The City of Elk Grove, California, has promoted IT administrator Nicole Guttridge to the role of chief information officer, the first such position in the 170,000-person city’s history.

Guttridge, who initially began working with the city as a consultant in 2002 and became its IT administrator in 2012, will be tasked with unifying the city’s disparate IT departments — a GIS department, a general IT division and a police department IT division — into a cohesive information technology services department, she told StateScoop.

Since starting in the new role on Monday, Guttridge said she’s made one of her initial priorities getting to know city employees she didn’t supervise in her previous role.

“We have a lot of talented folks, and I really want to dive into getting to know the work they do and be able to analyze that from that 10,000-foot level and decide where we can gain efficiencies,” Guttridge said.

Elk Grove, a Sacramento suburb, did a “stellar job” of sending city employees home at the onset of the pandemic with the resources they required for remote work, Guttridge said, adding that the city still has room to improve its resident-facing digital services.

“I look at information technology … as really a customer service department and the means of our customer service is through our technology,” Guttridge said. “So if we have our systems up and running and they’re working well, people don’t have to call us and that means we’re doing a great job. But if they do have a problem, we want to make sure we have the right people working on it and can get it fixed in a timely manner.”

The new CIO said she also has her eye on enhancing the city’s help desk and cybersecurity assistance offerings for residents, as well as improving online services traditionally available in city hall, like permitting.

“The pandemic, over the last year, has really shown us we have to rethink government and government technology and what we have and how we use it,” she said. “We have lots of different online services that are available, but we’re really looking to fine-tune that and create a true 24-hour city hall.”

What do Facebook livestreams, door-to-door volunteers with laptops and data-analysis companies have in common? They’re part of a growing toolkit that mayors across the country are using to reduce community hesitancy around the COVID-19 vaccine and other government services.

A pair of mayors shared details of their efforts to get more people vaccinated on Thursday during an online event hosted by Harvard University and ZenCity, a software company.

To energize and educate their residents about the COVID-19 vaccine, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka each said during the event that they’ve taken advantage of the expanded audience, as well as the targeted messaging, of social media platforms over the past five months.

Baraka said he’s used Facebook’s livestreams to schedule live question-and-answer sessions for the community three times a week for the past year. On those streams, he said, doctors and nurses address concerns that residents have about COVID-19 or the vaccine in real time.

Cantrell said New Orleans equipped volunteers with laptops to go door-to-door, asking residents if they have any questions about COVID-19 vaccines, or, more recently, if they need help help finding a job or applying for government services, such as unemployment insurance.

“The ‘meet people where they are’ concept is something that we’ve embraced 100%,” Cantrell said. “And it is through these [neighborhood volunteers] that we’re now scaling up and that will be a part of our recovery. So it’s getting us to herd immunity, but also getting people back to work, getting their kids back to school and providing them with the tools that they need.”

Both mayors allowed their cities to be part of a recent study conducted by ZenCity, an Israeli data-analysis firm that combs social media to inform local governments about the community sentiment on different initiatives, like the census count or COVID-19 vaccines. ZenCity’s founder Eyal Feder-Levy said during the event that COVID-19 messaging was clearly more effective in cities that prioritized marketing the vaccine from official government channels than in cities that chose not to.

“There was a clear correlation between extensive official communications, like updates about rollout and information about how to access vaccines, and high positive sentiment among residents,” a report summarizing the study said. “By contrast, residents in cities that were below the cohort average in terms of their official communication levels—measured by what percentage of overall online discourse was driven by posts or statements issued by local government—tended to express lower levels of positive sentiment.”