Access Initiative Tracker

As referred to in Initiative G1, the City conducted an assessment of City-operated office space to determine improvements that could be made for City staff. The space assessment also explored opportunities to streamline physical access points and intake for residents and businesses. The City will seek to implement key recommendations from the assessment, including consolidating the City real estate portfolio and establishing one building as the main entry point for customers to do business with the city across multiple departments.

The City intends to upgrade various structural elements of City Hall, including accessibility upgrades. This involves adapting facilities to accommodate individuals with disabilities, including accessible restrooms, signage, and pathways.

As part of the planned structural renovations, the City will also explore ways to open up City Hall for unofficial business and provide access in close proximity to services beyond the traditional administrative functions. This will involve exploring opportunities to incorporate public dining, a coffee shop, or appropriate retail within or adjacent to the City Hall building and create vibrant areas and civic spaces with amenities around the building to make it more appealing to the public.

Some examples of City Hall buildings with mixed use retail include Philadelphia, which utilizes nearby park space for seasonal events including a holiday market, ice skating, and promotion of City Hall tours, and Boston, which uses its courtyard for farmers markets, concerts, and events. Other cities have shops within the City buildings as well, which can be considered in future remodel plans to open up the building.

Optimize the navigability of City Hall through a comprehensive wayfinding signage and paint program to create a welcoming environment. This program includes noninteractive informational digital signage with the support of IT-managed technology to push out helpful information for staff and visitors.

Place new furniture within the City Hall common areas to foster comfort, collaboration, and conversation among staff and visitors.

The City will staff a welcome desk where a concierge will be stationed to serve as a central point for assistance and guidance for customers who enter City Hall and require support.

The City will develop and employ a strategy to disseminate information effectively and inclusively. This strategy will guide the City to communicate important updates and initiatives and to inform residents, businesses, and vendors in Cleveland of services available to them and prevent stakeholder segments with unique needs from being left out of communications.

The City will employ different types of platforms to engage the audience, including social media channels, official websites, newsletters, press releases, podcasts, community events, community canvassing (e.g., visiting neighborhoods, attending local events, and conducting surveys to better understand the concerns and wishes of residents), traditional television news, and other communication mediums.

The Office of Communications will contract a third-party vendor to evaluate its capabilities to deliver engaging multimedia content and propose recommendations for consolidating media talent into a cohesive media communications office. The goal of the evaluation and recommendations is to revamp the City’s outdated media strategies, including TV20 Cleveland, the City’s television station that broadcasts public meetings, community events, and government-related content to keep residents informed about local governance and civic activities.

The communication strategy will be designed with inclusivity in mind. Special consideration will be given to seniors, with the strategy accommodating their unique communication preferences and accessibility requirements. Additionally, the strategy will acknowledge the linguistic diversity present in the community and incorporate measures to effectively reach multilingual and non-English-speaking residents. The City will also adhere to ADA accessibility practices in its communications efforts by providing auxiliary aids and services (e.g., qualified interpreters, closed caption decoders, braille materials, videotext displays, exchange of written notes).

The City will also use the youth narrative framework in the development of communications and marketing materials to amplify the youth perspectives.

The team will execute a robust 311 public relations campaign in partnership with the Office of Urban AI to highlight the simplicity of using the 311 online platform compared to visiting City Hall in person or calling a representative. It will emphasize the types of requests and inquiries that can be addressed through 311 and the different ways the community can access 311.

Recognizing its diversity, the City seeks to strengthen community bonds and enhance inclusivity by collaborating with organizations that intimately understand the unique needs and preferences of various demographic groups.

Community development corporations (CDCs), churches, recreation centers, block clubs and Cleveland Public Library branches will be utilized to fill gaps and provide information about City resources to residents in their own neighborhoods. Partners like these are also often better positioned to communicate with people in their neighborhoods in a way that resonates with them. Further, partners that work with specific populations, such as immigrant and refugee agencies, LGBTQIA+ organizations, or organizations supporting the unhoused, are sometimes better situated to translate and communicate what City services and resources are available to the people they serve. They will therefore play a key role in achieving the City’s communication strategy (detailed in Initiative J1) and outreach goals.

The City will also identify and partner with nontraditional neighborhood champions and influencers in promotional activities. These can include individuals like a store clerk at the neighborhood corner store or a grandmother who has been providing childcare to her community’s residents.

Through this initiative, the City will develop a strategy for engaging diverse communities, by supporting them with the appropriate community liaisons and resources. This strategy will encompass educating these groups about City Hall’s services and tailoring services more effectively to their specific needs. The strategy will also consider utilization of existing City technology, such as the CivicPlus platform (manages recreation center point of service delivery and resident engagement) currently being implemented in the the Mayor’s Office of Prevention, Intervention and Opportunity for Youth and Young Adults (PIOYAA). The City will define KPIs to measure the engagement of a specific communication initiative’s target audience. Indicators can include initiative or event subscription, attendance, repeat forms of engagement, satisfaction levels, etc.

The City seeks to break down language barriers by providing multilingual City services, disseminating information in multiple languages and employing multilingual staff members who can communicate with residents in their preferred language.

While there are staff across various departments, including Community Relations, that provide support for residents without English as their primary language, this support is often provided ad hoc. The City seeks to formalize this support by establishing translation services through on-call staff and partnering with organizations. This assistance will be available to all departments with resident-facing services and will include translation of important documents, forms, and other communications.

