GONZALES — Billboard flyers can get overwhelming, leaving well-meaning merchants and public places buried in paper. The City of Gonzales found a way to dig out of flyer overload and at the same time greatly enhance engagement with the public and with key businesses.
The KICK Kiosk system has helped reduce the avalanche of paper notices by service groups and others, transferring flyer information and other notices to a network of wide-screen TVs strategically placed around high-traffic areas of the city where people frequently wait in line, such as public library branches, a pharmacy, a bank and a restaurant, as well as city facilities and schools.
Each screen displays a slide show of timely city, utility and community information. The same information is also sent out in weekly KICK Kiosk emails along with highlights and important reminders for the week.
Several aspects of KICK Kiosk make it unique. Physical placement at strategic locations around the city provides very broad outreach to residents. The information is updated weekly, and gathering that information provides ongoing engagement.
Rather than updating kiosks through an online digital connection, the information is transferred to a portable flash drive and then physically changed at each site. The visits by the city person in charge of the program allows regular contacts with the city’s business community, providing an important link for feedback to city hall.
The program’s motto is “Finding Information in the Places You Find Yourself.”
KICK Kiosk began in 2013 with a single surplus desktop computer programmed with an informational slide show and placed near the local library checkout desk. Over time, additional surplus computers were repurposed as KICK Kiosk screens at other locations.
As the kiosks caught on, the city replaced aging computers with new flat-screen TV terminals. The physical kiosks were then augmented with kiosk emails that now go to 1,300 recipients, as well as a kiosk page on the city website.
Maury Treleven, City of Gonzales consultant and Gonzales Grows Green project manager who runs KICK Kiosk, said the combination of emails and kiosks, and the weekly visits she makes to kiosk sites, provides a high level of engagement for the city.
“A city government needs to develop community relationships that make the city an essential go-to conduit for sending and receiving information,” Treleven said. “To be successful at this, you have to put your shoes on the pavement every week. You can’t just put information on a website and wait for people to show up and discover it. The city needs to show up in the places where people conduct business and seek the services they find essential to their daily lives.”
Anyone interested in receiving the KICK Kiosk emails can sign up on the City of Gonzales website.
Article submitted by the City of Gonzales.
