Latest / Modern Gov Matters / From Ride-Alongs to Civic Engagement: Building for Government with CivAll's Aaron King
Transcript
- Aaron King: raising the standard and frequency of civic engagement in our country is going to make our country a better place. I truly believe that. And so, okay, I'm a software nerd. How can I affect change? I can build great software for the people who unlock that type of engagement, and that is what CivAll is all about. Sarah Loyd: Welcome to Modern Gov Matters. I'm Sarah Loyd, and this show is all about honest conversations with public sector communicators about what's actually working, what's not, and the stuff that keeps you up at night. Modern Gov Matters is presented by CivAll, powered by Social News Desk. Today we're doing something a little bit different. This is a special episode because there's actual news to share, and it's news from the company that presents this show. So let me be up front with you. My guest today is Aaron King. He runs Social News Desk and CivAll, and he's my boss. And CivAll does present this podcast. You all know that by now, and we're gonna have the same kind of conversation that we always have. He's the kind of person who insisted on riding along in the patrol car to find whether the thing he'd built actually worked. And since then he's spent more than a decade at Social News Desk working with newsrooms and then with government teams. Today he's announcing something new and I wanted to talk to him about the why behind it, not just the what. So welcome to Modern Gov Matters, Aaron. Aaron King: Hey, thanks, Sarah. It's great to be here. And I just want to say you guys have been doing a great job with this podcast. Thank you so much for doing this. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, thank you so much. I I really appreciate that. So before any of this, before we got to the point where we are today, what was your first real exposure to how local government communicates with residents? Aaron King: my time at New World Systems, you mentioned it at the top of the show. I built public safety software and I watched how police, fire, CAD dispatchers, 911 dispatchers interface with the public using the tools that we were building for them. Sarah Loyd: So you insisted on doing ride-alongs with customers when you were building in-car software for police. And why did you insist on that? And then tell me about Flint as well. Aaron King: Haha. Yeah, Flint's a good one. the thing about ride-alongs is it let me see what the users were seeing. in a situation like that, so for those who don't know, we're talking about software that runs inside of a police car or a or a fire truck. that provides information to the officer responding to an emergency situation, And so slightly slow response or a bug in the system, you know, where it might be an annoyance for one user, for this user, it could be the difference between life and death. It certainly could be the difference between them knowing that a gun was registered at a address, that there was in the case of fire, that there was a Oxygen tank or some kind of explosive potential at that location. when I'm rolling up to a scene, I know what to expect, or at least I have a lot more information. So I wanted to be in the car experiencing the entire thing. You know, you learn a lot knowing that that the the officer who's driving the car looking down at a laptop you know has to balance attention to the road and attention to what's going on. So you can't use small fonts, you can't use poorly contrasted buttons. And so being in the car allowed me to experience my software that we were building from the perspective of the user. And then yeah, so Flint, that was a good one. I've done ride-alongs in all four corners of the country, from Flint, Michigan to San Bernardino to to Yuma, Arizona. And They've all been unique. And able to sit next to and and and walk the town with the men and women serving in law enforcement really revealed some great things about our customer and some some great things about our country. but the the best time that I ever had was in Flint, Michigan. And I got to roll with a drug enforcement task force. I don't remember her name, but I got to ride with her in this Yukon or whatever we were riding in so the work that the drug task force was doing was very powerful work, keeping drugs off the street. I got to be a part of that and just as as part of the experience, we we ended up responding to a domestic disturbance. And the the woman I was riding with had to get out of the car and she did not want me sitting in the car. and so I had to get out with her. I I had, you know, like a a flashlight and you know appropriate clothing on, but I I definitely you know did not have a gun and I I was not I Sarah Loyd: Ha Aaron King: was not you know prepared to respond to any kind of problem. So not fully Sarah Loyd: Not fully equipped. Aaron King: equipped, equipped enough to get hurt for sure. but I had to get Sarah Loyd: Ha ha Aaron King: out and go with her to to sort of secure an area and that was blood pumping and that's just you know a tiny fraction of what she and and the other folks who run that test force dealt with every single day. And you know, just it was such a