Data-driven Decision Making for Local Government

The goal with Zencity is to benchmark how community members think about all of the different smart city projects we are rolling out. The purpose is two-fold. It’s a way for us to potentially identify additional expenditures, but also to let us know the impact on the community of all of our different smart city initiatives.

One of the first things I do every morning is scroll through the Zencity feed and determine whether there is anything crucial that my team and I need to tackle. As a relatively new county manager, it's a lifesaving tool for me and an excellent data source.

We’ve tried other platforms in the past that were time-consuming, didn’t provide us with city-specific information, and were a nightmare to use. Zencity is intuitive and helps us to tailor our strategic planning and focus for our community.

Zencity allows us to better listen and understand the needs of our larger community and monitor as concerns change. This information and data aides us in providing top quality city services to our residents.

Zencity was a powerful tool for helping us make data-driven recommendations to Town Council, and also imperative in helping Council Members feel confident about their decision.

We believe Zencity’s city-centric technology, including its sentiment analysis and unique geolocation capabilities, has great potential in helping cities make more data-driven decisions.

In the few short months we’ve had Zencity, both the tool and the team behind it have quickly proven to be incredibly powerful in helping us refine our approaches to whom, when, and how we communicate on very important topics to our community.

The most important question I have been trying to solve is how do we, as a city, understand the silent majority? This is why we use Zencity, who is shifting the paradigm on understanding our citizens.

Zencity has been an essential tool in helping us, as a city, better connect with, and serve, our residents.

In the short time we’ve used Zencity, it’s been an early win in terms of improving operational efficiency and cost savings. Zencity consolidates everything into one place. It’s easy to use and it surpasses all of the other platforms we were using to understand what's happening in our city.

I always have one of my monitors turned on to Zencity. It's really useful to me because it allows me to see the bigger picture about what my public thinks and feels, but also to drill down into just about everything in real time.

Beaverton’s staff is small and nimble. Zencity saves us time and money, particularly when it comes to pulling reports. Thanks to Zencity, we’re able to quickly and easily gather data on topics that would have normally taken extensive staff time. Zencity is therefore an excellent capacity building tool for us, and a resource-saver.

Zencity helped us pinpoint the significant spike in social media interactions surrounding the railroad issue impacting our City. With this powerful qualitative and quantitative data, we quickly understood that an action by the City was necessary in order to mitigate this issue before it got worse. With Zencity’s insights, we were able to build an effective initiative and communicate productively with our residents.

Why do we use a tool like Zencity? Because social media is the new city arena. People used to sit in a town square and share their thoughts, but now they do that via social media. So we must listen to them and understand what people are thinking. Yet in order to do that we are not just generally listening, we are relating that analysis to specific events that are happening in the city.

We utilize Zencity to understand at a glance community sentiment across a variety of media outlets and digital channels. Before Zencity it was hard to obtain this valuable data. Thanks to Zencity we are able to see how our emergency information is dispersed and the community's reaction in real-time. This has been a game-changer for us when managing severe weather scenarios and other challenges.