In this issue
📞 Baltimore's 311 gamble
🔧 What Domino's knows about trust
🏥 Boston, Tamarac, and South Bend compared
🎙 Brian Elms on the city that gets it right
📖 Your service storytelling toolkit
Oh, hi!
Imagine you report a pothole. You get a confirmation number. And then nothing. No update. No timeline. No proof it was ever fixed.
Now imagine you report that same pothole and two weeks later your phone buzzes: a side-by-side photo shows the crater you reported next to fresh asphalt. Your request, closed. Your street, fixed. Your city, accountable.
That second version is what Baltimore is building. And the story behind it is worth pulling apart.
Act 1: The Problem
Baltimore's 311 system handled nearly a million requests last year, and for most of them, the conversation only went one direction.
Residents called in. The city took notes. What happened next was anyone's guess.
The system was not broken in an obvious way. Calls were answered. Requests were logged. But CitiStat, the city's pioneering performance management program (the one other cities had copied for a decade), had gone quiet. The data existed, but nobody was turning it into a story residents could follow.
The core problem was not technology. It was design. Baltimore's 311 was built as an intake form: you talk, we listen, we hang up. There was no mechanism for the city to say, "Here is what we did with what you told us." And without that second half of the conversation, every unanswered request became a small deposit in a trust deficit.
On May 27, 2025, Mayor Brandon M. Scott announced a comprehensive overhaul. Not just a tech upgrade. A redesign of the relationship between residents and the services they pay for.
He called it 311 Reimagined.
Act 2: What They Built
Baltimore did not just upgrade its software. It rebuilt the conversation. Here is what 311 Reimagined includes:
A resident-facing data portal with neighborhood-level mapping and keyword search. Before-and-after photos for select service requests, so you can see the pothole you reported and the repair that followed. Spanish-language options on the website and app from day one. Community workshops designed to help residents actually use the system (not just know it exists). And a relaunched CitiStat with public-facing performance memos, so the city's own accountability data is not buried in an internal file.
The CitiStat Annual Report for 2025 dropped on February 4, 2026. Weeks ago. This is not a retrospective on something that happened years back. It is unfolding right now.
Here is why this matters beyond Baltimore.
Think about the Domino's Pizza Tracker.
Before Domino's built it, you called in an order and waited. No update. No timeline. No way to know if your pizza was in the oven or still sitting on a counter. In 2008, they changed that. They gave you a progress bar: order received, being prepared, in the oven, out for delivery. You could see exactly where your order was at every step.
It did not just satisfy curiosity. Transparency became the entire brand strategy. Domino's credited it with helping drive a 40% year-on-year sales increase in some regions. Today, Uber shows you where your car is. Amazon shows you where your package is. TurboTax shows you where your tax return is. The Pizza Tracker trained all of us to expect visibility.
That is the shift Baltimore is making with 311.
The old model: you call, someone writes it down, the request disappears into a queue. The new model: you report, you see the data, you get a photo of the fix. Visibility. Transparency. Confirmation.
Cities are in the service business. The ones figuring that out are the ones redesigning 311 as a two-way conversation, not a one-way intake form.
⏩ If someone on your team runs a 311 operation or a contact center, forward this issue to them. And stick around for the podcast section below. The conversation I had about which city does 311 best might surprise you.
Act 3: What Others Can Learn
Baltimore is not the only city reimagining 311. But each city is solving a different piece of the puzzle.
Boston replaced a 15-year-old legacy system with Creatio's AI-native CRM platform, integrated with Cartegraph for asset management. Within months of going live, 50% of calls were routed through the new system. They consolidated 180+ service request types into streamlined workflows and connected approximately 600 users across dozens of departments. Boston's story is about speed: a city that went from a system old enough to drive to a modern platform in four months.
Tamarac, Florida (population 72,000) deployed an AI-powered omni-channel platform on Amazon Connect and Bedrock AI. Residents can reach the city by phone, text, web chat, video, or Alexa. An AI virtual assistant resolves roughly 20% of incoming calls without a human ever picking up. And here is the number that stops you: 77% resident satisfaction, compared to a 53% state average and a 56% national average. A city smaller than most people's commute won a 2025 AWS Champions Award and first place in the Digital Cities Survey. Small city. Big results.
And then there is South Bend, Indiana.
South Bend is building something called CARE (Community AI Risk Estimator), which uses 12 years of 311 data to predict where problems will emerge before residents report them. Not just faster response. Proactive response. The city won a $1 million Bloomberg Mayors Challenge award for the project, announced just weeks ago. Not a city you would have guessed, right?
Think about the progression. Baltimore made the 311 loop visible. Boston made it faster. Tamarac made it omni-channel. South Bend is trying to close the loop before it even opens.
Three platforms. Four cities. One design philosophy: 311 is not a complaint box. It is a conversation.
This Part Really Matters
I built a 311 app. I know what the data looks like from the inside.
311 generates the most honest signal your city has about what residents actually care about. It is not what they say at a town hall. It is not what they post on social media. It is what they call about at 7 AM on a Monday. Potholes. Missed trash pickups. Streetlights out. Water that looks wrong.
NYC 311 fielded over 3.4 million calls in 2024 alone, up 7% from the year before. Baltimore processes nearly a million requests. Across more than 300 platforms in North America, 311 is the most frequent conversation cities have with their residents. If your comms team is not looking at that data to shape your messaging, you are writing to an audience you are imagining.
Last week I wrote about closing the engagement loop. This is where the loop lives. Not in a meeting room. In a service request.
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What You Can Do
- Pull your 311 data this week. What are the top five request types? That is your residents telling you what they care about. If your comms strategy does not reflect those five things, you have a misalignment.
- Ask: does our 311 system close the loop? When a resident reports a pothole, do they ever hear what happened? If the answer is no, that is the gap. Even a follow-up text or email changes the experience.
- Steal the before-and-after model. Baltimore is showing residents photos of their reported problem and the completed repair. You do not need a $10 million platform to do this. You need a phone camera and a follow-up message.
Brian Elms spent years running Denver's Peak Academy, teaching city employees to fix broken processes from the inside out. When I asked him about chatbots and AI and all the tools cities are chasing right now, he did not give me a tech answer. He gave me a service answer:
"Look, if a chatbot solves a problem that reduces your call intake on 311, boom, that's a great idea. If a chatbot helps connect people to the right department faster and gets them a license quicker, boom, that's a great idea. But if a chatbot is just another avenue into 311, hold times are still nine minutes. It doesn't matter."
That is the filter. Does the tool make the service better, or does it just add another door to the same slow hallway?
Brian also said something I keep coming back to about how cities treat the work of the people who came before them: "Whether it's a city, whether it's a company, it's the old team isn't the enemy. We're going to build on what they did versus tear what they did down."
Baltimore did that. They did not scrap CitiStat. They relaunched it.
Free Resource
If you are starting to think about how to turn your city's service data into stories residents actually connect with, I built a toolkit for that. It is designed for the person on your team who looks at 311 reports and thinks, "There is a story in here somewhere, but I do not know how to tell it."
And if you missed it last week, the Resident-First Readiness Checklist is still there. Ten yes-or-no questions that tell you whether your engagement process closes the loop.
Is your city doing anything interesting with 311 data? Hit reply and tell me. I am collecting examples, and the best ones might show up in a future issue, credited to you.
Talk soon,
—Dana
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About Dana
Former Emmy-winning television producer and Chief Digital Officer. Built Gilbert, AZ's national award-wining Office of Digital Government. Now helping city communicators tell stories that build trust.
Oh, hi! Stories Podcast: Spotify | Apple Podcasts
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