Woodstock’s town board this month heard two presentations, one by Colorado-based TownCloud, which specializes in web presences for municipalities, and the other from TextMyGov, a company that facilitates mass text alerts to update residents about issues and concerns.
Woodstock hopes to get a website that will make it easier for residents to find information and to interact with the town, no matter what device they are using. An annual charge by TownCloud of $4385 should bring a major upgrade to the current website, whose back end is run by Digital Towpath, a cooperative of local governments joined together to save technology costs.
“Really, what we are offering is a simplified approach to managing your website,” TownCloud manager and cofounder Chris Haywood told the town board at its July 16 meeting via Zoom. “We work with people all over the country, including in New York, and we have really focused on providing a solution that is simple, and it’s easy to use that’s very easy for your residents to find information.”
He said the system integrated easily with other applications. “You can be up and running very quickly,” he promised. “We have multiple customers that we had live in just a day, a week.”
TownCloud provides assistance moving content over from the old website.
It is easily accessible on any platform — a mobile device, a desktop device or a tablet.
“There’s no limited functionality,” said Haywood. “Everything is really designed to provide a great experience for everyone.”
TownCloud’s own content management system, or CMS, is intuitive and doesn’t require knowledge of web design or coding, Haywood explained.
The website CMS includes a meeting management system, which creates meeting agendas and information packets. It posts them to a calendar item on the website.
Councilmember Anula Courtis, well versed in web technology, asked about accessibility for the disabled.
“We’ve tried to build a platform that’s focused around meeting those standards very easily right out of the box,” Haywood replied. The content is structured in a way that is easily consumed by automatic screen readers.
Courtis asked whether the CMS was set up in such a way that the town could move its content out if it ever decided to go with a different company.
Haywood assured the board that wouldn’t be an issue.
In response to councilmember Bennet Ratcliff’s questions about company structure and ownership, Haywood said TownCloud was formed in 2018, by a core team that had been working with municipalities for decades.
Supervisor Bill McKenna asked the board to think the idea over and possibly decide by its next meeting on July 23.
Woodstock’s town board also heard a presentation from TextMyGov, a firm which provides automated answers to residents’ text questions and facilitates communications with town governmental departments.
The system would cost the town $5500 annually, with a $2500 one-time setup fee.
Residents could text a keyword to a local phone number to sign up for alerts. They could also text questions such as, “How do I get a building permit?” The system will reply with an automated answer based on a data base of common queries.
The public could also sign up for text alerts on the town website.
TextMyGov represents 700 government agencies nationwide, account executive Jayden Eastman said.
The package offered to the town includes 75,000 texts per year, which includes incoming texts from residents. More text messages can be purchased, Eastman said.
The amount of text details concerned councilmember Anula Courtis, as did the storage and protection of data in the event of a breach.
Town supervisor Bill McKenna asked the board to consider the presentation and address it at a future meeting.
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