How the Illinois State Treasurer Created Unprecedented Transparency

What challenges led you to OpenGov?

Transparency is a principal priority of the Treasurer’s Office. The mission of the office is to promote education, access, and opportunity for individuals and governmental bodies across the state to give families the tools to achieve the American Dream. Treasurer Frerichs is committed to fulfilling this mission in a highly professional and ethical manner, while striving for transparency, efficiency, and preservation of public trust. Therefore, we want to be as transparent as possible in how we invest our money, how we bank the state’s money, and the performance of our programs.

Transparency is a key component for effective governing and ensures there’s trust in the government because we are accountable to the people.

Before using OpenGov, the majority of the information online was static, non-interactive, and not user-friendly. We wanted to provide constantly updated data in a user-friendly manner and provide information on programs for which this Office previously did not inform the public.

“OpenGov is a key partner we utilize to execute and achieve our transparency goals, our civic engagement goals, and to achieve internal efficiencies in terms of data preparation and reporting objectives. They are definitely an important partner in achieving those high-level strategic objectives.”
Max Dulberger, Director, Corporate Engagement & Investment Operations, Illinois State Treasurer

Why did you choose OpenGov?

Seeing the real examples of how OpenGov is facilitating transparency and civic engagement in other governments really helped us envision what we could do with it. The fact that other governments are successfully using it, gave them credibility. We also found the cost and price manageable, and the level of responsiveness and detail received in the RFP was notable. OpenGov gave us confidence that they could execute the level of responsibility and transparency we needed.

We also found that OpenGov as a software solution is up-to-date, easy to utilize, and enables us to tell more of a story about what we do in the Treasurer’s Office to serve the people of Illinois.

You branded your OpenGov solution for the public as The Vault. Tell us about your specific goals for The Vault.
Our goals are transparency, public trust, and more citizen engagement. We wanted to transfer any static graphs and tables into this interactive, online, user-friendly format. We also wanted to take the current data and convert it into this new, more innovative format. That was a key deliverable.

Putting new info online was a key objective, too. Internally, we wanted to improve productivity – with data storage, sharing, analyzing, reporting it out – these things used to be clunky and time consuming. It has saved our staff time and thus, saved us money.

What results have you seen so far?

One of our staff reported that they went from spending 3 hours and 45 minutes per month on data preparation to just 45 minutes per month—that’s an 80% reduction in time! We have also reduced the time spent preparing State Investments reports by 95% (from 3 hours per month to 10 minutes per month). In addition, we’ve received positive press coverage praising us for taking this step and creating greater transparency.

It’s been an exciting, positive project. We’re looking to derive as much value as we can out of it and make sure folks know how to use it.