The Town of Leesburg resides in Loudoun County and is Virginia’s largest incorporated town within a county rather than an independent city.
The COVID-19 pandemic created the perfect storm for The Town of Leesburg. They sent hundreds of employees home to telework, and they needed new equipment such as laptops and mobile accessories. They worked quickly to continue providing services to their residents, businesses, and non-profits. Fortunately, the Content Services (Laserfiche) migration to the cloud completed prior to the pandemic and there couldn’t have been a better time to deploy several electronic forms.
The Federal Government allocated stimulus funds to municipalities via local government to assist citizens in various ways.
The challenge was to determine how to process applications for funding local businesses and non-profits in an online, secure manner that also allowed for data verification through database lookups. They quickly developed telework agreement forms to help manage requests and check out mobile devices.
The CARES Act Funding Implementation
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, is a $2.2 trillion economic bill signed into law in late March of 2020. The Leesburg Town Council allocated over $6 million of that funding to business and non-profit organizations. People applying for aid needed a process available online due to COVID-19 restrictions. The Town developed an electronic form to streamline their processes and workflows that met the verification needs.
Leesburg wanted automation to complete the verification so the data would be clean, compliant, secure, and encrypted.
How did they accomplish this for Business Infusion Grants?
They developed an electronic form that required business owners to provide two unique numbers from their business license to determine their eligibility using database lookups. The Town efficiently distributed funds to businesses that matched the requirements.
Based on an excel table provided by their finance department, eligibility requirements, and the numerical data entered, the form could run their information and either allow them to proceed within the application or direct them to contact the finance department. The form’s robust functionality and user-friendly options opened the opportunity for 2,500 businesses to apply for relief aid!
How did they accomplish this for Non-Profit Grants?
The form created to allocate aid to non-profits relied on metadata that simplified extraction and reporting to determine eligibility. With requirements included in the online application, it was a simple process for agencies to upload necessary information, such as their federal non-profit status. Laserfiche Cloud also enabled the town to facilitate communication with the grant recipients.
What is their return on investment?
The pandemic made budgets tight for municipalities, which is why Laserfiche and the support system MCCi provides is worth the investment for The Town of Leesburg. Many want to see a return on investment, and with over 25 forms in place and hundreds of approvals rolling in, The Town sees their return. The ability to streamline multiple processes with Laserfiche fits in very nicely within the IT Department’s strategic plan. They maximized the resources they already had rather than expending more to implement other processes.
The migration to Laserfiche Cloud granted them document management, security and reliability. With new developments released monthly, along with automatic security updates, the cloud environment allows their IT team to focus on their internal development and continue to produce quality, reliable, and secure solutions for The Town of Leesburg.
