Town Invites Email Contact

It was only a little over a year ago that Morris Plains, NJ launched its first website. Since then, they have reached nearly 10,000 page views and over 1,500 visitors each month. Quite an accomplishment for a town of about 5,000 residents.

Unique to Morris Plains is a close-knit community, a vibrant local business section and some impressive corporations operating there, including Pfizer pharmaceuticals. The town being between a high-tech business and a low-tech neighborhood feeling, postponed the town website until councilman Steve Welsh pushed the issue to the front and began to get involved himself. He solicited some help from the good corporate neighbor, Pfizer in the form of an initial design and then studied the alternatives to creating the website as an ongoing vehicle to communicate with its citizens and visitors. Morris Plains chose MIG to develop the site with an emphasis on keeping people informed on current events, recreation programs and local history.

After the first year of operation, Steve saw an opportunity to improve communications and some operations using the website. MIG had begun a successful email alert service for Morris County's government called ConnectedCitizen. Using ConnectedCitizen, Morris Plains could communicate its own news to its residents on a local level.

MIG tailored the ConnectedCitizen email newsletter for information that was already entered in a database for Morris Plains. The most important local scrolling news was automatically added to the email in addition to recreation news and special highlighted features. The subscriber can also choose to limit the subject matter to certain categories. Morris Plains became the first town-oriented ConnectedCitizen email alert system.

Steve stated, "We are pleased to announce the new ConnectedCitizen email alert service. Our feedback has been excellent on the website and now we now hope to raise the expectations bar even higher with this new service. Working in the IT industry myself, I can really appreciate the work and the satisfaction residents are getting from our website." MIG is currently working on a new web-based Recreation Management System to help register and manage their recreation programs.

MIG can tailor a ConnectedCitzen email alert system or build an effective website for your town. To find out more, contact Paul Kiczek MIG at (973) 244-1191. Morris Plains website is morrisplainsboro.org and Steve Welsh can be reached at 973-538-2224.

Formed in 1996, Morris Internet Group is a NJ-based software development company that provides web hosting, site management tools, and outstanding Internet applications under its ie-Government family of products.