Exploring Next-Gen Citizen Services

All right, happy Friday everyone. Dustin Haisler here, President of GovTech. We're going to break down what is next-gen citizen services all about. I'm really excited about our guest today. We've got Granicus's own CEO, Mark Hines, joining us to discuss technology's role in modernizing government services and strategies for enhancing citizen engagement and participation. So Mark, thanks so much for carving out some time on a Friday afternoon to join me.

You bet, Dustin. Thanks for the invite.

So this is a big topic, and, you know, I was thinking we could talk for hours about kind of next-gen citizen engagement. Everything is changing with technology. But before we dig into those questions, I'd love for you to, you know, just share a little bit about yourself and kind of your journey in this wild market we call GovTech.

Yeah, sure, you bet. So I'm the CEO of Granicus, as you mentioned. I've had the joy of being the CEO of this company for almost 8 years. I came up through the kind of the software kind of product route as opposed to the public sector route. So I'm a little bit of a software nerd by training, and most of my professional career has been in software companies. And, you know, by and large, kind of in experience and personalization technology. So that certainly has a nice parallel here with Granicus. But I've also had a great personal interest in government and government capabilities. And so when I was approached for the CEO opportunity almost 8 years ago, it was just this wonderful opportunity that kind of merged both my, hopefully my training and background and skills in software and creating software companies with my interest in public sector. And, you know, it's hard to, hard to imagine being in a place where you can have more impact than in this GovTech sector. So, I mean, us, you, me, and others in this sector that, you know, really have a mission of trying to create better communities, more engaged lives, you know, people living more fulfilled kind of livelihoods for them and their family. There's really no better mission than that. So to be able to apply your skills into something like that is pretty wonderful.

I love that. And I'm a software product nerd too, so we definitely can align on that. Now, you mentioned you've been at Granicus for 8 years, and, you know, as a company, y'all have done tremendous things over the last 8 years. So tell me a little bit about kind of the evolution of Granicus as a company, you know, and where you're at today in market. Wow.

Okay. Yeah. As you've, and you've, you know, you've covered this at great length, so I think you probably know a lot of the story as well. And it's hard, I think, to maybe, you know, put it in a short synopsis, but I kind of think of the business so far in like 3 chapters or 3 waves. And we like to say that the modern Granicus started about in 2016 when we merged the then largest SaaS cloud pure-play vendor in local government called Granicus at the time, and merged it with an equal-sized business called GovDelivery, which was also a SaaS cloud delivery company primarily in serving federal markets and state markets. So instantly in late 2016, we kind of had the largest pure-play SaaS cloud company in GovTech, and we were doing that in cooperation with a great capital partner called Vista Equity. And we had this kind of vision and mission to really attack GovTech very differently, right? Where traditionally, you know, purchasing technology in government was largely on-prem and slowly moving to SaaS cloud. And then, you know, purchasing, you know, technologies independently rather than as platforms. And virtually every other vertical market software segment in the world has said there's value in combinations of independent technologies in the form of platforms. It had never been done in GovTech before. And so we got kind of on the road, as you know, kind of relatively quickly with a mission of inviting great next-gen technologies in addition to the original Granicus and GovDelivery business to create what we now consider the largest upscale SaaS platform for experience and engagement of citizens that had never been done before. So over the course of 8 years, we've invited 12 of what we think are the most advanced next-generation capabilities around for those businesses, those teams, great innovators, And basically invited them to join this bigger mission of creating an experience platform that had never been done before in government. And so that's kind of chapter 1. After that chapter, kind of 6 years in at the time, we had assembled what we consider to be kind of the next-gen capabilities for experience, now what we call Government Experience Cloud, because we've put them together, we've integrated them, we've packaged them in capabilities for the market all the way from largest federal agency to state agencies and local. And now we're present across the world. We're in UK, we're in Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada, Puerto Rico. So we have this nice global footprint, over 6,500 customers that we really enjoy calling our partners, around a really comprehensive suite of capabilities now across things like web, your digital front door, coupled with digital communications like email and SMS. coupled with feedback mechanisms, surveys, forms, you know, those kinds of things, FOIA requests. So we've collected all these capabilities and combined them and integrated them in a way that create more value than the independent solutions themselves. And that's kind of chapter 2. And chapter 3, we can talk about, is really exciting, which is coming.

