City of Vernon

Municipal app launches to assist residents

With a wealth of recreational activities at its doorstep, the City of Vernon is home to an active population of over 40,000, including both permanent and seasonal residents. In addition to communicating important information about public services and government initiatives, the City wanted to improve its website's ability to keep on-the-go citizens involved and aware of events and promotions in their area.

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Services Provided

  • App Design & Release
  • Dynamic Communications
  • Integrated Online Tools
  • User-friendly CMS
  • Social Media Integration
  • Centralized Service Databases

"The Upanup team is skilled, knowledgeable and progressive. More than this, they were keenly interested in helping us create a website that was not a cookie-cutter design but instead ambitious, powerful and unique to our City. All of the staff who worked on our website were warm, friendly, funny, sympathetic when necessary, knowledgeable, responsive and genuine. Our team felt like we weren’t working with contractors; we were working with friends—friends with superior technical skills. The result is a website that our Council, staff and residents are proud of."

Tanya Laing Gahr (no longer with the City)

Communications Officer, City of Vernon

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The Challenge

A project to improve the overall functionality of the City of Vernon's Drupal website proved to be the perfect opportunity to leverage the capabilities of the CMS to more effectively connect with its active citizens. In addition to our work on the site, the City wanted to upgrade its email-notification system while maintaining consistent messaging and branding, without increasing system management efforts for staff.

Young professionals at craft brewery bar
Singers on stage at Civic sounds

The Solution

Keeping the needs of both citizens and City staff in mind, we worked to develop a mobile app that would effectively deliver key information and notifications to users, without additional maintenance on the backend. This included a mobile notification broadcast system, event schedules, and mobile issue reporting – all of which can be updated from the City's Drupal website. 

Vernon app screenshots
Vernon app screenshots

The Results

Serving both the iOS and Android markets, the Vernon Connect app has created a more immediate connection between the public and the City, serving content from the website in real-time and allowing users to engage more directly through a number of submission options.

Drupal tools for app controls and notifications let administrators select which updates are delivered to users, and the app's modular foundation means that it can scale alongside the City's needs.

Related Work

Are you curious to see more projects like this one? We’ve selected a couple relatable case studies which you can find below.

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