Chris Maddox

Romulus wants to make constituent relationship management more delightful

Posted on by Luke Fretwell

Romulus

Seneca Systems CEO Chris Maddox shares the inspiration behind the new constituent relationship management system, Romulus.

140-character pitch

Delightful CRM built just for local government. Manage constituent requests, collaborate with your team, get back to solving what matters.

What problems do you solve for government?

Local government offices, from elected officials to boards of education to police departments, handle hundreds of constituent requests every day. These public servants are the gateway to democracy and deserve tools that work with them to better serve citizens.

Instead of a pile of Post-Its or shared Excel spreadsheets, Romulus tracks constituent requests from submission to resolution. We automatically provide status updates to constituents via email so employees focus on what needs to get done, not worrying “how” it’s organized.

For chiefs of staff, department heads, and elected officials, we make reporting and analytics a breeze. Want to see a chart of top constituent issues for a given date range? No problem. Holding a community meeting to discuss pedestrian safety? Export contact information for just those constituents who have expressed interest, at the click of a button.

What’s the story behind Romulus?

Our founders previously helped bring delightful payroll to tens of thousands of small-businesses across America. We experienced first hand the antiquated procedures of state governments when we would ship them boxes of paper tax forms at the end of the quarter.

And that was just the external face; we shuddered to think of what their internal process looked like. As philosophers and engineers, we had the perfect mix of practical experience and idealism to do whatever it took to change things.

So Chris walks into San Francisco City Hall and speaks with everyone he can. Supervisor Katy Tang took a meeting and talked about their process for handling constituent requests. She gave us incredible feedback as we iterated through multiple solutions. From there, offices from Oakland to Chicago immediately saw the value and started coming on board. We now help teams across the United States track requests and interests for hundreds of thousands of constituents.

What are its key features?

User-centric design

If we could change anything about this industry, it would be to ingrain a focus on the needs of the users. One of our company values is Empathy, because understanding the customer is the most important part of serving them.

We don’t build features because we think they’re cool or to check off a box on an RFP. For us to have a profound impact on millions of local government employees requires nuanced insight into what matters to them.

Integrations

We’ve already built an Add-In for Microsoft Outlook and synchronize with Open311 systems. Many representatives have websites where they direct constituents, so we also have an embeddable web form that submits directly into Romulus.

CRMs are only as powerful as the data they contain. We’re proud of our product design because we want our users to get excited about using Romulus. For the times when that is not possible, we make integration seamless.

Worry-free security and auditing

This goes back to focusing on the “what” and not worrying about the “how”.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and Sunshine Laws are great for transparency but can be a burden on local governments. Everything in Romulus is fully audited and redundantly backed up in multiple geographic locations. Users can export their information at any time so FOIA requests are not scary anymore.

On the security side, our servers are FedRAMP certified, which is the specification the Department of Defense uses to determine cloud-readiness. Our data is always encrypted in-flight over SSL and at rest in our databases.

What are the costs, pricing plans?

Traditional government vendors rely on exorbitant pricing and long contracts. We firmly believe this is wrong for the customer and, by extension, the constituents they are charged with serving. We are changing that with simple, transparent and affordable pricing:

  • $40 per user per month. Everything included.

No contracts, no cost for support, and we will onboard any information you have free of charge. We’ve had offices send us CSVs of tens of thousands of constituents and we get them up and running in little more than a day.

We’re passionate about fixing how governments buy software. You can read more about our philosophy on our blog.

How can those interested connect with you?