City-owned websites and external communications will provide information in multiple languages (as determined in the language needs assessment) and implement a multilingual 311 service, where residents can access information and assistance in their preferred language and/or accommodate other community needs (e.g., hearing impairment).

The City will hire or designate an individual within City Hall to serve as the Language Access Coordinator to oversee the “on call” program and partner support organizations. This individual should also be tasked with reviewing and contributing to external communications strategy and collateral.

In order to recruit and retain a diverse workforce with proficiency in multiple languages, the City will also introduce an incentive program through which it will offer a compensation premium to employees. Employees eligible for “on call” roles and/or frontline staff positions will be eligible for this incentive.

Create a user-friendly open data platform that will serve as a centralized repository for Public City Data, offering residents convenient access to a wealth of cross-department information in the form of tabular, spatial, and visualized data.

Develop appropriate staff training and standards for public data, including clear guidelines for what data can be shared, as well as processes to efficiently release new data on the platform.

Departments will share accurate and complete data in a consistent and timely manner and provide appropriate documentation and metadata to explain the meaning and structure of the datasets that residents will be able to search for.

Upon development of the open data portal, additional data sets will be shared as integrations are developed and new requirements are identified.

Develop a standardized and streamlined process for City departments to “self-service” updates to department website content (incorporating necessary communications approvals). The goal of website maintenance  
will be for information on the site to be continuously updated, resolving current issues related to outdated  
data. This initiative will also address the lack of standardization in design and navigation structure across all department websites.

Due to the number of stakeholders involved across all departments, website management will need to be more decentralized. Individuals within each department will be designated as web content owners and liaison with the Communications Office (through a cross-department web team). These web content owners will be trained on how to update basic text (including things like updating facility hours based on schedule changes and/or seasonal holidays) and ideally have limited permissions to conduct minor updates to content (with appropriate communications team review).

The Communications Office will also designate a website manager (likely delegating to an existing role) to serve in a nontechnical role responsible for managing content on the website and tracking web traffic data to measure performance of pages. Content updates are currently managed through the IT division, which will continue to require a website manager to support the communications website manager with any technical development beyond text or graphics updates.

The IT-side website team will continue to integrate departments with external websites into the www.clevelandohio.gov City platform as several departments (including Economic Development) are housed on legacy web platforms.

Empower staff to handle common issues and requests on their own through user-friendly, and (where possible) automated, self-service options and rely less on calling or emailing the City’s Helpdesk.

The City is in the process of developing an internal IT self-service portal to support employees in getting help by reporting issues through chat with virtual live agents, finding documentation about solutions for common problems or submitting requests for applications and approvals. The portal will also be used for digitizing the onboarding/offboarding IT processes and requesting new technology hardware/software (e.g., laptops for new employees, licenses).

The City will also consider and prioritize development of “self-service” capability for staff to manage other City shared services such as finance and accounting (e.g., making changes to retirement elections or direct deposit or seeking assistance with time and expenses) and human resources (e.g., onboarding support, benefits enrollment and updates, payroll inquiries and leave requests, which will be enabled through the new Human Capital Management system detailed in Initiative B2).

The Law Department will also implement a digital docketing system that will improve case management and simplify the process of employees filing and reviewing legal documents.

All self-service options, once developed, will have well documented, regularly updated, and easily accessible standard operating procedures (SOPs) or process flows to easily explain how to utilize self-service functionality. These SOPs will be hosted on the City intranet (detailed in Initiative B1).

Currently, residents can call the 311 telephone number to request information or ask for support for select City services. While call-in functionality is always available, the City is working to implement a 311 online platform that will allow residents to also submit and track requests online without calling. The online platform will also enable tracking of call resolution and a knowledge management tool to help call takers better answer questions without call forwarding.

Services currently handled by 311 include services from certain divisions of Public Works, Public Health and Building and Housing. The City intends to expand to additional departments after the implementation for the initial departments is stabilized.

Data tracked by the 311 system will provide insights to the volume of requests, frequently asked/reported topics, and time to completion, which will allow staff to identify bottlenecks and improve processes.

Successful implementation of this initiative will also require building confidence in the system among council members who will require a degree of visibility to requests within their ward. Council members ideally will be able to refer residents to the 311 system with confidence their requests will promptly be addressed.

Establish a user experience task force to conduct an annual evaluation of City services to identify opportunities and update prioritization of self-service functionality. Service journeys will be prioritized based on certain criteria such as impact on residents, operational efficiency gains, and feasibility for successful self-service integration.

The City will develop a mechanism through which all staff may submit recommendations to the task force. Successful self-service options will have fully automated workflows. Key components will include an intuitive interface, be mobile-friendly, provide secure payment options and allow residents to track the progress of their service requests or inquiries through established self-service channels (either through 311 or ACCELA-based systems).

As an example, the City created an online platform for the purchasing of birth and death certificates using Permitium software. Residents simply need to submit basic personal information to request certificates and can track the status of their requests.

Additional candidates for self-service options are block party and special events permits, tax filings and reimbursements, specialized program applications, recycling enrollment, and general support functions for FAQ.

The City will regularly explore integration and utilization of next generation self-service solutions (e.g., chat bots capable of triaging resident needs), in which Artificial Intelligence can be used to anticipate resident needs and proactively provide relevant information that align with needs.