By Richard Fong, Technology Project Manager
Nestled in Southern California just south of Joshua Tree National Forest is Coachella Valley, which includes the Salton Sea. With an average annual rainfall of three inches, water is a vital resource. In 1918 the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) was created to “protect and conserve local water sources.” Today CVWD meets “the water-related needs of more than 107,000 homes and businesses across 1,000 square miles.”
CVWD understood the resource constraints of paper-based communications and knew that the move towards digital was the right direction for the organization. This led CVWD to implementing GovDelivery Digital Communication Management to help them build outreach and maintain consistent communications with stakeholders. Additionally, as an organization with established communication processes in place, having a solution that was easy to integrate into existing processes was important. With GovDelivery APIs (application programming interfaces), this was easy.
CVWD’s Public Information Officers (PIOs) already had the ability to create a news release and post that content to their website. To maintain legacy systems and continue using communication processes, CVWD integrated GovDelivery’s Send Bulletin API into their custom CMS (content management system) to automate the dissemination of those news release bulletins to the public. This integration conveniently allows CVWD PIOs to trigger a Send Bulletin API call to GovDelivery after their news release has been posted to the website, which then creates and pushes out an email to subscribers with the new information. The integration started with the news releases but has recently been expanded to include board agenda meetings.
Jesse Ruiz, Web Editor for CVWD, said he wanted to streamline the communications process, specifically how to allow staff to publish content and send a GovDelivery bulletin without leaving the organization’s CMS or website.
How does this automation benefit Coachella Valley Water District? By leveraging API technology to automate content distribution, Jesse was able to save the organization and his colleagues time and money. The PIOs can preserve their current work flow while adding the ability to send a bulletin from GovDelivery with a click of a button from their system. Additionally, there was little or no training required.