City of Geneva supports local art and culture thanks to ServiceNow

A dedicated portal to secure grants
The residents of Geneva, a city of some 200,000 inhabitants, have suffered the full effects of COVID-19. To bolster the local cultural scene, the city decided to award grants to artists worth an overall two million Swiss francs. The city council therefore asked its IT services department to design a dedicated portal using ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM). Developed as a short-term SaaS solution, this straightforward, practical system was positively received by applicants, the assessors evaluating each application, and the City of Geneva’s cultural services department.

Tom Royston, Head of IT, says: “ServiceNow CSM allows us to make user-friendly digital forms fully accessible online. In the future, the portal will facilitate other communication needs for our residents, particularly around grants and funding.”

ServiceNow CSM is the latest innovation to be rolled out by the City of Geneva’s IT services department. It brings together key applications and features that can be developed as needs change. The product was chosen and put in place to manage the workflows of applications from within the council as well as external applications from citizens, allowing them to submit requests to the city’s departments. This is an effective, modern method for keeping in touch with local residents via a workflow. However, the portal was initially designed for the cultural sector.

Just five weeks to build the portal
To address the isolation experienced by residents and the cultural sector as a result of the pandemic, each local council sought simple methods for keeping in touch with its residents. Geneva was no exception and, benefiting from the modernization of its services, it established new and innovative channels of communication.

The portal, which was developed in just five weeks, is the latest of these and was designed to provide municipal financial support to the region’s artistic sector.  Due to the health crisis caused by COVID, the Administrative Council of Geneva decided to invest two million Swiss francs in grants to support the full range of professions within the cultural sector. Since May 2021, artists have been able to submit their projects through this dedicated portal, with each application evaluated by 15 experts. Logging into the highly secure ServiceNow back office using two-factor authentication enables the experts to evaluate each application remotely, score them, and select grant recipients. The tool’s simplicity and processing power have been well received by the artists and assessors alike.

The cultural sector plays a crucial role in the city’s economic life. Its creative economy accounts for nearly 8% of the city’s jobs, making it the second largest sector according to a survey conducted by the Geneva School of Business Administration (HEG) between 2014 and 2016.

A project accelerator
While the ServiceNow CSM reporting tool has proven particularly useful for the municipal council’s IT and cultural services departments, Tom also underlines that, “Customer Service Management is a genuine project accelerator.” Instead of multiple systems developed internally that need maintaining for different services, the IT team now has one standardized platform in which the solutions developed have far fewer components to maintain in house, and which is much more responsive.

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