great team. And and in my experience doing ride-alongs with law enforcement across the country, it's just shown me how many great men and women there are doing that job, how hard it is. And so I take that experience, I put that type of care and concern into what we're building for communicators and for Clerks and for IT directors and all the teams in our in local government because I really believe that the mission that they're after, increasing the engagement of the populace in our country is an important mission and is something that I want to be a part of. Sarah Loyd: when you've talked to customers recently, what sticks in your mind as far as the challenges that they talk about? Aaron King: for communicators today, the the biggest thing they want to do is get to the job that they signed up for. You know, they're so caught up in technology, vendors, administrative tasks. The thing they want is time back to communicate. you know, I think of Brian Ligon, for example. And, you know, he what a great guy, by the way. Sarah Loyd: Friend of the podcast. Aaron King: of the podcast, yep, awesome guy. And the thing is he he just wants time to do what he loves to do. he's not the only one. There are many of our communicators who are doing two jobs. sometimes they're volunteering in in the in the fire department. Sometimes they're the head of the emergency operations response, they want to be a communicator and they don't want to be a software wonk or an admin. they they they want to get out there and do that job that they sign up for. And and that's part of what is powering us. That's part of our mission is to unlock that. Sarah Loyd: So let's go ahead and get into the news. Tell me what is CivAll, and how would you explain CivAll to someone who's never heard of it? Aaron King: CivAll is a modern civic engagement platform that allows a communicator to do things like write a piece of content once and distribute it to their website and to all their social media platforms in a completely accessible and compliant way. And then tools like CivArchive capture that and create a durable record, a durable archive that is compliant with open records laws. Sarah Loyd: So what does this mean for a government team that's already using Social News Desk today? Does anything change for them? Aaron King: CivAll comes from Social News Desk, not just from a pure company standpoint, but also it comes from fifteen years of experience working with professional communicators. for for local governments who signed up with us in the early days and are using Social News Desk, the SND Dashboard or SND Archive, Nothing's going to change for them. They can continue using that platform for the foreseeable future. But what we are going to do is offer a free and easy upgrade path to CivSocial and CivArchive. And what they're going to experience is a newer, more modern, and more specifically designed for their workflow software. So they'll find that things that in the past might have been geared towards volume publishers like television newsrooms and digital publications. CivSocial for example is designed specifically to help the PIO or the comms manager, the communications team publish social media i the manner that they they want to do it. Sarah Loyd: a lot of companies in this space grew by buying other companies and stitching the pieces together. And you alluded to that a little bit earlier. What did you decide to do differently and why should that matter to a government agency? Aaron King: Yeah, so we've built a completely integrated platform. The information that you put into CivSocial is available in CivSites and in CivArchive. The tools all talk together, and that's not just a dream that we promised. It's something we've actually delivered on. So for example, when you're editing your homepage in CivSites, can pull a feed of social information directly on your website that's powered by CivSocial. So the integrated aspect of our platform is important today in the products that we're currently offering, but will continue to get more valuable in the future. So the more CivAll products that you use, the more of that integration synergy you'll get from the platform. Sarah Loyd: Let's shift a little bit and talk a little bit about CivSocial specifically. So I want you to picture a communications director on a Monday morning and there's a road closure to announce, a strategy meeting with the city manager in an hour, and three departments waiting on approvals. So what does that morning look like in CivSocial? Aaron King: Well, it's a typical morning, right? So Sarah Loyd: Ha ha Aaron King: yeah, for for a government communicator, you know, they could have twenty boring days followed by one bang all at once. And so you said a road closure, right? That would that would come up first and they could hop into Civ CivAll and flip the emergency and alerts button that will allow them to put up an alert. on the site takes about ten seconds. They can type up the specifics of the road closure and then maybe even link to an article that they've already published on the site that talks about it. they're done with that, they probably need to do a social blast. So they'll go to CivSocial and they won't have to rewrite that entire story. When