Organizational Profile

The New York City Council is the legislative branch of the city's government. Currently, New York City Council is made up of 51 Council Members elected from 51 Council Districts throughout the five Boroughs of the City of New York. They oversee a fiscal budget of $23.5 billion dollars.

The Issue

When you oversee the needs of a community of over 8 million people, there are a lot of demands for your attention. The NYC Council wanted a way for the people of the city to be able to register concerns via the web, look for information and get in touch with their council representative. They wanted to be able to track needs and issues, and to compile reports that would allow them to be more responsive to the needs of the citizens.

The Solution

GroupLink could see that what NYC needed was portal-based constituent relationship management (CRM). Using GroupLink's Orion CRM technology, we created a constituent complaint system for the NYC Council. Council members wanted to know who, how to find them, what the problem was, and to be able to add all this information to a database to do drillable reports via the web. Our eReport tool handles that part of the solution.

Currently, the New York City Council utilizes three primary CRM functions:
Relationship Management - for 51 Council Offices
Issue Management - Citizen Concerns
eReporting - Citizen Issues drillable by District, date, etc.

Future Expansion plans include:
Portal Interface for Community / Citizen Groups
Portal Interface for City Services
Portal Interface for Media, Businesses, etc.

Return on Investment (ROI)
Average Savings Per Employee
Response Time reduced 70 - 80%
Work Backlog reduced 60 - 80%
Errors / Rework reduced 40 - 50%
Learning Curve reduced 18 - 20%
Training Costs reduced 30 - 40%

Calculated Payback Time: 4 to 5 months