NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Zencity, the leading civic engagement technology provider to local governments, announced today that it has acquired data analytics and community polling company Elucd. Zencity and Elucd have been at the forefront of govtech innovation, empowering local government leaders to more effectively incorporate community feedback and analytics on a community-wide scale into their decision-making process. Over the past several years, both companies have been helping local governments of all sizes better understand resident needs, concerns and sentiment trends in real-time around critically important public policies, initiatives, and events.
Particularly in light of the complicated, large-scale crises local governments have faced over the past year, from managing the onset of a global pandemic to now handling an efficient, fair, and clearly communicated vaccine distribution process, it’s evident that in order to adequately and effectively address major challenges, as well as the routine work of governance, local governments require an informed understanding of their communities’ specific needs and priorities. Zencity and Elucd have both been addressing this same age-old challenge of civic engagement for years, leveraging similar yet distinctive approaches to answering the same need — understanding the community at-large. While it’s easy for local government leaders to hear from a small handful of the same people, hearing directly from a broad-reaching and representative sample of the community has been next to impossible.
Since 2015, Zencity’s tailor-built-for-government platform has provided community feedback directly to local leaders in over 200 cities and counties, enabling decision-makers to hear from residents across their community about a wide range of topics by analyzing millions of organic data points already out there – on social media, news media, customer service lines (like 311/211), and more. Elucd’s community polling service has increased dialogue and improved the relationships and trust between government leaders and their communities by asking targeted questions to demographically representative and statistically significant population samples in many of the largest U.S. cities. The combination of Zencity’s analysis of broad-reaching community input with Elucd’s proactive, representative polling creates a radically new way for local governments to understand and act on the feedback they’re receiving from their communities.
With the backing of leading investors, including Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12 and Salesforce Ventures, Zencity builds on a first of its kind vision that truly addresses the most complicated and vital needs of local leaders by leveraging cutting edge technology. By bringing all of these joint capabilities under one roof, Zencity will provide the most inclusive and comprehensive local government community insights and analytics platform on the market, offering one streamlined tool for leaders to understand and act on the feedback they’re receiving directly from their communities.
“Zencity is deeply committed to supporting the heroes in local government, and we are constantly looking for ways to improve and innovate our platform. In that pursuit, adding Elucd’s forward-thinking approach to proactive, representative polling will enable us to provide even more support to local leaders,” said Eyal Feder-Levy, CEO of Zencity. “We’re thrilled that with Elucd, we can provide stronger, data-driven strategic guidance to those we serve. With the industry’s two leading innovators focused on community feedback now joining forces, we’re creating a new standard and streamlining civic engagement for our partners in local government.”
Using Zencity’s new and improved community insights and data analytics platform, local government leaders can effortlessly leverage truly community-wide feedback at any given time, taking a major leap forward to foster greater trust between residents and leaders in government. Current and future government partners can expect to see expanded offerings and new products as soon as this month as Zencity integrates all Elucd capabilities into its broader portfolio of services.
“Both Elucd and Zencity have worked for years towards the same goal: to give voice to all members of a community by making their feedback measurable and actionable for local government leaders. We’re really proud to join Zencity, where we will continue to build and deploy technology to serve those in government serving us all,” said Michael Simon, co-founder and CEO of Elucd.
About Zencity
Zencity is a community insights and analytics platform that provides actionable data to local government leaders about their residents’ needs and priorities. As the most comprehensive civic engagement solution for local governments on the market, Zencity offers leaders insights from resident feedback through the analysis of millions of pieces of anonymized and aggregated data points alongside continuous, community-based polling. More than 200 local government agencies across the United States depend on Zencity to take civic engagement to the next level in order to inform decision-making, build trust, measure progress, and ensure the efficient allocation of resources. Visit https://zencity.io for more information.
About Elucd
Founded in 2016, Elucd is reinventing the way opinion data informs decision-making by governments and business. Through Elucd’s survey technology, residents are empowered to give real-time, actionable input to local leaders to guide policies and decision-making, and leaders can get the answers they need to their most urgent questions. Committed to giving people a seat at the table and fostering greater responsiveness, Elucd gathers real feedback from every neighborhood in a city or every corner of the population so organizations can understand the people they serve. In a world where the loudest voice in the room can drown out the rest, Elucd helps leaders–in government or business–cut through the noise and find the truth. For more information, visit www.elucd.com.