they go to do the post in CivSocial, they'll be prompted to, hey, it looks like you just published an alert on your website. Would you like to publish that to social? And boom, one button press. They might even use our auto crop tool to crop some images related to the post. And then boom, that goes out. They've spent maybe five minutes. And they've now done, they've updated the website, they've sent a social blast out, and then they're on to that first meeting to talk about the community response. Sarah Loyd: So let's talk a little bit about approvals. Approval workflows are one of those things that not many people outside of government really have to think about. And why do they matter so much here? Aaron King: Yeah, I mean a approvals are a key element of communicating information to the public. know, mentioned earlier, Brian, Ligon and and many other communicators, they want time back their day to do to do the job of communication. we're finding that many communications departments really appreciate just having being able to delegate some of the communicating to the rest of of their town. And what's great about that is that brings forth the real community voice. It brings forth more more of the people in the community to to add to the to the message. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, you're getting that content directly from the people who know the content best and then getting that professional set of eyes on it before it has to go out the door. Yeah, that's great. And so CivSocial has native Nextdoor posting, which almost nobody else does. And why did that matter enough to build into the product? Aaron King: Yeah, Nextdoor has been a great partner. to be able to publish content as a another network that you can use with CivSocial, it's it's really been very powerful because there are there's definitely a significant number of people on next door that are not on Facebook, that are not on Instagram. So to be able to get all of the communities with one communication. Remember with CivSocial, that's one social post, not nine to each network. That's one social post and you get to you get to get your message across to so many different places. So Sarah Loyd: All right, so tell me about the part of CivSocial that you're proudest of that you wouldn't necessarily see in a demo. Aaron King: Well, it's not technology, Sarah. you know, this is gonna sound cheesy, but it is the people, a hundred percent. our team of product builders of of support, of customer support, of implementation, of sales. They're just my favorite people. And the reason why I love them so much is they care about what we're trying to do. They are trying to help communicators, clerks, IT departments, everybody in in in in our customers towns, they're trying to help them do their job better. get get to the get to the task that they're trying to get to and and let the software get out of the way. So you know, when it comes to CivAll, our our our best thing is definitely our people. Sarah Loyd: Well, I'm gonna say thank you as as one of those people who gets to do this job. so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about archiving. And I always say that archiving is the most boring product you'll ever love. and it sounds so dry right up until the day you need it. So why should a communications team care about this as much as their clerk does? Aaron King: Yeah, yeah, I love that line by the way. definitely the most boring product you'll ever love. And want to tell the story about about how we got into archiving. the early days with SND Dashboard and our government customers, they loved our software so much. They loved our people so much, and they had other archiving solutions that just were a bear to deal with. And they were telling us, look, we love what you guys do. We love your people. Build this software and take our money, please. And so that's how we got into archiving. But since we built SND Archive and and and now CivArchive, I've I've learned that compliance aside, the ability to have a clear transparency in in what your government is communicating and have a durable record of that, approvable record, and one that is available to open records requests, to sunshine laws and FOIA. it is a shield on a communicator's arm. When they have a durable archive that is compliant with federal, state and and local laws, that's something that they can bank on. And so our job, especially with this latest iteration with CivArchive, has been build a product that supports our customers' needs in terms of compliance, transparency, and communication with the public. Sarah Loyd: So we hear sometimes about teams that are still out there taking screenshots of their social posts. What's the risk that they may not realize they're carrying? Aaron King: Well, the biggest one is time. you know, it it there there are situations where you can go take screenshots of content. And I understand why some small teams think that that is a a reasonable solution. But the time it takes to do that, real challenge you come up against is time. not just time, like your time taking screenshots and doing that, but also the passage of time. So you know, 30 days ago, pretty easy to find a social post. You know, two years