A smart city application is one of the best solutions available to keep residents engaged with their local community. Providing up-to-date information about local events, services, and news, a smart city app for community engagement allows cities to conveniently reach users.

Before building a mobile engagement app for smart city management, municipalities should ensure that a mobile solution delivers the features, functionality, and information that local citizens will find most useful. Without taking time to carefully organize a civic engagement application, locals can find themselves without access to the information or services they initially sought out the application for.

Here’s a simple guide to the steps cities seeking to build a smart city mobile application should take:

Identify the essential kinds of information locals want most
Users who download your smart city application may want to depend on it to check hours of operation for local facilities, phone numbers for utilities or other public services, or a calendar of upcoming events. Determine the best information to include for users to access through the app, so they don’t have to seek it out from other sources.

Identify local services that can be accessed through the app
A crowdsourcing app for community engagement makes it easy for residents to report local issues, such as broken streetlights or fallen trees, by filling out a form and attaching photos. Determine which maintenance and service issues can be conveniently handled through the mobile application.

Identify additional sources of information from social media
Does your city have a unique Twitter feed, Facebook page, or other real-time feed that keeps citizens informed? If so, a community engagement application can include live updates from any number of such sources.

Identify local points of interest
Smart city management software makes it possible to automatically offer information to local residents and tourists using connected Bluetooth beacons. Take time to identify which landmarks, businesses, and other important points of interest are worth being shared with users.

Choose a community engagement app development partner
Building a mobile app for your city doesn’t have to be a daunting challenge. Civita App, a comprehensive community engagement platform, is an affordable, out-of-the-box solution for Android and iOS users that makes launching a smart city mobile application as painless as possible.

To see how the Civita App can meet the needs of your community, schedule a demo today!