New Online Public Engagement Platform

The vendor is required to provide new online public engagement platform to fostering a vibrant, inclusive, and engaged community.
- Platform development and customization:
•    Design the platform with a focus on user experience, ensuring it is intuitive and easy to navigate.
•    Design the platform to be fully compliant with the accessibility for act (AODA) with translations and personalized accessibility tools seamlessly integrated. 
•    Ensure engagement tools used on the site are accessible and that interactive features are keyboard accessible.
•    Ensure the platform is accessible on various devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) and compatible with major web browsers.
•    Customize the platform to reflect the city's branding, including logos, colors, and fonts.
•    Ensure city of staff can work in the platform and make updates simultaneously.
•    Ensure the platform can be customized with various videos (e.g., YouTube), graphics, maps, and hyperlinks as needed to engage users.
•    Provide the ability for city staff to update and customize URL paths for specific project webpages.
•    Provide version history and control for project webpages.
- User registration and authentication:
•    Implement secure user registration and authentication processes.
•    Provide options for residents to sign up using email, social media accounts, or other secure methods.
•    Provide options for residents to share demographic information, geographic information, and any other information they wish to share about how they identify.
•    Provide ability for residents to specify areas of interest based on topics and to subscribe to notifications about existing or future engagements.
- Engagement tools and features:
•    A variety of robust, modern and engaging feedback tools with moderation of content with the ability to be completed at a time of the respondent’s choice, at an in-person event of meeting or as part of a virtual meeting.
•    Include tools for surveys, polls, forums, budget building, and interactive maps to gather resident feedback on city programs, projects, and issues.
•    Provide the ability to automatically notify city staff by email about feedback being received through the platform and allow staff to respond back to questions from residents directly in an efficient manner.
•    Enable residents to submit comments, suggestions, and questions directly through the platform.
•    Provide options for potentially hosting private or internal “sub-sites” for employees or other specified audiences where access permissions can be customized for different groups.
•    Provide features for live Q&A sessions, virtual town halls, and webinars.
•    Provide modern, flexible communication tools to send email newsletters based on customizable templates with potential to integrate mailing lists in MailChimp.
- Content management:
•    Develop a content management system (CMS) that allows city staff to easily create, customize, edit, publish and archive content.
•    Ensure that the CMS provides a preview mode for content before publishing live, that includes previewing feedback forms, as well as gating and approval functionality.
•    Ensure the CMS supports multimedia content, including text, images, videos, and documents.
•    Ensure the homepage can be fully customized to categorize related content with specific sections and themed content
•    Provide a participant database management system with the ability to filter search based on projects and resident interest.
•    Ensure role-based access capabilities for city staff. 
•    CMS must have the ability to have user accounts and groups with differing levels of permission. 
•    CMS must have functionality to manage user accounts and web author accounts as well as providing an audit trail, log and reporting of user activity; as well as ability for administrator accounts to suspend a user id or group of users from future usage and provide user-initiated self-service email-based password recovery.
•    Provide an effective search function for users to find projects and navigate the platform.
•    Ensure archived content can be easily exported for potential external storage.
- Data analytics and reporting:
•    Integrate analytics tools to track user engagement, participation rates, and feedback trends.
•    Provide customizable reporting features to generate insights and summaries for city officials.
•    Options for real-time reporting and analytics that are easily exported or customizable with the potential for pre-built dashboards and reports with ai data analysis.
•    Provide the ability for city staff to export customized reports in different file formats (e.g., excel and pdf) so that reports can be shared with project teams.
•    Provide the ability for city staff to identify repeated or duplicated feedback submissions from individual users, and the ability to customize user permissions for feedback that can limit the number of responses a device or user can make through an individual engagement tool.

- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: September 9, 2025