ago, no, very difficult, very time consuming. And with CivArchive, that's literally a search. A it takes you, you know, 15 seconds to find that. so getting time back when those requests come in, finding something in in you know, let's just say five minutes to build a a case response for for a request versus five hours is a good example. another big part of CivArchive is our level of capture. So grabbing a screenshot of what the current state of a social post is could be useful. But knowing that that social post changed two or three times or someone put up a comment and then the next day deleted it, we capture that information. And so that can be essential if it comes when it comes to courts looking at looking at an archive or giving a full and accurate picture to the person Request any information. Sarah Loyd: So if somebody is already archiving with another provider and their contract is up, what does switching actually look like? Aaron King: Yeah, it seems like it could be tricky, but really it's quite easy. when you onboard into Civarchive, we will import your current archive. So two of the biggest competitors in that space, we will import directly their archive, and you can request that. It's it's it's it's your data and it's part of your rights as a customer to request that archive, and we'll import that for you. We also do an automatic backfill. of information to a certain point in in in the past and that is also a helpful part of the capture. the actual switch is very easy. It can seem scary, but we make it we make it a breeze. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, and it sounds like for for teams that are coming fresh into this whole archive ecosystem, they'll they'll get some of that backfilled data. So it's not like they're completely starting from scratch. Aaron King: Absolutely, that's a good point. If if you sign up today, let's say you're not using any tool, which we do still find, you'll get a year of backfill right from the start. So you've already got your archive primed. And so if you get a request within that window, you'll have it. Sarah Loyd: So there's also a third piece to CivAll. So let's talk a little bit about CivSites. What is CivSites and why does a government website belong in the same family as social publishing and archiving? Aaron King: Yeah, it's a great question. So CivSites is the last website CMS you'll ever need. it is designed to be the the city's website host, its web editor, and its content management system. And it like the other tools in our solution is fully integrated. it's got best of breed tools to manage your website. And the reason why communicators care, we're we're finding a lot of websites are actually led by the communications team. So, of course, in as you as you move up in terms of population, IT departments, IT directors, clerks, comms teams, city managers, they're involved in in the direction of the website but often it's led by the communication team and that makes sense this is how you're in in in 2026 this is how a an agency communicates with its residents that it starts at the website it follows on through social and and that's what eventually leads them into you know into town hall into the board meetings into the public events it starts at the website and of course the communication communication teams are often leading that. Sarah Loyd: Now, for those communication teams specifically, what should they be able to do with their own website that most of them currently can't? Aaron King: is kind of a goofy one, but they should be able to edit it and edit any part of it that Sarah Loyd: Yeah. Aaron King: they want to when they want to and immediately. we're finding in talking to some of our customers that you know they've been on another platform and they've needed to make a change to the header and it's takes 45 days. And I I said, I can't believe that cannot be true. But once I heard it five, six, seven times, I started to believe, okay, that's that's just the reality of the world. With our platform, if you have permission to change the header, you can go in and change the header. Let's say you need to change an extension or a phone number, you need to update a department page, you want to change the background on the site, you want to change anything about the site, it's easy to do with our editor. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, without having to move heaven and earth to get it done. Aaron King: There's no there's no call in to support, there's no email that goes into the ether. You're empowered to make that change. And it's still a little top secret, but that empowerment is gonna get even easier. You're gonna be able to make that change. You don't need to be a an IT person, a web developer. You don't need experience with HTML. If you can use Canva, if you can use Word, you'll be able to use our tool to change your website. Sarah Loyd: So Aaron, what are you hearing from government teams right now that's shaping what gets built next? Aaron King: it's a good question. I mean, we're always listening to communicators. I listen to every episode of this podcast, obviously. and you know, it's almost all the features that we're building come directly from someone asking or a a pain point that we've