An Effective and Fiscally Sound City Government Providing High Quality Service
Sub-Theme: The citizens of Franklin will be benefactors of City services that reflect efficiency while preserving the personal touch and engagement they have come to expect in our community.
Franklin citizens have high expectations for their government. As the city continues to grow, it must remain vigilant in the prudent management of taxpayer funds by continuously working to improve the quality, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of services demanded by its citizens. The pace of technological change and innovation in our world is accelerating, and the City depends on the expertise and creativity of its employees to integrate new ideas and tools that will improve service delivery and operational efficiency while maintaining the sense of personal touch our citizens have come to expect.
The City of Franklin understands that in this era of rapid change, the need for knowledgeable, active, and engaged employees is greater than ever. Building and retaining a skilled, adaptable, and diverse workforce requires the City to recruit qualified employees and provide competitive salaries and benefits along with opportunities for ongoing training and professional development in order to meet future needs. Employees will be encouraged to become adaptable, take initiative and keep their skills current through organization wide initiatives and individual development. They will also need to continue to build their ability to serve our increasingly diverse community.
There are 3 goals contained within this sub-theme:
Goal: Franklin will develop a quality level of service expectation for its citizens– To have 90% citizen satisfaction rated excellent/good for services as reported by community survey.
Franklin of today has become one of the most desirable places to live in the mid-South for many reasons. One of them is the set of efficient, high-quality City services residents get with their tax dollars.
The City set a goal of having at least 90% of citizens rating government services as excellent/good. That goal was reached, as 93% of citizens in the 2016 Franklin Citizens Survey rated government services as either excellent/good. It was also reached in 2019 when again, 93% of Franklin residents rated government services as either excellent/good.
Goal: Franklin will maintain its social media presence to increase effective communication with the public - to continue to foster the public’s use of social media forms of communication with the City of Franklin.
As shown above, the city maintains a dynamic social media presence on multiple platforms. This effort is managed by our Communications division. They manage internal and external communications and citizen participation initiatives. The division also handles all media relations for the City, Public Outreach/Special Events and the City’s Government Access Channel, called Franklin TV on Comcast and AT&T-U-verse.
The City maintains one central Facebook account, four Twitter feeds, a YouTube Channel, and an official Instagram site. We encourage all citizens to connect not only with the City, but with each other through these dynamic platforms. A more engaged City is a stronger city. The City measures its effectiveness of its social media accounts in four ways:
Followers: The Number of People following your page
Impressions: The total number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not.
Reach: The number of people who saw any of your posts at least once (estimated)
Engagement: The number of interactions people have with your content, likes, comments, shares or reposts.
Baseline: Communication contacts with citizens (2013) through: website hits‐32,662; social media: Facebook followers– 7,462, Twitter followers ‐ 4350, YouTube views ‐38,664.
Goal: Citizens will have online access to city services – To enhance online services for citizens.
Governments need to be more than responsive to their citizens. They need to accessible at anytime. The internet has revolutionized how the City can provide service and distribute information to residents, taxpayers, businesses and customers alike.
We are proud to have an Online Customer Service portal whereby anyone can request services from the following departments:
- Police
- Building & Neighborhood Services
- Fire
- Misc
- Sewer
- Solid Waste
- Streets
- Traffic Division
- Water
- Mayor & Alderman
- Parks
- Utility Billing
Customers can also lookup the status of the customer service request.
We will continue to expand service offerings in the future, especially in the areas of open government and data and financial transparency.
Baseline: The City of Franklin currently has 100 services available for citizens to complete online in 2013.