CityGrows has gone to the puppies!

Dogs are awesome, paper forms and dog licenses are not.

Meet Delores and Roger of CityGrows, they’re super hard workers. Photo by Catherine Geanuracos

We have two new, adorable, squirmy, almost house trained puppies in the CityGrows family, which means lots of cuddles, unscheduled breaks and also dog licenses.

Almost every municipality in the US requires dogs (and often other pets) to be licensed. Licensing pets is an important component of animal control services, ensuring rabies vaccinations are up-to-date and providing critical funds that help support local shelters. But the reality of dog licensing is this: it’s another trip to City Hall, another form to print and mail, another check to write, another reason to skirt an important regulation.

In 2014, KCRW examined the issue of why up to 85% of Los Angeles dog owners avoid licensing their dogs, and many expressed frustration at the cost and hassle of the process.

By eliminating paperwork and trips to City Hall, CityGrows has the potential to make purchasing or renewing a dog license as easy and affordable as ordering a pizza online.

Here’s how the dog license process with CityGrows could work:

1. 1–2 months before a license renewal is due, dog owners receive an email reminder.
2. Dog owners visit their city/town website and fill in the required information via CityGrows, including uploading copies of the rabies vaccination and spayed/neutered certificate if necessary.
3. Via the CityGrows platform, a government employee verifies the accuracy of the application and approves it for payment.
4. The dog owner receives an email notification and submits payment via credit card. (There is also the option to mail in a check payment, ensuring that those residents without access to credit can register their pets.)
5. Government staff verifies the application is complete.
6. Staff processes and mails out the dog license.

Bonus — with dog license number and information (including rabies vaccinations and certifications), the CityGrows platform serves as a de facto database to track all dog license related information, easing the administrative burden on municipal staff.

Double Bonus — CityGrows facilitates responses to public records requests and open data. Any data entered into the platform can be marked to be included

A sample dog license renewal application — hosted on CityGrows

Why CityGrows:

CityGrows is free for governments to use — as a cloud hosted software solution, a government agency can set up and launch processes with zero capital investments (we charge a small percentage of payments processed on the platform to earn a living). This approach is more fair and efficient, and also eliminates municipal procurement cycles and delays. We’re already in use in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, and we’re expanding aggressively.

Our software is flexible — processes can be updated and customized by anyone with zero coding. This makes us particularly well suited for government clients who want to get online, but are leery of spending gobs of money on software that might not be a serviceable solution.

We’re committed to transparency. With the click of a checkbox, data entered into CityGrows can be included in open data and available almost immediately for public records requests without additional involvement from city staff.

Get it!

Get online with CityGrows. Photo by NickTurner via Unsplash.

You can get online with CityGrows in a matter of minutes — it’s free to create an account, and you can see sample templates here.

If you’re looking for a more intensive on-boarding experience with more support and customization, then check out our CityGrows pilot program — a structured 3 month program to get your processes online.

And because dogs are awesome, we’ll leave you with one final pic:

CityGrows co-founder Catherine Geanuracos with Delores and Roger.