helped identify and then we built something. We have a one-button crop for all networks, and it takes a job that might have taken 15, 20 minutes to do individual image crops. It does that instantly. So a 20-minute job goes down to 30 seconds. And it's that type of thing that comes out of conversations with communicators, with with with the comms department. So we build them an easy button. And we'll just keep doing that with every one of these tasks. We try to find pain points, we try to find ways we can add value, save time, get the communicator back to the job that they want to be doing. Sarah Loyd: So what gives you Aaron King: That's it. Sarah Loyd: hope about this work? Aaron King: I mean, the the thing that powers me, the reason why I wanted to to build CivAll is I want to raise the standard and the and the frequency of engagement in our community. I want residents and citizens to be participating in their local government because I think if we start in a small way, if we start close to home in our family, in our town, and then we expand beyond that, that's how you make real change, that's how you make real progress. And so, okay, I'm a software nerd. How can I affect change? I can build great software for the people who unlock that type of engagement, and that is what CivAll is all about. Sarah Loyd: That's great. So if somebody listening wants to see all of this for themselves, where should they go? Aaron King: Well, CivAll.com of course, if you're already in part of the audience of Modern Gov Matters. but CivAll.com is a great place. if you for some reason can't get to our website, you can visit us at a number of communicator events, 3CMA, GSMCON, Sarah Loyd: Yeah, absolutely. I know I know our teams are are going to all kinds of events in in states and cities all across the country. All right, Aaron, it's time for the lightning round. We do this with every one of our guests. So rapid fire, first thing that comes to mind, no wrong answers. What is your favorite local spot in your area? Aaron King: Grand Haven boardwalk, 100%. If you haven't been to Grand Haven, Michigan, you haven't lived. if you ever come to Grand Haven, Michigan, let me know, shoot me an email, aaron@civall.com, and I will show you around town. It is the absolutely most beautiful place on the planet. Our beaches, you know, in the three months when it's really warm here in Michigan, our our Sarah Loyd: Ha ha Aaron King: beaches are the best beaches in the country. They are golden sand, clear water, nothing will sting you or bite you in the water, and it is just absolutely beautiful. definitely come come visit us in Grand Haven. Sarah Loyd: All right. What is the most underrated part of your community? Aaron King: Yeah, so where Grand Haven boardwalk and pier are and beaches are fantastic, the underrated the underrated area is Muskegon. the city of Muskegon is just a fantastic town with beautiful beaches and great places to eat and hang out. So I would I would say if when you come to Grand Haven, be sure to come to Muskegon too. Sarah Loyd: what's the best thing you've ever eaten on a customer visit? I know you like to get out and visit those customers, but everybody has their favorite on the road. Aaron King: not gonna tell you the best thing I ever ate in terms of quality of food. I'm gonna tell you the coolest spot I ever ate, and that was in Yuma, Arizona, this little place called Lutes Casino. And they had this Lutes hamburger hot dog thing that had a hamburger patty and then a split in half hot dog sitting on top. And you know, as dumb as that is, it is just absolutely delicious. Sarah Loyd: So if you go to a cookout, you don't have to decide. You can have the best of both worlds. Aaron King: Easy. Yeah, of course. Why would you have to pick between those two? Sarah Loyd: All right. My very last question for you, Aaron. What is one piece of advice you would give to a public sector communicator, knowing what you know now? Aaron King: Yeah, be authentic. Having traveled the country, having talked to communicators and and really public servants across the country, it's the authentic people that have have changed my life. Just be yourself, be true to your community, don't try to chase every internet fad. I've seen the coolest things emerge out of the craziest parts of our country. And if people would just be authentic and and let their community breathe, man, we'd we'd have a great thing. So be authentic. Sarah Loyd: Love that. All right, Aaron. Well, what I'm taking with me today is that none of this just started with a product. It really started with watching people do an enormously hard job with tools that just aren't specialized for them. And then putting all those learnings into a whole system that's purpose built for government communicators. So thank you so much for coming on the show today. Aaron King: it's been a pleasure and just thank you so much for what you do for us and and really for the communication community at large. Thank you so much, Sarah. Sarah Loyd: Modern Gov Matters is presented by CivAll, powered by Social News Desk. If you found this episode helpful or interesting, please share it. And for more episodes, visit moderngovmatters.com. I'm Sarah Loyd, and we'll see you in two weeks.