Consensus Update #11 — Pilot Partner Marketing and 1000th Member Milestone

August saw continued growth for the Consensus team in South Burlington. We spent time listening to various rounds of feedback during City Hall meetings and will be expanding the desktop portal for the government facing web app. The four following features will be added to the government portal to streamline workflow and assist in organization:

• Feature to categorize feeds of data to form a central hub.
• Feature to organize a folder structure, so it is easier, so they track the decision-making process.
• Feature to generate reports from polls to understand a dataset of feedback better.
• Feature to categorize certain cohorts of respondents for further feedback solicitation.

These updates will be added over the coming weeks so South Burlington will have access to them during the pilot project.

Consensus About to Onboard 1000th Milestone User

Obtaining feedback from citizens about their city used to take a lot of time and resources. Consensus is able to solve this problem by fast tracking feedback from citizens which in turn accelerates the decision making process for local government.

South Burlington residents are beginning to take notice of this fact and the word is spreading. So much so that in the month of September Consensus will see a milestone reached. We expect to see the 1000th pilot project user engage the Consensus app. What this means for South Burlington is residents are beginning to see the value of Consensus and the news is spreading. With a total population of over 19,000 in South Burlington we still have a lot of room for growth, but now with the 1000th user about to clock over we feel like this is just the beginning.

Pilot Partner Promoting Consensus

As we work closely with South Burlington on the pilot and product development, we’ve also partnered with them on marketing and promotional efforts. For example, an avid supporter Coralee Holm, Director of Community Engagement and Innovation, CIty of South Burlington, is spreading the word about Consensus at two conference engagements.

The first conference engagement is in early September during the 3CMA — City Council and Communications & Marketing Association Annual Conference. During a breakout session, South Burlington’s Director of Community Engagement and Innovation will conduct a forum on Authentic Engagement in the Fake News Era. The Consensus Pilot Project will form part of the solution in separating the authentic from the fake.

This speaking engagement is a massive opportunity for Consensus because The City-County Communications & Marketing Association is the US’s premiere network of local government communicators. Members represent local governments from across the country and include:

• City/County Communication Professionals
• City/County Marketing Professionals
• Communication Directors
• City/County Managers and Assistant City/County Managers
• Elected Leaders

Plus many hundreds of members including any staff member involved with outreach / engagement from cities across the US. In total at the 3CMA conference this year there will be 500 delegates attending, the largest ever gathering.

Secondly, at the Vermont Town Fair 2019 on Thursday, October 3rd, Ms Holm will talk about Consensus during her talk on “Building a Successful Public Information Campaign”. The blurb for the talk includes;

Budgets? Bond votes? Ballot items? Events? Learn which building blocks of a campaign will best inform your community through multiple channels. Attendees to this session will walk away with useful templates, tips that work, and resources to help you get the word out quickly and efficiently.

Each of these opportunities further promotes Consensus as a leader in the GovTech space. As the pilot project continues to trend well and eventually move onto the final stages in South Burlington, Consensus CEO, Oleg Gutsol and CSO, Dustin Plett continue to get the project ready for commercial relations. The development team are working hard on the Consensus app to better integrate and adopt identity verification in the application UI/UX with the hope of rolling out to the larger Vermont area.

Dustin Plett will also meet with officials in South Burlington VT in the second week of September 2019 to listen to feedback and provide updates on the Consensus app and Government facing web app.

Office Update

Despite most of the team working remotely from different offices around the world the core team have now settled into the new office space at 56 The Esplanade, Toronto, ON. With space to store equipment and larger meeting rooms to discuss development and design, moving from a co-working space to a dedicated space proved to be an ideal move. Plus for many of the team having a central location to work from made more sense.

Summary: What the Consensus team are working on across September:

• Bug fixes within the Consensus app.
• Government reporting tools for showcasing citizen poll data.
• Expanding the desktop portal to implement new features such as folder structures for polls.
• Continuing discussions with new exchange listings.

Now that you are all up to date with Consensus, we encourage you to follow our official announcement channels on Telegram and Blockfolio Signals.