Civic engagement platform

Local officials mostly talk to residents through social media. Plans get buried in the feed, questions scatter across comments and messages, and there’s no simple way to show what has actually been done. The data involved is sensitive too, so the platform had to protect residents by design, not by policy alone.

One platform that serves many organizations from a single codebase. Each gets a public site for its plans, projects, commitments, events and volunteers, and a private dashboard for its team. The privacy rules are part of how the data is stored, not just a policy page.

• A public site for each organization, with plans, projects, announcements, events with registration, and volunteer sign-up.
• A commitments tracker that shows progress on each commitment. Anything marked as delayed needs a public explanation.
• An Ask page that answers residents’ questions using only what the organization has published.
• A team dashboard with content editing, an issues inbox that records every change, volunteer lists and analytics that don’t use cookies.
• Community Pulse, which shows residents’ concerns only as totals. Areas with too few responses are merged so no one can be singled out.
• No profiling or targeting of residents, strict separation between each client’s data, and sign-up forms that never reveal whether someone has already registered.
• Custom domains, themes and branding for each organization, all from one codebase.

Built and running end to end with demo data: public sites, the team dashboard and the privacy safeguards. It started as a product experiment and isn’t offered to clients. Its foundations (logins and roles, dashboards, inboxes, themes and custom domains) are ready to reuse in client portals and business systems.