New Website Reflects Growth, Client Successes
Thomas Mullen
August 23, 2016
So we redesigned our website.
By itself, this is not revolutionary. After all, we live in an age where your 12-year-old neighbor probably just launched an online variety show that got her 36k Instagram followers and a YouTube deal.
But what is revolutionary are our many innovative and just plain brave clients, who ditched the spreadsheets, email chains or antiquated computer programs and said yes to a new paradigm in how their public comments are managed, and whose continuing loyalty warranted the need for our new digital home in the first place.
Like a once-tiny book store quickly running out of room for all the rare and wonderful volumes it wants to share with the world, the old smartcommentsoftware.com simply wasn’t built to house all the client success stories and industry insights we’ve been fortunate to collect on our three-year journey from hopeful public-sector startup to forward-looking software company.
Enter the new smartcomment.com, which has organized shelf space, easy-to-read labels and accessible pockets of knowledge meant to show our visitors the many different ways we work to connect regulatory agencies and environmental consultants with the citizens they serve — and make both their lives easier in the process.
From case studies on how our public comment software helped a client receive and process electronic comments, to blog posts about infrastructure funding and environmental management, we want the new smartcomment.com to be more than just our corporate signpost in the digital yellow pages. We want it to be a place where anyone who’s dealt with the demands of an Environmental Impact Statement or spent a long weekend manually re-bracketing comments might just be inclined to poke around for a while.
Want to see how we helped a project team with two lead agencies and two separate consultants manage and respond to more than 6,000 comments related to one of LA’s biggest freeway projects? Find out about it here. Interested in what it took for an entire agency to convert their dozens of annual comment periods to our digital platform? We give you the details on that too. And of course check out the ground-breaking features that have turned our software into the go-to public engagement tool for environmentally sensitive projects from Alaska to North Carolina and points between.
But don’t listen to us tell you all this. What we hope speaks loudest on the new site are the results we’ve achieved for our clients — whether they wanted to eliminate the red tape of their current comment management process, increase transparency and legal protection for their public outreach methods, or just better understand what their public is really saying.
That we have this many stories to tell in such a short amount of time is pretty special for us. We knew that a digital solution for public comments was needed, but would it be something potential clients actually desired? Would public agencies see the benefit of innovation the same way their corporate counterparts do? On both counts, the answer has been a rewarding and exciting affirmation of our concept that has allowed us to build our idea into a business and keeps us hungry to continue expanding the boundaries of what we can do for our clients — whether they’re an agency improving our country’s infrastructure, a city turning around an urban neighborhood, or an environmental consultant looking for a more efficient way to work.
It’s been an exciting three years of new connections and big ideas. This website will allow us to keep growing right alongside the clients who have put so much faith in us, and provide a home that befits the stories they’ve built for their projects. After all, we’re no longer just a cool-sounding tool that we hope people will use. We are proud to be the backbone of the public outreach efforts for some of the most important projects in the country, and for agencies whose decisions affect millions of people and our country’s most valuable natural resources.
So take a quick tour of our new internet home. If you like what you see, maybe go ahead and request a software demo where we can show you — in person or over the web — the finer points of SmartComment’s solution and what it means to have us as a partner.
It certainly means a lot to us.