Yeah, I can't wait to dig into that. So, you know, as you kind of look at those next-gen citizen services, I mean, how would you parallel or maybe even compare and contrast, you know, what that is today versus, you know, what it used to be and maybe some of what government is struggling Yeah, sure.

So it's a great question. As I think about it, you know, when you think about next-gen services, the services catalog perhaps themselves hasn't changed that much, right? I mean, governments, local governments, state and federal, they largely have delivered the same catalog capability services for a couple hundred years, right? And so when we start to think about next-gen services, it's less maybe about the services and it's more about a mind shift on how governments think about the delivery and measurement and impact of those services, right? So, you know, for us, it's, it's this interesting shift where governments, you know, I think historically have felt like the responsibility is that it's available, right? So my catalog of services, my job is to make them available to the public. How they are consumed is less their responsibility, right? And I think what defines the next-gen services movement is now we care, governments are caring about what is the experience of their customer, their community, their constituents? How are they accessing those services? Do they, are they able to access them easily? Like what is the process? How well is their satisfaction? Is it having the outcomes and the impact that those services are intended to deliver? I call it the great move your cheese movement for like, you know, for government, because no longer is access, yes, is accessible good enough, right? It is now what is the experience and are the community members that are in most need of those services, are they able to access them? And what's their, what is their experience as a result? So like, to me, it's a mind shift. And maybe I can illustrate with an example kind of to bring it home, right? So let's just say, uh, I'm a, a fire inspector and you're a small business, right? Any local government. Um, and as a fire inspector, I typically wake up every day and I've got, okay, a calendar full of inspections I need to go do. The service is the fire inspection. Well, for a long time, that was kind of the boundary of responsibility. And you as a small business, historically, you'd be like, all right, how do I access that service? Well, I'm gonna go to the website, see if I can find fire inspection. Nope, I can't find it. I need to call into the government. And they tell me, oh, I need to, you know, drive across town, be there between 9 and 2, print off a form from home, rummage around in my desk because I haven't written a check in the last 10 years and I can only pay by check. Right? And then they show up, you know, do the inspection and, oh, I didn't have all my documentation. Like, that's the typical traditional experience, right? If you transition to what a next-gen service might look like, where the responsibility shifts to the experience, now, of course, it's I go where my constituents are online and digital. I should be able to go navigate the web in a way that immediately understands, or I get an email because they know that I am a small business that just got an application or a permit and I require a fire inspection. They tell me exactly what I need. I go online, I fill out all the forms and applications online. It tells me what level of service. I can pay online. And all of a sudden, that transaction and that experience, the same service, looks and feels completely different.

It's anticipatory. I love it. You know, it's less for me to have to remember, but more that's, you know, driven towards me, as we see in a lot of the consumer-oriented experiences there. I mean, I really like that example. The other thing that stood out to me, as you were talking, is that this isn't just the constituent. This is also the employee. You know, that fire inspector is gonna benefit from these evolutionary leaps that are happening with technology. So tell me a little bit as you think about that experience layer and, you know, all the work that y'all have done to kind of unify and integrate it, you know, where does technology intersect this kind of future next-gen service experience?

