 1 features every bill pending in Congress; 2 allows organizations and people to share their views; 3 electronically delivers input to Congress from verified constituents; 4 Provides an online, transparent bill-by-bill, district-by-district record of public sentiment.

to get started:• Create a POPVOX account for insight into your district or state

• Research bills to find out what people are saying -- and what your colleagues are hearing

• Search the POPVOX organization directory to find potential allies

• Build suport for your priorities by sharing links to bills on POPVOX via social media

• Download the POPVOX iPad app for Congress “”MarkUp”” to read bill language, take notes and get a quick overview of bills

Visit: popvox.com

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MindMixerMindMixer makes it easy for elected officials to solicit input and ideas from citizens through the web and mobile phones.

three reasons why Elected officials should use MindMixer:• Transparency: MindMixer breaks down the perceptive wall between

government and citizens by making it easy to share and act on great ideas.

• Convenience: Only 11% of the general population will attend more than one public meeting per year. 80% of U.S households have in-ternet access and 90% have a cell phone with texting capabilities. MindMixer allows government to reach citizens with tools that nearly everyone is using on a daily basis.

• Empowerment: Citizens have lots of creativity and ingenuity. Often times all it takes is providing the right tools, empowering citizens to take ownership in their community.

Visit: MindMixer.com

Enhance Public Participation

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GranicusGranicus provides open government, civic engagement, and efficiency so-lutions on a cloud based platform. Designed specifically for government, Granicus product suites offer live and archived meeting video streaming, smart agendas on the iPad, online citizen crowdsourcing and ideation, pa-perless workflow and agenda management solutions.

reasons to use Granicus:• Promote transparency and build public trust by creating a more open

and accessible government.

• Create a powerful online legislative research center of agendas, sup-porting documents, and legislative histories.

• Replace agenda packet and related paper with the iPad, improving mobility and efficiency.

• Review indexed, archived meeting videos – see only the portions of meetings pertinent to specific agenda items

• Encourage citizen involvement through ideation, prioritization, and feedback channels.

Visit: http://www.granicus.com/Government/Who-Benefits/Elected-Official.aspx

Enhance Public Participation

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Empower Your Constituents

SeeclickFixSeeClickFix enables local governments to respond to constituent requests in a cost effective and innovative manner. The government dashboard allows SeeClickFix partner cities to track issues from when they’re reported through completion, and custom analytics help officials to understand what their citi-zens care about most.

• Citizens can report issues through web, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Facebook platforms.

• Customized service request types are routed to the appropriate de-partment.

• SeeClickFix can integrate with CRM systems like CityWorks, Kana, and Motorola.

• Citizen engagement and satisfaction increase dramatically because of improved responsiveness thanks to SeeClickFix.

Visit: SeeClickFix.com/government

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citySourcedCitySourced allows residents to report issues using their smartphone cam-era and GPS to create rich, relevant information for local governments. Residents can monitor their issues in real time with push notifications. City-Sourced works with all leading back office software to integrate directly with your city’s existing workflow.

citySourced Provides:• Rich communication tools to engage your constituents.

• Reliable high currency data saving time and money searching and verifying issues.

• More transparency for constituents involving them deeper with their local community.

• Integration with almost all existing workflow management systems.

Visit: CitySourced.com

Empower Your Constituents

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citizinvestorCitizinvestor is a crowdfunding platform for local government projects. Municipalities submit projects to Citizinvestor.com that have already been scored, department-approved and only lack one thing - funding. Citizens then donate to the projects they care about most with the guarantee that their credit card will not be charged unless the project reaches 100% of its funding goal.

• Citizinvestor is completely free for governments to use.

• There is no risk to governments for submitting projects to Citizinves-tor. A government entity doesn’t commit to anything unless a project reaches 100% of its funding goal and they have the necessary funds to bring that project to life.

• Citizinvestor allows you to re-allocate budget to other priorities at a time when budgets are tighter than ever before.

• Citizinvestor allows you to raise money without raising taxes.

Visit: Citizinvestor.com/about

Empower Your Constituents

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WordPressWordPress is the most popular and fastest growing publishing platform on the Web. WordPress.com is the simplest way to start web-publishing imme-diately for free. Paid premium features such as custom domains and design upgrades are available as well. With over 391 million people viewing more than 3.8 billion pages each month on WordPress.com, your WordPress.com site doesn’t live in a vacuum--you can easily connect with other WordPress users, and even Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr.

reasons to use WordPress:• Easy-to-use and very intuitive for publishers and for readers.

