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NLC Teams With Indigov on Community Engagement Platform

The National League of Cities aims to give its local government members access to CRM and other tools that can help officials keep better track of what constituents want. The deal reflects larger trends in gov tech.

Closeup of a microphone with a blurred room full of people behind it.
The National League of Cities, or NLC, is getting deeper into the guts of local government via a community engagement deal with a technology supplier.

The nonprofit and Indigov have come together to launch NLC Outreach, which a statement described as “a new constituent engagement and communications platform” for towns, cities and villages.

The League is offering the platform exclusively to its members.

The idea behind this deal calls for them to use the tool to upgrade their community outreach and build better connections with residents. The platform offers messaging via such channels as email, mail and text, built-in constituent relationship management (CRM) capabilities and segmentation.

Indigov’s own community engagement platform has found use in 47 states, according to the statement. Cities using tech from Indigov have enjoyed engagement rates of nearly 50 percent.

The tech helps officials keep track of constituent communications and trends in service requests, and streamline workflows.

“Government leaders need modern tools to meet the needs and expectations of the people they serve,” said Indigov CEO Alex Kouts in the statement. “We built NLC Outreach to help government work better for everyone, and partnering with the National League of Cities allows us to scale that vision across thousands of municipalities.”

This new deal comes a year after the National League of Cities — an advocacy and professional membership organization for municipal governments across the U.S. — said it would join gov tech startup accelerator CivStart in support of the CivStart Innovation Hub, another platform.

Meanwhile, community engagement options continue to build upon some of the latest technology, including artificial intelligence.

That is the case in Kentucky, where Bowling Green recently tested an AI-backed public engagement tool that collected more than 1 million responses from residents in just more than a month, all in service of the city’s long-range planning.
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