Great question. And, you know, when I think about that question, you know, we've been doing this for quite some time with a lot of our customers and what we have found is this question about engagement and participation is really twofold, right? One is, you know, have you embedded the tools to collect and allow for participation? Are you allowing for surveys and forms and asking what their satisfaction was at the end of a transaction or inviting them to participate in online forums or video, you know, meetings, et cetera? But as you know, as we've— you've talked about before on this show, is that You know, a relatively few number of people actually use those tools to participate. And so engagement participation is not just allowing for it to happen through tools, but also what is technology doing to encourage and promote engagement and participation? And for us, that has become equally important to the technology itself is how you deploy and utilize that technology. And then how are you stimulating basically trust, right? And that's something I know you've talked about a lot is If you don't have a sense of trust with your government or your service provider, you're not going to participate. You're not going to engage. And so the next question obviously is like, well, okay, well, how do we generate trust? Because it's fundamental to engagement and participation. I don't know, you may have seen there are some really interesting and insightful studies by McKinsey who looked at this question. They looked across all levels of government and asked what makes great digital services for government. And what makes poor services, what makes good experiences and bad experiences. And ultimately the conclusion was trust is fundamental to it all. Like, so you can have a great online service, but if your constituents and those you're trying to serve don't feel heard, feel understood, or trust you, it doesn't matter, right? Almost nothing else matters. And to get all of the efficiency gains and all the cost reductions and all the good participation benefits, have to start with trust. And when it unpacked that, it said, what are the 2 biggest drivers of trust? There's only the 2 drivers that drive the, the, the biggest impact on trust. Were only 2, it turned out, is how easy was it to navigate and get to the service that I need, and how clearly was it communicated. Those 2 things, right? And so that's one of the focus points for Granicus is, all right, how do we make this very broad collection of digital services or any services by a government highly accessible to those that they're meant to serve? How do you navigate them? And then how do you communicate about them? Because your audience is so incredibly diverse as a government, you have to speak in different voices to different people at different times with high degrees of relevance to generate trust that's necessary to support the engagement and participation that then delivers outcomes and impact. So in the end, 2 of the core tenets are about accessibility, navigation, communication, and relevance. So it's that coupled with the tech tools that really drive great excellence in participation, engagement, outcome, and impact.

Yeah, I love that because, you know, as we've seen before, just doing technology for the sake of technology is not going to drive the usage or the behavior, right? And so optimizing for it and, you know, focusing on those things like trust, I think, are incredibly important. So love that. Now, you know, you talked a little bit about it as it relates to kind of trust, but what else is holding back agencies as they look to kind of modernize the way that they deliver services for the future? I mean, what are you seeing out there?

Yeah, it's, you know, this is a pretty significant, you know, shift. You know, it's one of the monumental technology shifts, you know, for anyone, any sector, including government. A, moving from on-prem to SaaS cloud. And then secondly, how do I think about, you know, transforming, you know, how I deliver services, how I measure the impact of those services, Again, this movement of my responsibility from access to am I having impact? So the big challenge that we've seen very often is change management, right? That's a big change management challenge for a lot of our customers. And so it's less about what technology I choose or, you know, how do I plan for tech? It's more about, all right, I have a lot of disparate operations in a very complex organization like a government. How do I organize them? How do I, you know, understand how they're doing operations in today's state? How should they be doing operations in tomorrow's state? And how do you manage the change management associated with that? The most success we've seen is particularly in local governments, but also in state, is you have to hire people outside to manage that process. And you'll see, you know, a preponderance now of chief experience officers being hired, chief digital officers, chief transformation officers, because you need someone over top of all of the silos that says, all right, if we are literally gonna transform the way we think about delivering service to be more human-centered, to be more citizen-centric and orient everything around that, it impacts everything we do, right? And you need someone to actually map that out and think it through. So that's number one. Number 2 is this is a big challenge and it's overwhelming. And the question is, where do you start, right?

Mm-hmm.

And historically in on-prem software, you'd have to plan for months and years, right? With big capital budgets. And you couldn't afford to get it wrong 'cause everything was a big bang project. SaaS cloud now is very different, right? And so we actually, you know, promote something called a product mentality instead of a big project. And products, the way you build products is agile, right?

Okay.

