Managing millions of constituents for 62 New York State Senate offices

New York State Senate's Bluebird

With the backing of CiviCRM's community of developers, Bluebird's increased functional capabilities, streamlined workflows and refined user interface promises to move the State of New York forward and help improve the communication of representative government‚ ultimately making the Senate more responsive to constituent needs.

Organizational focus
Government
Organization type
Government

Background

To improve communication and interaction between constituents and their elected officials while increasing staff efficiency and effectiveness.

Challenges

To engage disparate stakeholders during the design phase, anticipate modifications and build in development time to respond to changes in specifications once software is deployed to clients.

Solution

Several open source CRM solutions were evaluated as platforms to help improve the New York State Senate's communication and responsiveness to constituent needs through streamlined workflows, increased functional capabilities and a user interface built on principles of simplicity and efficiency. CiviCRM stood out from the other available platforms due to it's robust feature set, open source license, eager and thriving community of developers and cooperative core team.

Functionality

The solution required a glossary of terms; UI design philosophy; vision; roles (limiting access to data); permissions (restricting access to perform functions on data); constituent management; case management; search (activities, cases, contacts); training; reporting; customization (functional vs configuration customization at district level); integration (with existing tools); determining workflow requirements via 'user' stories ; a volunteer for a given Senate District; an office manager in a Senate District ; an analytics user managing data from one or more Senate Districts

Project images (click to enlarge)

The project's core team consisted of: NYSS CIO, Project Manager + team of developers, trainers rayogram Creative Director, CTO, Production Director, Project Manager + team of developers Lighthouse Consulting Services, project manager, trainer CiviCRM Core Team Key Stakeholders New York State Senate district offices + other non-district-specific NY State Senate employees