When we first started ProudCity, we set up a simple company website at proudcity.com and, as early-stage startups do, spent all of our time focused on building the platform, onboarding early customers, and refining our processes so that we could scale government impact.
Over the holiday break, we finally used some downtime to dogfood proudcity.com and moved our new website to the ProudCity digital government platform.
For those unfamiliar with the term, Wikipedia describes dogfooding as:
“Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, occurs when an organization uses its own product. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding demonstrates confidence in the developers’ own products.”
Why we did this
Eating our own dogfood allows all of us at ProudCity to actually use the same product our government partners use to serve their communities daily. This enables us to be more empathetic to their needs, support them more effectively and experience how it could be made better, whether it’s fixing bugs, cleaning up the user interface/experience or imagining new features.
As software providers of government websites, online public meetings, forms and payments, if we’re not using our own product in context of real work, we have no idea how we can make it better for our government partners.
Now, we have a more authentic perspective on on how governments can best use our digital government platform, and we’re excited to truly build with and not just for them.
Features we’re using
Here are a few of the ProudCity features we’re using at proudcity.com:
- ProudCity Search Plus (integrated with ProudCity Help)
- ProudCity Pagebuilder’s 30+ drag and drop widgets
- ProudCity Accessibility Checker
- ProudCity Analytics
- ProudCity Forms
- ProudCity Service Center (see it on our Facebook page)
- And, of course, ProudCity Care and ProudCity Safe
Welcome to ProudCity
Come visit us. We’re ready to meet you.
ProudCity is a digital government platform that makes it easy and cost-effective to launch and manage all aspects of digital government operations, including websites, meetings, online forms and payments.