So it's just like, we don't need to know necessarily the destination. We know what we want the outcome to be, but you don't need to know every step along the way. Let's just get started, right? So let's find some of the pain points our customers and citizens are experiencing. Where are we experiencing the most cost as a government in serving our constituents? Like, how do we align against our strategic objectives?

Right.

Let's start mapping that out. Then we can just start because the beauty of, you know, deploying technologies and capabilities like this is the payback is so quick, right? So you can pick the highest cost, highest ROI projects for digital services creation, and you'll see payback in the form of certainly better customer sat, but also in reduced walk-ins, reduced calls, higher, more operating efficiencies, reduced repeat visits. So we had customers like Grand Rapids as an example that saw payback in 11 weeks on just a couple services. So you kind of just get started.

Yeah, I love that. I want to double-click on that a little bit because as we think about measurement, I mean, one of the questions I often get, especially as we're looking at large-scale transformation of the way things are done, I mean, you mentioned some of the ROI dynamics. How else are you seeing people measure the impact? I mean, what should they ultimately look for as they optimize these service delivery channels?

Yeah, great question. So, and this is, we've talked, alluded a little bit about kind of the chapters of Granicus. Chapter 3, this is, you know, really what's coming and what is, you know, in front of us right now is all about this measurement question, right? Because in the first 2 stages, you're putting the tech in, you're creating a digital audience, you're figuring out what the responses are and how you can tune And then the question is, to your point, is what are the key measurements that determine whether you're successful and whether you can expand the project? And, you know, ultimately this shift in responsibility from access to outcome and impact means how do you measure outcome and impact? And historically that's been incredibly difficult because as CIOs, CTOs, city managers have had to deploy products independently that don't speak to one another, aren't connected at the data level, right? You can only get one slice of the measurement of the experience. I can see how many web visitors came in, I can see how many people opened email, how many clicked through, how many, you know, online transactions there were. But that only tells you one part of the experience. What you really want to know is how was the overall experience and how was it experienced to different constituent groups, right? Because in some cases you know, it's great that, you know, we're serving well certain parts of the population, but there are certain, you know, parts of the population that may be underserved, right, as an example. And you really want to know acutely, did they get access to the services they need? Were they— did they drop off at certain parts of the process? Or did the adoption rate go up? Did the application rate go up? And then what was the impact? Did they get, you know, food assistance programs that that community needs? Did they get you know, after-school lunch programs, that, you know, all of the things of the, the outcomes they really want. That's the measurement you want. And you can only do that when you've got implemented kind of at a platform level all of these capabilities. And then this chapter 3 for Granicus is about putting all of that independent behavior and transaction data in a place where you can access it, and then you can get to the insights and the questions that you're asking, like What was the impact on these communities, on my African American community, my Hispanic community, on my folks that are living below the poverty line? Like, and how did they experience these services differently? Like, that's the impact you really want to measure. And it can only come when you've got this abstracted data capability that allows you to ask those questions. But it's what's coming.

Yeah, I love that multidimensional reporting across all of those lines. So yeah, so as you look, you know, everything is changing right now in the landscape of technology and behavior. We've got You know, generative AI, we have evolutionary leaps in technology. I mean, what are some of the things that are on your radar that you see having kind of the biggest impact on citizen services over the next few years?

Yeah, well, you kind of nailed it on the head and we weren't going to finish this discussion without some AI talk.

Got to inject AI, right?

And, you know, but it's real, right? That's the thing, right? So anybody that doesn't know if AI is going to be applied to government or there's going to be some kind of, you know, constraints or delays. It's coming. And you've talked a little bit about on the show, and it's going to be coming from vendors like Granicus that can embed AI responsibly as part of platforms, right? And so we talked about like this, you know, the next 8 years, we're going to see evolution of innovation at 3 times the rate than we did in the last 8 years because of this, because of AI and data capabilities. So what's beautiful is In the last 8, you know, customers and agencies have been laying down the foundation that is ready to unlock the capabilities of AI. Because as I mentioned before, if you are trying to string together independent technologies and then you're like, okay, some are working, some are not, they don't integrate, they don't talk to one another, AI is kind of useless, right? Data is kind of useless. But we've been setting these foundation blocks that now— and I'm going to shock you here a little bit— statistic. So across 6,500 agency customers for Granicus, we enable 30 billion digital interactions a year across our customer base— website visits, emails, SMS messages, feedback forms, surveys, FOIA requests. Like, it is a mountain of data, but inside that data is a trove of information about how governments can better serve their constituents.

