A government communication platform is the software that a government uses to inform its residents: it runs the government's website, sends email and text alerts to people who sign up, and runs council meetings and publishes their agendas. The products on this page are sold mainly to local governments in the United States and Britain, and much of the software is built in Bengaluru.
A city government has many things to tell its residents: road closures, water cuts, new rules, job openings and the dates of public meetings. Residents expect to find this on a website and to receive it by email or text message. A city also holds public meetings of its council, the elected body that makes the city's decisions. By law, the agenda of each meeting must be published in advance, and the minutes afterwards.
The platform handles both jobs. For alerts, residents subscribe to topics, such as "water and sewer" or "parks". When the city publishes an update, the platform sends it to every subscriber of that topic, by email or text message. The messages are delivered through notification infrastructure, which can send large volumes of messages at once. For meetings, the council's office staff build the agenda in the software: each item, with its staff report and attachments. Council members review the items, and the public can watch the meeting by video, with each agenda item marked in the recording.
Take, for example, a city in Arizona with 250,000 people. On a Monday morning, a water main breaks in one neighbourhood. The water department posts a notice. The platform sends a text message to the 8,400 residents who have subscribed to water alerts for that area, with the expected time of repair. In the evening, the city council meets. Item 7 on the agenda, published a week earlier, is a contract to replace old water pipes, paid for from the budget held in the city's government ERP. Residents can comment on the item online before the vote.
Emergency warnings are handled differently. A warning about a flood or a fire must reach every phone in an area, not only the subscribers. That is done by emergency location and public alerts systems, which governments run together with the telecom operators.
In India, the same jobs are done differently. Most government websites are built and hosted by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), and alerts reach citizens by SMS from registered government senders. Municipal corporations publish their meeting agendas, but rarely with software built for the purpose.
How is a government communication platform different from a company's customer engagement platform? A company sends messages to sell more. A government sends messages to inform residents, and it must reach every resident equally, including people who do not use apps.