S.F. Business Portal a Finalist for Federal CIO Award

The San Francisco Business Portal, an easy-access website for Bay Area startups, has been chosen as a finalist in the 2015 Excellence.Gov Awards in the Excellence in Customer Experience and Digital Services category.

The portal, which is just under a year old, was created by Mayor Ed Lee, the Department of Technology, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and the Office of Small Business, along with a local design firm, Tomorrow Partners. It recently won a “Best of California” Award in August 2015.

The site makes it easy to find guides and startup kits for local business owners, said Jane Gong, program director at the S.F. Department of Technology. She added that another important feature of the site was the ability for a business owner to see each step in the process.

Using Drupal, Gong’s team worked to make the portal accessible to everyday people, instead of putting a lot of what she called “legalese that’s slapped together.” The project had an initial total funding of $657,000, and did not require any new hires. In the site’s first month live, the city reported an average of 103 users and over 400 page views per day.

The San Francisco Business Portal is up against other finalists such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s Digital Transformation, the Texas Department of Information Resources at Texas.gov and the U.S. Patent Trade Office’s “The Patents End to End Project.”

The Excellence.Gov Awards are jointly sponsored by the Federal CIO Council and ACT-IAC.