BACKGROUND

As one of the fastest developing cities in the country, McAllen, Texas has quickly grown from a small section in the Rio Grande Valley to a leader of business and commerce in the region. Located just eight miles from the United States-Mexico border, McAllen has matured into a strong economic, multicultural community that acts as a hub of international trade and destination.

Public Relations Specialist Brian Godinez moved to the area in 2002 and created Godinez Communications, offering South Texas companies and institutions a variety of communications, marketing and business development services. Some of his most recent work involves planning and developing projects for the valley. In addition to working with the city of McAllen, he currently provides public communications services for the “Imagine Brownsville Comprehensive Plan” initiative. The project focuses on the creation of a ten-year plan for the city of Brownsville’s economic development future and quality of life improvements. The plan included unprecedented, interactive public involvement programs.

THE CHALLENGE

While deemed the City of Palms due to the tropical climate and palm trees that dot the area, the city of McAllen is associated with being a “border town” with image stereotypes related to drug traffic, crime and immigration problems. Residents know different, but the perception has yet to wear off regardless of decades of growth and economic prosperity. The city of McAllen took action in the form of a branding project.

With over 30 years in media and public relations, Godinez has seen the advantage of community involvement in his projects. When asked to conduct a branding exercise, he knew that certain entities within the city would have a great influence. How to gather everyone’s ideas in an efficient, orderly manner was his greatest challenge.

He was first introduced to Turning Technologies’ Audience Response when he was searching for ways to capture real-time data with the ongoing “Imagine Brownsville” project. After doing some Internet research, and sitting through a web demonstration, Godinez was convinced. He rented 250 ResponseCard^® keypads and TurningPoint^® polling software to gather real-time results during a community workshop. The project was a huge success, and the technology was used in two other workshops with a similar purpose. Godinez was confident that Turning could find a solution for the city of McAllen.

THE SOLUTION

While TurningPoint response systems had fit the needs of previous projects, Godinez was tasked with not only asking polling participants at the convention center where the workshop took place, but also interacting with a television and webcast audience as well. A local cable access channel would be broadcasting the presentation, and a webcast would be available on McAllen’s official site – both live as the event was happening. Luckily, Turning’s ResponseWare application could accomplish all three of these tasks.

ResponseWare is a web-based polling application for mobile devices, laptops, desktops and more. Participants not at the convention center could easily gain access to polling by going online (in this case to McAllen’s site), entering a session ID and instantly responding. Those using laptops and desktops could see the live webcast side-by-side with the polling questions, and instantly respond. Participants watching the broadcast on TV could also use their mobile devices with Internet access to view and respond to polling questions. Convention center attendees could simply respond with the press of a button from a ResponseCard keypad. All devices from the 160 participants worked together seamlessly. The results from all participants were gathered and tallied within a matter of seconds – and displayed in TurningPoint’s PowerPoint^® slides. Within a matter of an hour and 18 questions, the city now had solid input to follow for their new branding campaign. According to Godinez, everyone was “thrilled, entertained and engaged. It went off without a hitch.”

CONCLUSION

After the workshop, Godinez received several accolades for the use of the technology, but also how easy his team made it look. Even though he had minimal rehearsal time with the presentation and was a brand new user to ResponseWare, he found that it didn’t present any problems. Rather, the technology lent itself directly to this event.

“Our city IT staff, led by Brenda Mercado, was able to customize and easily integrate TurningPoint’s technology into the city’s web system without any problems. The success of the event is really due to their hard work and knowledge of advanced technologies,” Godinez said. “We literally raised the bar on community involvement. Citizens can now vote community-wide from the convenience of a home office or mobile device, and be a part of the selection process on anything.”

The presentation was well-received from the city manager, mayor, institutional leaders and all that were invited to attend – and Godinez is just getting started with Turning’s products.

“I feel like your products are an onion that I’ve barely unpeeled. I know that there are a lot of other applications and we look forward to working with the technology in the future,” Godinez said.

For more information about purchasing or renting Turning Technologies’ response technology, including ResponseWare, contact us at 866-746-3015.