When you’re running a local government, your staff’s to-do list is already a mile long. Between managing daily municipal operations, fielding questions from residents, and coordinating public services, updating the municipal website is often a frustrating bottleneck. You know how important it is to keep your community informed, but wrestling with a complicated platform or relying on a developer to post a simple notice shouldn’t be part of the job description.
Over the past three years, Calumet Media has had the privilege of working with nine local municipalities and one regional municipality in Quebec, as well as the Township of Petawawa. Our goal has always been to help them create websites that are highly organized and specifically geared toward their intended audiences.
In working with such a varied set of local governments across the region, we began to deeply understand their unique pain points and production bottlenecks. We started retrofitting most of our designs with vastly improved administration elements to cut down on those daily frustrations. The result? We made managing a municipal website “too simple,” in the exact words of one local mayor.
The Sweet Spot: A Custom Suite for Local Government
We’ve taken that successful approach to its logical next step by completely rebuilding a suite of custom plugins designed specifically to tick all the boxes for municipalities.
Through a customized interface powered by Calumet AI and our Theme Builder, the elements that actually matter—managing communication with residents, business owners, and visitors—are front and centre. We call this tailored backend system our “My Municipality” setup, though the name is far less important than what it actually does for your workflow.
With only a few clicks through an intuitive process, your staff can post the latest council minutes, send out urgent public notices, or quickly update changes to the garbage pickup schedule. It takes minutes, requires zero coding knowledge, and gets the right information to the public instantly.
Community Connections and Built-In Power
Because local governments need to reach everyone, our new municipal websites come fully equipped with powerful built-in tools. To help bridge communication gaps, each site comes preinstalled with AI-powered translation, ensuring your content is easily accessible to your entire community without doubling your team’s workload.
Additionally, we’ve integrated Calumet Media’s custom newsletter plugin, Chimpr. Keeping your constituents in the loop is essential, and Chimpr makes creating and managing Mailchimp audiences incredibly easy for any novice.
The beauty of building on a foundation designed specifically for local government is that your website finally becomes a powerful, time-saving tool for your municipality, rather than a hurdle for your staff.
