Subscribing to News and Notices made easy! When you choose a Town Web municipal website, you get an easy way to communicate with your residents. All of our websites offer a Communication Platform. It allows you to post information in one place and your residents to be informed in many ways!
When you choose a Town Web municipal website, you get an easy way to communicate with your residents.
All of our websites offer a Communication Platform. It allows you to post information in one place and your residents to be informed in many ways!
When you post agendas, minutes, reports or News & Notices to your website, residents and visitors can read them. Those materials are available to readers any time they want to access them. It’s an easy and efficient way to communicate with your residents.
Our Communication Platform also offers a special feature that allows your residents to sign up to receive instant notifications of your postings. When residents fill out a simple form on your website, they will subscribe to receive email or text notifications when you post new content.
This is a great way to stay in touch with your residents. You can encourage them to sign up and stay informed easily!
The city of Belleville, Michigan, allows residents to choose to receive all New Agenda Postings by clicking one box, as well as to click on or off for City Council Regular Meetings, City Council Special Meetings, Downtown Development Authority and Planning Commission. A subscriber may click one box to receive them all or click off the Planning Commission, if that’s not an interest.
In this way, residents can choose exactly what they wish to receive for notifications concerning upcoming meetings.
Communicating with residents and visitors is vitally important. Part of your role is to serve them and meet their needs. Letting them know what’s going on in your community is an ongoing challenge for many municipal leaders.
When you provide information on your website, you’re meeting any requirements for posting as a government entity. But can you be sure your residents are visiting your site? Think about your own online habits. Are you likely to go back to a website to see what’s been updated since the last time you were there? Not usually. Rather, we rely on notifications to let us know when something has been updated and to give us the chance to click on it to check it out.
With a Town Web municipal website, your residents can have that option to receive notifications when you post agendas, minutes, News & Notices and more. Notifications are instant and automatic!
On your website, we offer a page that lets readers subscribe to updates to your website. This page features a simple form that collects their name, address, city, email and cellphone number. Then, residents can check boxes to choose which types of notifications they wish to receive. This is called subscription settings.
For example, they can choose New Agenda Posting to receive all notices of any new agendas you post on the website. You can break this down further, if you wish. A city may offer residents the option to choose to receive agendas for city council regular meetings, special meetings and planning commission meetings.
Additionally, if you post News & Notices on your website, you can allow your residents to choose to be notified using the same program.
For example, you can post about an upcoming fair or festival, notices of holiday hours, changes in garbage collection times or dates, new services offered or anything that you’d like to share with your residents.
Your subscribers can choose to receive notification by email or text message for any News & Notices you publish, as well.
By giving your residents a chance to subscribe, they can receive notifications in the way they prefer. Some people will want an email, while others want a text message, and some will choose both.
No matter which they choose, you only need to post your content to your website. Our program takes care of the rest, sending notifications immediately to subscribers. There is no extra work for you. It’s automatic, and your subscribers receive notification instantly.
When subscribers receive a notification, they will be able to see what it is and click on the link to read the entire post, see the document and get more information.
Of course, subscribers will have the option to unsubscribe and stop receiving notifications, if they wish. The program offers a one-click unsubscribe option, which is easy to use.
Additionally, we have programmed the Communication Platform to connect to your Facebook page, if you have one. When you post to your website – agendas, minutes, public notices or whatever you choose – it can be sent automatically to your Facebook page. You won’t need to get a link and go to Facebook to post it yourself. It will automatically update for you, saving you time in the process.
You don’t have to connect your Facebook page, but it is a time saver that we offer.
Of course, it’s up to you to decide what you will post and how often. Some municipalities post often while others only post occasionally outside of regular agendas and minutes. It’s really up to you and your municipality to decide how you want to use your website.
But having the Communication Platform can make it easy to reach your residents.
After your website launches, you can reach out to your residents in traditional methods – mail, email, flyers or community meetings – and encourage them to visit the website and subscribe to notifications. You can continue to encourage them to sign up when you reach out to them with any printed materials, email signatures and community postings.
The Communication Platform is easy to use for both you to post and them to subscribe. It allows you an easy way to reach residents and an easy way for them to stay informed about the things that matter most to them.