Yep.

Are the people that are— that need the access getting the access? Are they having poor experiences? What's their satisfaction? How expensive is it to deliver these services? How can I tune them to be more relevant to specific audience groups? How to become more contextual? How do I personalize services? And to your point, how do I become more predictive? How do I anticipate needs? All of that capability is embedded in all of this transaction data. And we've got global data now, so we can take best practices from, you know, governments in the UK or governments in Australia, apply them in the US and Puerto Rico. Like, so the beauty of government is everybody's willing to share these best practices and concepts and data. So to the extent we can actually empower these really good and enhanced capabilities around outcome and impact by unlocking this massive amount of data that humans just don't have the ability to to actually sift through and get insights from, we're going to see that applied in ways we can't even conceive of in the next 8 years.

It's an exciting time. I know we often talk about how, especially with generative AI, it's democratizing data analysis and data science to a certain extent. And so if you take kind of the multidimensional aspects you were talking about, it's exciting to think about not having to be an expert and being able to understand and, you know, not just understand your data, but understand the wider potential that's there from some of these other jurisdictions.

Totally right.

I love that. You know, as you, you know, there's government leaders that are watching right now, and as you kind of think, you know, about what they should do, I mean, many often come to us and they say, what are my next steps? You know, how do I even start? I've got technical debt. Maybe I don't have technical debt and I just don't know where to pull the trigger. I mean, what advice do you have for them as they look at just taking those initial steps?

Yeah, thanks for that question. So we hear that a lot too, right? Where do I get started? And I think, You know, one of the constraints we often hear, and I know you've probably heard this before, is, you know, the, the workforce, the internal workforce of governments and their agencies is diminishing, right? So talent is very difficult to come by these days, right? And to some degree, that's been used as a limiter to getting started.

Mm-hmm.

Anyways, our view would be, look, you've got a lot of people around you, right? So, you know, understand what your capabilities are internally. From a talent perspective, and then bring in the right partners, right? So, you know, bring in folks like Granicus, others that have, you know, experienced delivering and deploying in a very expeditious way that delivers high ROI with high payback. And then just get started incrementally because as you get huge ROI payback, as you see CSAT increase, as your elected officials start to see the real benefits of some of these things, the projects are just going to expand. But let partners help you. And then the second, you know, dimension of this ecosystem is the beauty of government is you have the support of all your peers around you, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, we're building best practices and then creating forums that will allow, you know, counties that are next to each other to communicate about what's working and what's not, cities next to one another, across agencies, federal, state, and local, like get engaged and, you know, learn from the, you know, the mistakes and the successes of others. so that you can, you know, really attack the problem, you know, in a very directed way with a reasonable budget that delivers, you know, quick wins with high impact.

Love it. So easiest question for you today is where can our audience go to learn more about you and about Granicus?

You bet. So the easiest way is granicus.com. We've got a lot of resources there, so I would encourage anybody to go there. Success stories, some customer examples, We have forums again and for places where people can interact and tell their stories. And we have a series of stories that folks can learn from. So encourage folks to go to granicus.com for sure. And then if anyone wants a personal question and want to engage directly, please feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn.

Awesome. Well, Mark, thanks so much for sharing the chapters of Granicus and introducing us to this 3rd chapter. And congrats on the amazing success that y'all have had. And I know that you'll continue to be a rocket over the years to come. And thanks for carving out some time on a Friday to join me.

Thank you, Dustin. Really appreciate it.

We'll see everyone next week, same time, same place.