Caddo Parish Adopts OpenMeeting for Their Local Government Meetings

Just like many other city councils and county boards across the United States, Caddo Parish is taking full advantage of all OpenMeeting has to offer.

Jeff Everson is the Commission Clerk for Caddo Parish, Louisiana, and we’re going to share with you what he had to say about OpenMeeting for local governments.

“Caddo Parish’s decision to adopt OpenMeeting was based on the functionality of the software, the practices of the OpenMeeting team, and the benefit to our constituents, staff, and members – and the price sealed the deal. It is easy to tell that the program has been designed by someone who has administered many, many meetings of public bodies.”

We take pride in not only the functionality of OpenMeeting for local governments, but also the customer service and support our team provides to all of our customers. Customer experience is at the core of our culture. This customer-centric approach involves frequent communication, ongoing surveys, as well as a strong service and support mentality. We focus on complete transparency and accountability. We organize our business and our teams to provide the highest levels of service.

OpenMeeting streamlines meetings and makes them as seamless as possible. Each of the four tools integrate easily with each other and can be connected remotely, so if one person cannot attend in-person, they’re still able to fully participate in the meeting.

“We started looking for software when we began thinking about transitioning back to in-person meetings after the COVID-19 pandemic had us meeting virtually for over a year. We had come to realize that some of our software was too modulated and clunky and was actually causing extra work. Things that might work great for a very large jurisdiction might not be as appropriate for our medium-sized Parish, but OpenMeeting came through as a perfect fit for how we run our meetings. It is customized, and the development and management team were accessible and responsive.”

Our systems have been used in over 10,000 legislative settings, and our staff has personally been involved in hundreds of these meetings.  This direct “eyes on” approach has allowed us to identify, anticipate, and design for the functionality needed to deliver more productive and efficient meetings.  A meeting time reduction of 50% is not unusual.  On August 21, 2018, a client with 25 voting members conducted two roll call votes within 48 seconds!

“It is a smaller company, so we didn’t feel completely lost in the shuffle of a giant software group. The price of the software is also exceptionally valuable. Even with adding on some of the extras, we didn’t feel that we were paying for features that we would never use or need.”

Our WYSIWYN (What You See Is What You Need) interface provides each user (whether voting members, the clerk or secretary, or observers) exactly what they need when they need it.  Users report that our WYSIWYN interface reduces training time by 2/3!

The Legislative Board Voting Solution You’ve Been Looking For

OpenMeeting Technologies is the legislative board meeting software solution you’ve been looking for. With one powerful platform, you have easy meeting setup, agenda management, automatic documentation, visualization of all procedures, and more! Your board members, citizens, clerk, chair, and everyone else involved will thank you!