How Anchorage Implemented a Quick, Low-Cost Texting Service to Support Small Businesses
“With USDR’s support, the capacity of our innovation team seamlessly grew overnight at a time when we needed it the most. Having a network of talent to tap into is a game changer for local government.”
Emily Bokar, Innovation Strategist on the Anchorage i-team
CHALLENGE
As the Municipality of Anchorage began the process of reopening, Mayor Ethan Berkowitz’s Economic Resiliency Task Force (ERTF) and the Anchorage Innovation Team (i-team) realized that the information on Anchorage’s COVID-19 website was (and still is) changing so rapidly that business owners couldn’t keep up with it all. Asking them to continually check the website or other sites to stay up-to-speed with the latest information wasn’t practical during COVID-19. Relief funds would open and close before people even found out about them. Anchorage officials needed a way to alert local business owners of critical information. The stakes only got higher with reopening; not only were federal dollars on the line, but so was the safety of the community.
SOLUTION
To reach the small business community, the Municipality of Anchorage wanted to create a texting service that could efficiently communicate information about benefits, resources, and opportunities for local businesses.
A USDR software engineer partnered with the Municipality of Anchorage to assess various software solutions for creating a texting service, and selected the best options to fit the city’s needs. By using TextIt, a program to build interactive SMS applications, and interfacing with Twilio, which builds logic flows virtually, the team created and tested the texting service in less than three weeks. Both TextIt and Twilio are donating storage or data to nonprofits and COVID-19 relief efforts, which allowed the Municipality of Anchorage to launch the texting service for free.
IMPACT
The texting service, called ANC Small Biz Alerts, launched May 26 and is now connecting small business owners in Anchorage with helpful alerts, access to a broad range of resources and one-on-one responses to their unique questions, all conveniently on their mobile devices. The tool’s two-way communication has already allowed the team to iterate on the user experience and collect and evaluate user-generated data to aid the city’s decision making around resources for small businesses.
HOW USDR CAN HELP
Access to free, easy-to-understand software makes it easy for a nontechnical team to create a texting service or similar output very quickly without needing specific engineering support.
Governments can connect with USDR for help with sourcing already-existing solutions or building and implementing custom tools based on their specific needs.
Visit our website (usdigitalresponse.org) to learn more or reach out — our Government Partnerships team will be in touch within 24 hours!
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