• Free to use and offers great premium upgrades to enhance the web experience and design.

• During the 2012 election cycle, political candidates from across the country turned to WordPress for beautiful, websites, making it the digital hub for campaigns from coast-to-coast.

• 35% of all U.S. Congressional candidates used WordPress

• 40% of all U.S. Senate races used WordPress

• 44% of all Gubernatorial races used WordPress

• 41% of all state political parties used WordPress.

• Get social: Publishers can share their work with the world. Publicize lets you connect your WordPress site to the most popular social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and more. Use social media and social tools to expand your audience and gather support for your campaign.

Visit: WordPress.com

Campaign in a Box

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organizerDescribed as “the most impressive application” of the 2012 Presidential cycle, Organizer is the world’s most powerful mobile canvassing, fundraising and phone banking system.

Born from a marriage of Silicon Valley high tech and presidential field strat-egy, Organizer enables door-to-door canvassing/fundraising, phone bank-ing, voter registration, street canvassing and more. All of these features run seamlessly on inexpensive smartphones connected to a single web-based management system.

Organizations of all sizes can now reach vast numbers of constituents, in their own language, all managed from a laptop at a coffee shop -- without printing a single sheet of paper, without any data entry, without even a cam-paign office.

Beyond saving campaigns time and money, Organizer enables campaigns to reach those who they could never reach before -- in other words, the differ-ence between winning and losing.

reasons to use organizer:• Reduce voter contact costs by up to 25%

• Accept credit card donations at the door

• Integrated smartphone predictive dialing

• Eliminate data entry and data entry errors

• Eliminate printing walk lists and assembling walk packets.

• Real-time data prevents duplicate contacts and errors.

• Live monitoring = accountability and efficiency.

Visit: Organizer.com

Campaign in a Box

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Leverage Technology to Drive Change

EsriEsri technologies help people and organizations leverage the power of geography to solve important problems and design a better world.

• Increase efficiency and accuracy. Displaying information on maps instantly communicates the many factors under consideration for an issue.

• Improve accountability and transparency. Putting best ideas forward, revealing processes, and gathering input from the public delivers the transparency and accountability citizens expect.

• Automate workflows. When people can report the places and issues that are most important to them, they see that government values their input. This valuable feedback helps establish successful plans and processes that best serve communities.

• Save money and time. Seeing your work on a map makes priorities clear. It’s easy to see the infrastructure, communities, and issues that are most in need of investment and attention.

• Generate revenue. Using maps and spatial analysis to track sources of revenue shows you areas where collection may have been missed. GIS also empowers you to support economic development efforts to attract and retain business.

Visit: http://www.esri.com/arcgisforlocalgov

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code for AmericaCode for America partners with local governments to foster civic innovation. Through its Fellowship program, Code for America provides an opportunity for the web generation to give back by embedding developers and design-ers in city governments to collaborate with municipal leaders. Through the Accelerator program Code for America supports disruptive civic startups, and through the Brigade program Code for America encourages civic par-ticipation by organizing local groups of civic technologists to take action in their communities.

Ways to use cFA• ApplytobecomeacitypartnerfortheannualCfAFellowship:

codeforamerica.org/cities/apply-now

• JointhePeerNetwork: network.codeforamerica.org

• LaunchaBrigadeinyourcity: brigade.codeforamerica.org

• PromoteOpenGovernmentpolicies: openimpact.us

Visit: CodeForAmerica.org/get-involved

Leverage Technology to Drive Change

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Get Rewarded

Ashoka changemakersWant to encourage your community to come up with creative solutions to social issues? Changemakers’ global online community provides the tools and resources to help strengthen communities. Our diverse network of inves-tors, social innovators and advocates come together to collaborate, discuss and empower citizens to launch projects that have the power to make a dif-ference. Here everyone is a Changemaker and people from across the global can join funding competitions, connect with investors and collaborate by using our online platform Changeshops.

• Help citizens gain access to funding and resources for ideas that will benefit your local community.

• Keep your finger on the pulse of social issues and needs by discover-ing new citizen-led initiatives, ideas, and projects.

• Connect and collaborate with a worldwide community of leading in-novators, investors, and citizens.

• Support or promote new ideas and help push them to the next level.

Visit: Changemakers.com

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