How Small Town, Manitou Springs Quickly Pivoted from Paper to Digital

Even though COVID-19 closed the doors of city hall, Manitou Springs was committed to upholding citizen trust through its operations.

According to Alex Trefry, City of Manitou Springs Public Information and Engagement Officer, when the COVID-19 pandemic originally necessitated the closing of Manitou Springs’ City Hall, local leaders committed to maintaining operations that would facilitate citizen trust.

“The closure was hard on every department,” said Trefry. “We quickly had to move to online meetings and remote work. We didn’t want our citizens to feel separate from us, so we posted our staff members’ contact information online to reaffirm that while our doors were closed, we were still here serving our residents.”

Trefry and his fellow leaders knew they needed to quickly adapt many of their citizen service workflows to enable online access to files, forms, and requests since citizens could not walk into City Hall or place a phone call to a department office.

“While it was necessary to migrate forms online due to COVID-19, we knew that implementing online services would ultimately be easier for both residents and staff, rather than managing paper processes,” said Trefry. “By implementing an online form management solution, my goal was to make it easier for both parties involved and to enhance the typical experience of filling out a form.”

Manitou Springs adopted online forms onto its existing website to remain engaged with its citizens.

The City of Manitou Springs was already using CivicPlus’ CivicEngage website design and hosting solution, so it was quick and easy to add the needed functionality.

“When I saw the Productivity tool, I knew it would make an impact and help us make forms easily accessible to our community,” said Trefry.

While the transition from paper to digital forms happened because of COVID-19, it has created lots of durable benefits for residents and city employees. For example, the previous PDF tax forms the city used required users to complete a series of complex calculations to determine their tax payment. This requirement left room for inadvertent errors and added work for the City’s Finance Department to review and check the calculations. Trefry recreated the paper forms using this new software, designing them to automatically calculate the user’s taxes based on the submitted data, which made the process easier for citizens, more accurate, and freed up time for the Financial Team.