Purcellville, Virginia has a population of around 9,000 people. Fifty miles outside of the District, it's something of a commercial hub in the rural area of western Loudoun County.
"Folks come here to get their tractors, maybe get their tractors fixed, buy some farming supply," said Purcellville's Assistant Town Manager Danny Davis.
So, it may come as a surprise that when a young crowdsourcing government tech company called Polco launched there in January, it had one of its most successful roll outs to date.
"[Looking at] the magnitude of the public sector, there's so much room for improvement and room for innovation," said Polco CEO Nick Mastronardi. "That room is in local government."
Mastronardi founded Polco in May 2015 after noticing how inefficient small governments were at generating public feedback. Popular polling platforms like SurveyMonkey gave unreliable data - it could be the same person answering 10 times, he said. More traditional methods, like phone surveys or postcard mailers, were outdated and garnered little response.
Polco works with local governments to create online polls, designed to encourage and increase constituent engagement. The surveys are created as widgets, which can be embedded into any website, like the town's homepage or Facebook profile. City councils or governments can ask voters for feedback on certain issues, and voters respond online.
Polco then sorts and analyzes the data and presents the information back to officials, noting everything from who is and isn't a registered voter, and who actually lives in the town they're gathering information for.
The Madison, Wisconsin-based company launched in May 2016 after raising around $705,000 from SeedSumo, an accelerator in Austin, Texas. They recently closed a nearly $1 million seed round, and plan to launch a Kickstarter campaign in coming weeks.
They're now in around 22 cities and five states around the country. Mastronardi said Purcellville was one of the company's earliest launches, making it its eighth or ninth town.
"They were forward leaning, wanting to do innovative things, and they don't have the bureaucracy to hold them back," Mastronardi said. "It was just a really good test case that they did."
So good, that the National League of Cities recognized Polco's work in Purcellville as "the future of civic engagement".
"That's just kind of crazy for a small team in Wisconsin and a small town in Virginia to be highlighted for that."
It all started in 2015 at a League of Cities conference. The timing was right - Purcellville's newly elected officials were already looking for ways to increase engagement with the community.
"I think what really appealed to them about Polco is the fact it's a kind of real time polling system. So, instead of a lot of dialogue back and forth or a bulletin board or a discussion forum, it really is just an easy yes or no, or multiple choice," Davis said.
Plus, he said, getting a breakdown of the respondents was a big selling point.
"The council wants to hear from anyone... but they really want to hear from the people who are registered voters, the people who live here in town," he said. "They're the ones who pay the taxes, who are most impacted by it."
"We get all the results broken down, to say like, 'Of those who live in the town, this is the percentage that supports this, this is the percentage that doesn't."
The roll out took some time, he said. Rather than throw one question out and let it sit for a while, the city council wanted to streamline a way to develop questions they would all agree on. They spent a few weeks creating a plan for how to form and edit questions, and launched with a couple initial 'yes or no'-style polls.
One question asked constituents to choose between two different Purcellville-branded car decals. The other asked whether they'd support the construction of a pump track (a sort of BMX and mountain bike lane). The questions were posted and shared all over the town's social media and online platforms, from their homepage to a newsletter sent out with monthly water bills.
"We got over 170 responses, which was pretty impressive for the first set," said Davis. Mastronardi says the town has accumulated around 400 Polco followers.
"If you're thinking about employee or consumer engagement, that isn't huge. But in a city [of 9,000], especially when you know it's a registered voter and it isn't the same person ten times, that's great," he said.
There are two factors behind Purcellville's success, said Mastronardi. For starters, they were just extra coordinated in their launch efforts.
"They said, 'We don't know what the citizens are going to want, but this is good government,' and the mayor got all the council members to buy into that," he said. "So, they were unrefined in what the results were going to be and they just wanted maximum participation."
But the size of the town probably helped, too, he said. Smaller municipalities simply have less hoops to jump through.
"It's a slightly quicker adoption in smaller places because there are less channels to work with," said Polco's Director of Strategic Partnerships Nick Jeffress. "The smaller places will always sprint ahead."
Mastronardi says the pace of life in smaller towns also allows it's residents to pay more attention to local government issues.
"I worked for a while in New York and things are so fast paced that local government just drops off the radar," he said. "But those things are really important."
Image used CC BY-SA 4.0 - Credit Scott Harris
