Case study: CityGrows and Inyo County
At the beginning of December, a business owner in Inyo County completed the first-ever fully digital Fictitious Business Name (FBN) filing in California, through a partnership between CityGrows and the Inyo County Clerk-Recorder’s Office, led by Kammi Foote.
For CityGrows it was another important first — Inyo is the first County to bring a workflow live on our platform.
Inyo County is the second largest county in California, with the second-smallest population. Many residents live more than 50 miles from the County offices — making in-person paperwork time-consuming and expensive. Now, Inyo residents can complete this important process quickly online, saving time and helping Inyo County encourage new business formation.
We were able to launch this process without any financial investment from Inyo County — demonstrating how our no-up-front-cost and “no IT needed” model makes creating better digital services accessible to even very small governments. We’re helping to increase the Inyo County staff’s efficiency — and their ability to manage their own technology. The Clerk-Recorder and her staff are able to set up and manage CityGrows workflows themselves. We’re eager to work with other Counties in California to quickly launch online FBNs in other jurisdictions through our cloning feature.
Any California County can have their own online FBN process up and running quickly — learn how in one of our upcoming webinars, or do it yourself by follow the steps below.
- Create a CityGrows government account
- Visit the Inyo County FBN page on CityGrows
- Click the 3 small dots to the right of the title and then click on “Clone this process.”
- Now, you’ll have your very own FBN workflow to edit and launch. You can add your own staff on the “Permissions” tab, decide who should complete the preliminary review and registration steps, and start testing out the workflow.
- Don’t forget that you can always connect with a CityGrows team member through our chat function (that little white square thing at the bottom right of our pages.)
April 2018 UPDATES:
- We’re very excited to share that, in addition to helping Inyo County improve their office’s internal efficiency with better technology, we’re also seeing significant increases in compliance with the FBN requirement. Using month-over-month comparisons with previous years, more businesses are completing the required FBN process because it’s available online— resulting in more revenue to Inyo County, and better data for planning services.
- We’ve updated the screenshots in this post to showcase our new landing page design, which includes a streamlined overview of the steps in the FBN process, as well as a customizable banner image (for Inyo County, it’s the majestic Eastern Sierra).
