In the heart of Miami-Dade County lies Biscayne Park, a close-knit village renowned for its serene, tree-lined streets and community-centric atmosphere. Despite its charm, the village faced significant communication challenges, particularly in disseminating timely updates and managing resident requests. Enter GOGov, whose Citizen Notifications and Citizen Requests Management solutions have revolutionized how Biscayne Park engages with its residents. By providing a platform for efficient communication and issue reporting, GOGov has empowered Biscayne Park to keep its community informed and responsive, particularly during critical times such as hurricane season. This partnership not only enhances resident satisfaction but also streamlines the village’s internal processes, making Biscayne Park a model of effective local governance.

About Biscayne Park

Nestled in the heart of Miami-Dade County, Biscayne Park is a charming village with a close-knit community of just 3,000 residents. Spanning less than one square mile, this entirely residential community was founded in 1931 and is renowned for its picturesque, tree-lined streets. Unlike many neighboring areas, Biscayne Park stands out as a peaceful haven, free from commercial businesses and schools. Its serene environment offers a stark contrast to the surrounding crime communities, attracting visitors from near and far who come to stroll through its beautiful streets and enjoy the local Recreation Center. Often hailed as a hidden gem, Biscayne Park is a unique and inviting escape within Miami-Dade County.

What was the challenge that led Biscayne Park to GOGov?

Resident communications have been a huge issue in Biscayne Park. With only using the Village website, and email addresses that may or may not be current, Biscayne Park was looking for a solution that would allow the staff to send out notifications. The village wanted its residents to be caught up with information such as what’s going on each week, or updates on meetings or events. Biscayne Park is also located in the middle of hurricane territory, with strong storms each season and huge floods. The village needed a platform to get those important hurricane updates out.

While doing research Chris Truitt, Village Manager at Biscayne, found that GOGov has a great resident reporting system, allowing residents to notify the village on their issues. This was a perfect fit for Biscayne Park to report issues like broken streetlights, allowing the staff to take care of the reported issues at the backend. GOGov Citizen Notifications and GOGov Citizen Requests Management were the perfect fits to improve resident communications in Biscayne Park.

“The GOGov products essentially turn into a workload management system. We can track where the requests are coming from, we can track our responses to those requests, and we can see who is constantly requesting issues, such as flooding” -Chris Truitt, Village Manager

This year in 2024, Biscayne Park teamed up with GOGov to develop a village branded mobile app “My Biscayne Park”. The app allows users to put in service requests with GOGov Citizen Requests Management and the village can send out notifications through the app with GOGov Citizen Notifications.

How is Biscayne Park using GOGov today?

Biscayne Park is using GOGov for a couple different things—of course the communications piece with notifications going out both for emergency and routine updates. The village receives service requests for potholes or flooding, but a cool feature that they use GOGov Citizen Requests Management for is “watch orders” when someone goes on vacation or is away from home, they can use the app to request the Police Department to drive by their house more frequently.

Internally, the staff tweaked the software and molded it to their specific needs. The village uses GOGov Citizen Requests Management for purchasing management system. Any request for expenditures or purchase orders now come through the app. The reason for this is to track and manage these orders coming in. The backend users can see every step of the process and report and see exactly who has been managing each report.

Recently, the reporting system has been especially helpful with Biscayne’s “Vulnerability Assessment”, when an outside consultant looks at the topography of the park and drainage systems, to predict where there will be flooding during hurricane season. With that data, the village can request grant funding for solutions to fix the flood. One of the things that Biscayne Park was able to do with GOGov as a part of that vulnerability assessment was create a service request option that allowed residents to report that flooding using pictures and include the photos in their reports. This allowed them to validate the data that they currently had during the vulnerability assessment, as well as look at new areas of the data that did not necessarily show up.

Additionally, this past June, there was a huge storm in Biscayne Park. The area had between 8 and 20 inches of rain. It was Biscayne’s first experience with a bad storm using GOGov, and it made it extremely easy to update the community with important notifications regarding the storm. They sent out notifications letting residents know which areas to avoid, safety and emergency information, and it allowed residents to report where the dangerous flooding is. “My Biscayne Park” was especially helpful through this storm, as well as being helpful for a small community managing these services when a lot needed to be tended to.

Future Plans for Biscayne Park

Biscayne Park plans to measure analytics that come from the app usage over time, specifically employee response on the workload management perspective, how long it is taking the staff to push things through, and the purchasing process.

“Hopefully within a year, we'll start having those baselines well defined and then can start tweaking our products and services to make sure that we continue to improve on the services that we deliver.” –Chris Truitt, Village Manager

The village also hopes to expand their usage with GOGov by adopting GOGov Code Enforcement and GOGov Permitting and Licensing modules, centralizing all of their systems with GOGov. When asked what advice Chris Truitt would give to other municipalities considering GOGov he said,

“Go for it, give it a shot! We like the fact that it's highly configurable. Like I said, we're using it to modernize purchasing, which isn't something I would imagine is normally used for. The sales team at GOGov is phenomenal, the implementation team is extremely responsive and knowledgeable. We always had answers within seemed like minutes.” Chris Truitt, Village Manager.

Your Municipality Powered by GOGov

GOGov is committed to helping municipalities and local governments enhance community engagement, streamline operations, and foster transparent communication. Our partnership with Biscayne Park demonstrates the potential of our solutions to make a meaningful impact on cities of all sizes, and our continued efforts to improve and innovate further.  

GOGov specializes in providing CRM, Code Enforcement, Citizen Notifications, Online Permitting and mobile software to local governments of all sizes. We built our software from the ground up working with the departments and staff that now use our products every single day.

Interested in learning more? Sign up for a demo with the GOGov team today.

‍