How Radnor Township Increased Community Transparency and Communication Through Digital Transformation

One of the oldest townships in Pennsylvania, Radnor Township was founded in 1681 when Welsh Quakers asked William Penn for a tract of land where they could conduct business in their native language.

This founding principle of communication combined with community continues in Radnor, home to several noteworthy academic institutions and headquarters of nationally recognized financial institutions, with a goal that Township Manager William M. White sets as “improving or making the lives of our stakeholders as positive as possible.”

“We do that by providing a multitude of municipal services through our various departments, by a staff that is genuinely caring in terms of delivering those services,” he said of the township’s target. “But being a municipality, we are extremely limited in our resources. So, we don’t have the luxury of hiring staff to address service gaps or problems as they arise. We have to be creative in how we address certain problems. And technology is a fantastic tool to fill some of those gaps.”

One area where White sought to fill those gaps was in public communications.

“A gap existed in terms of telling the residents not just what we’re doing, but where the problems are,” he said. “Little tidbits of construction information to avoid this street today or that street tomorrow, as well as the important stuff such as changing service dates because of a holiday, or a hurricane coming through.”

While White saw an opportunity to provide better real-time critical information for Radnor’s residents, his Executive Assistant, Peggy Hagan, saw a need to create efficiencies in public meeting information for many of the same reasons.

“We like to make sure that the public is engaged, that they’re aware of the issues,” she said. “And it helps to develop a sense of community to have public meetings where they can attend and participate or at least have access to what was discussed.”

Hagan found herself working with a variety of other departments and dealing multiple agendas, all formatted differently from each other, that prevented a convenient way of making information available to residents.

A possible solution to both concerns was taking shape with Radnor’s Public Information Officer Molly Gallagher, who found herself looking to find a way to reinvigorate a website that she said had been “mainly used as a community bulletin board.”

“Very basic needs were being met by our former website, and it was certainly time for a change,” she said. “The goal was to provide a consolidated, fully integrated, customizable all-in-one branded solution to our citizens. In other words, a more user-friendly experience for our visitors.”

The wish list that Gallagher and the Radnor team put together would create a digital experience that added government transparency in communications while allowing for live streaming, video indexing, document access, and efficient minute creation.

“We wanted to enhance our ability to communicate with the Radnor community by leveraging a number of outreach mediums, including email text and social media integration,” Gallagher said. “And we wanted to add board and commission software enabling real time, citizen application, appointment and tracking of terms to the various township boards and commissions. Our community expects a high level from township services, including communications and transparency, and we needed a change to help us reach and even expand our communication goals.”

Addressing these needs required a targeted approach, prioritizing execution and implementation of services to tackle each area. Gallagher turned to Granicus, first for website and communications solutions with govAccess and govDelivery.

“When we started working with Granicus, our basic expectations were the website, and part and parcel with the website was communications,” Gallagher said. “But then, because of the govDelivery analytical capabilities, we started to see what was performing well. And we realized that video is very impactful in our community versus still images or even just a press release.”

Based on those insights, Gallagher developed video messaging for a campaign called “Around Town Thursdays” which received national award recognition. The impact of adding video to Radnor’s messaging offered new perspective to Gallagher on communicating with her community.

“Granicus showed us that, analytically, video is preferred here in Radnor,” she said. “That was one of the capabilities we were lacking previously. It was really important for us to communicate with the community on a near daily basis and we’re now able to do go beyond static press releases on a news feed on a website. We didn’t want a community bulletin board. We wanted to engage.”

That engagement continued through a redesigned website, creating a new digital experience at the core of Radnor’s communications via govAccess. The cleaner, easier-to-use website made it easier to provide information and increase transparency regarding township news in a way that Township Manager White saw as helping the relationship between resident and government.

“The experience that we had with the old website versus what we were able to create with the new website is night and day,” he said. “Just how clean the information is, how quickly someone might be able to get to what it is they’re looking for. We’re talking about seconds, but when you’re on your phone or you’re at home and you’re trying to find something, those seconds add up, and they mean a lot from being satisfied versus frustrated.”

The shift toward video also extended to meeting Hagan’s transparency goals regarding public meetings. Integrating the Peak and Boards and Commissions tools within Granicus’ govMeetings solution, Hagan said she found a solution that helped make meeting preparation more efficient while also providing new ways to engage community members around meetings.

“We had our previous website for nearly 20 years,” Hagan recalled. “Putting packets together took quite some time previously. But now, Peak creates the packet, so what would take half an hour an hour now takes minutes.”

The live streaming capabilities of govMeetings Media Manager also makes it easy for the community to access meetings, she said.

“It’s so easy for them to jump in and view the meetings,” she said of the feature. “If they call, we can direct them right to the meeting and to the packets. It’s fantastic. We love it.”

The modernization and integration of Radnor’s new digital experience for their residents has been embraced dramatically. Over 1.7 million emails and 57,000 text messages have been sent through the govDelivery platform since implementation, resulting in a 66% engagement rate and 98% subscriber growth in 2022 alone. But it’s more than numbers that Gallagher said prove that Radnor residents are appreciating the increased communication.

“When we’re out working in the community and collecting data and video, residents are now coming up to us saying, ‘Thank you so much. We love the website. We love the videos,’” she said. “So, overall, our facetime with the community has increased, and I don’t even think you can put a number on it. And that brings us such joy. That’s our goal. We want to get the information directly to the residents, and we want them to feel like they’re in the know all the time.”

Township Manager White said that he finds the increased website sign ups critically important in providing a database of registered residents open to township communications, as well as beneficial in allowing a small team to have such a significant impact on goals. Beyond that, he said that the integration of products as part of the Granicus Government Experience Cloud has also created a change internally for the Township of Radnor, as well, shifting expectations of how technology can impact goals and opening new ideas for future use.

“It’s risen the bar,” said White. “I think there’s a general sense of improved technology, but that also folks aren’t satisfied with that. They come to expect that level of communication with everything we do. So, it has improved from the user’s end. But it’s also made it critically important for us to stay on the ball and continue to constantly improve and do a good job, not just with communications with all these different areas that we’re investing in.”

For Gallagher, however, the increased transparency and organized presentation that all the Granicus products help Radnor Township provide has been the largest success of their digital transformation.

“Now it’s very cohesive, very consolidated,” she said. “We’re proud that we can put our best foot forward to show the community who we are. And that’s a place where they can trust us to be able to access information any time of day in one concise voice, by watching live stream videos, or reviewing public meetings.

“We wanted to have a face for this township,” she continued. “We wanted to have a voice for this township. And it’s one of our proudest achievements to be able to do that through the new website.”