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Our General Manager, Larry Davidson, had the opportunity to interview our customer, Records Manager, Gary Blasczienski, with The City of Ocala.
Ocala, Florida, is tucked into north-central Florida in a region known as “horse country.” The City serves a community of 60,000 professionals and families. Its mission is to provide fiscally responsible services consistent with the community’s current and future expectations.
After extensive evaluations, the City identified that their current records requests software and provider did not fit their staff and community needs. In this evaluation, Gary Blasczienski identified features, usability, and customer service needs for a new solution. He found the solution for these needs with JustFOIA.
Watch as Gary shares his experience with our customer service, product development improvements, and beta testing our newest feature for “any and all” email requests and document management:
Customer Experience
“The JustFOIA experience and customer service were among the reasons we switched, and the customer service I received has been great. If I have a question, it is usually answered within an hour or two. JustFOIA is customizable and easy to use. Creating forms is easy. I was able to create a form for the Fire and Police department. The fact that I can make these changes myself is a game-changer. I do not have to submit a change to the software developers and wait for approval – it saves so much time.”
Stop Repetitive Requests
“The public portal deflects records requests and provides a self-service option. For example, recently, we had the medical marijuana use ordinance approved. At least 30 different lawyers, five reporters, and citizens requested these records. We posted the documents in the Public Portal as a viewable document. We proactively post the records if we know a specific request will come up a lot.”
Email Requests – Before
“The process to complete an email request was ridiculous. For example, we would receive a request for all emails to and from the City Manager’s office for September through December. That is thousands upon thousands of emails. First, my IT department would pull the requested emails. I would have to individually open every email after I imported it into my Outlook to see if the email needed to be part of the response. Sometimes, I would convert the PST files to a massive Adobe PDF (often taking four to five hours) and then delete non-responsive pages. Then it was time to look for redaction needs.”
“As you know, most city managers subscribe to newsletters, magazines, or online publications. I had to go through and remove all these emails because it is not public record. That was our process for every any and all email records request.”
The Solution – JustFOIA PST Extractor
“We were lucky to be a beta tester. JustFOIA development listened to our experience and what we would like to see changed.”
“The real time-saver is the ability to extract the PST into individual emails in JustFOIA, then click to remove which emails are non-responsive, and they are gone.”
“My processing time reduced by about 60% for any and all email requests.”
“Our IT department pulled some numbers for me. In July 2015, the City received about 550,000 emails at about 45 gigabytes of data. In July 2021, the City received about 950,000 emails at about 398 gigabytes of data. Email records and requests for these records continue to increase. JustFOIA saves me hours upon hours, and in some cases – it saved me days.”
Email Requests – Top Trends
We wish Gary’s story were unique, but the positive response to this feature and feedback in the beta group shows that all government agencies have a similar story about increasing email requests and the time involved in fulfilling these requests. Our customers experienced a 34% increase in requests referencing “any and all” for email communication.
One customer in our beta group set up a separate desktop computer to process email requests and not tie up the computer he works on every day.
Our beta customers play an essential role in feature development. We work closely with our customers to understand their current problems. We focus on saving you as much time as possible so you can get back to doing the important tasks under your purview.
Learn more about our document management product feature, a time-saving industry innovation for managing large, complex responses.