Our New Journey: Irys™
Cityflag was born out of the necessity to solve a personal problem; we wanted to improve the experience of communicating with local governments and increase civic participation. We are a mission-driven organization committed to giving people access to their community leaders throughout the world.
Cityflag was born out of the necessity to solve a personal problem; we wanted to improve the experience of communicating with local governments and increase civic participation. We are a mission-driven organization committed to giving people access to their community leaders throughout the world.
After working with our first client, we realized that our customer-centric approach to product and service design could offer value to cities at multiple levels. We designed our mobile app to increase civic participation by providing a unique user experience. We also designed and developed a CRM dashboard that provided city governments with an improved work order management process, enabling cities to quickly and efficiently manage service requests. The CRM dashboard also offered the ability to quickly gather and analyze large sets of data to measure operational performance and provide actionable insights.
In the past three years, our company has grown from an abstract idea to a company with over 13 employees, multiple products, and several clients around the world. Today, we are working with cities of all sizes, DOTs, airports, and other asset management organizations. We have connected more than 100,000 people to their government and helped city administrations resolve more than 150,000 service requests. Still, most importantly, we’ve contributed to strengthening the communities of our partners and clients.
After achieving rapid growth and learning more about our clients, users, and partners, our vision has expanded. Our mission has evolved from improving communication between people and government to improving the quality of life in communities through the use of technology.
Irys™
Our name began as a playful descriptive game of words: the user places a flag on the issues they see in their city. These days we do so much more than that, and our name stands for more than Cityflag’s functional and descriptive wording.
With the vision, attributes, and passions that already existed from the previous brand, we needed to permeate the new as;
- Building smarter communities
- Efficient communication
- Fixing real issues
- Positive impact in people lives
- Making cities more responsive and resilient
- Good design and innovation
The era where collaboration nurtures community building
We are living in the era of environmental, social, and cultural commitment of responsible citizens, focused on a common good: To improve communities. With that in mind, we began with a product that connected citizens with the management of the public service delivery process: Cityflag. However, we are now serving all communities, from cities or transit hubs to military bases! With the goal of improving their quality of life.
If we all form a society in which we are no longer passive, where we love to co-create, collaborate, and be relevant to a common good, our new brand should be part of a collective vocabulary and be part of that society we strive for. We personified the service, and now we call ourselves: Irys™. The iris is the circular part of the eye that regulates the amount of light that enters your eye or provides the color to our eyes, but it can also be the name of your neighbor. By changing the “I” for a “Y” which does not alter the meaning phonetically, we’ve shaped a name and brand that is forward-thinking focused on community building: Irys™, building collaborative communities.
The evolution of a social brand for cities to a brand of co-creation and collaboration for communities
As our product has evolved to meet the changing needs of our customers, our brand has also grown. Irys™ now has a new brand identity, visual universe, and design system.
Through our attributes:
- Proactive/Flexible
- Simple
- Innovative
- Tangible
- Agile
- Human-Centered Design
Kinetic Highlighting
The main concept behind the personality of our brand is inspired by signaling (wayfinding that exists in any city/community), where the user highlights the problem to be solved, facilitating the leaders and decision-makers to identify issues easily. HIGHLIGHT THE REAL PROBLEM. Mark the X when you see something wrong. Make it more visible. Highlight it. “Hashtag it” and talk to us from the action and invite us to be part of the solution from a digital ecosystem> the button.
