VIDEO: CivicLift Walkthrough & Demo

Transcript:

The CivicLift Community Website

Hello everyone! My name is Evan Dobos and this is a quick walkthrough of CivicLift's community engagement platform.

A CivicLift community site is hands down the best go-to resource for finding the things to do, the places to go, and the need-to-know community updates.

With so many parts that make up a community, Information tends to get fragmented. This is frustrating. and unfortunately the frustration directly correlates with lack of engagement and even lack of economic activity.

CivicLift takes all of these moving parts and creates a single all inclusive channel. Best yet, it delivers local content the way the modern citizen expects it: through a mobile-ready, online, and personalized experience.

So let's get right into a community site looks like an does. Imagine the site here is built for your town and you are a local resident browsing through it. The homepage is a lot like the front page of the newspaper in that it gives snippets of the most relevant information that you can click through to read more about. The difference however, is that our page is truly dynamic. It is always changing and updating to content that is most relevant at that point in time. This is why users will come to your site daily. Because it is always up to date with fresh and hyper-relevant community content.

"Events" is a community event calendar that is also dynamic. events are submitted by the users themselves which is especially advantageous to local businesses who are promoting their events to the community.

Each event in the list shows the pertinent information such as when and where, and clicking through it takes you to a detail page where you can see more details such as driving directions and contact info.

"Places" is an interactive map and places of interest directory. Listings tend to be mostly local business listings, but why not also include public transit stops, historic sites, or even bike trails? Whatever location-based asset your community has will be listed on this map. Not think of how enlightening that will be for both residents and visitors to visually see how much your town really has to offer!

"Headlines" is a hybrid between a community blog, and announcements board, and a place for interesting articles that relate to your town. For example, the mayor driving about community developments or a leasing agent talking about the businesses moving into town. Perhaps even an art critic writing about art featured in local galleries. Whatever topics are actually relevant about your community can be written about and promoted here.

The Difference

What you've seen so far is the public view of a CivicLift site. It's beautiful design and ease-of-use satisfies both residents and visitors with a comprehensive collection of what your community has to offer. This is a perfectly useful website in the traditional sense, but CivicLift is not a website, it is a community engagement platform. So, what's the difference? There are many actually and to begin illustrating them, let's start with the user.

Let's keep pretending I'm a resident of your town. I visit the site numerous times a week and have even promoted my local business and the events we have through it. If this were a traditional site, accomplishing that would entail contacting the webmaster, e-mailing him my pictures and information, and then wait for him to actually have time to update the site. Any changes I would need to make would simply be rinse and repeat. it's a clunky, time consuming process with lots of overhead and lots of room for errors. imagine if I had a typo, or if my event got canceled. It's not a sustainable model when you multiply that by an entire town of users. This is why traditional websites fail communities.

Since this is a CivicLift site, I can create an account and submit my own content. Everything I have submitted is available for me to edit and it is as easy as filling out an online form. Anyone can do it.

Now I know what you are thinking: "What if someone submits something that is not in the best interest of my community?" or "What if it's downright inappropriate?". Well, we thought of that too, and that is where the Curator comes in.

The Curator's Toolset

The curator is given access to special tools in CivicLift that allows them to moderate all of the community-submitted content before it goes live on the site. All they have to do is review it and click "Approve".

We also give Curators marketing tools where they can organize email blasts, social media, highlight important content, run specialized campaigns, and truly be a curator.

You may have noticed that the examples throughout this demo are pretty open ended. This is definitely on purpose and by design. After all, your community has its own personality and the brand, and there is no better way to accurately represent that van by letting the community drive the site themselves.

In the meantime, CivicLift we'll be constantly adding new features and improving our tools for an even more effective community engagement platform. If you have any questions feel free to contact me here, or click here to book a personalized demo.