Vivacity Technologies

Wishing you happy holidays and a happy new year from our family to yours!

It’s that time of year again! As we near the end of 2024, the VivaTeam is winding down for the holiday season. To ensure that we make space for our families this holiday season, and to make sure we all come back in the new year refreshed and ready to go, our office will be closed from December 23rd to January 1st. We wanted to take a moment to thank you all for an amazing year. We’ve worked with a ton of amazing new and returning clients this year, grown the team to include Dr Premie Naicker (PhD), Jackie Gorman, and Kobe Shimoyama, graduated from Creative Destruction Lab, and won Business of the Year and Emerging Business of the year at the Kamloops & District Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Awards. All of this happened because of the support of our amazing clients, families and friends, and our community. We wouldn’t be here without you! As we say goodbye for the year, we wish you all the best this holiday season. We’ll see you in the new year!

Now that we are a few days into our public launch of VivaCitadel with the City of Kelowna, we wanted to share a bit about our first few Property Information Requests (PIRs) through the platform. To date, we have helped the City of Kelowna process 8 requests from the public, all completed digitally through simpler and more streamlined forms, online payments and signatures, and a record response portal. In the completion of these first few PIRs, we have noticed that our realtor users seem to be overall happier with the process, and have been very engaged with the Vivacity Technologies team to help further improve the process. Some have submitted multiple requests and are very pleased with the speed of VivaCitadel and how easy it is to use. City staff have also been very receptive to the platform, bringing us important questions and contributing new ideas as they arise. Overall, we’ve been super happy with the response we have seen from our municipal and public users so far! They have been very diligent with reporting any issues with the platform, and we are happy to say all support issues have been resolved rapidly. We are looking forward to seeing a larger pool of realtors and other public users engaging with the platform soon!

Over the last 20 months, our Business and Marketing Analyst, Cassandra Roberge (the one writing this post and article 👋) has been on a journey to explore new roles and responsibilities at Vivacity Technologies. In the last 8 months, that journey has entered into management and what it means to be a leader. Read about her experience in our newest article below:

It’s time for the second half of episode 1 from the second season of our Vivacity Technologies mini podcast series! Following the debunking of last year’s predictions, the second half of episode 1 follows George Emery and Stefano Stamato as they recount some of the major milestones and achievements of the team between the last season and now. Learn more about what the VivaTeam has been up to in Episode 1 part 2!

Today, Vivacity Technologies is thrilled to announce that our records retrieval and data management platform, VivaCitadel, is live in the City of Kelowna! Citizens looking to request a Property Information Request through the City of Kelowna can now visit https://pir.kelowna.ca/ to fill out a request through our online portal. Read more about about our launch with Kelowna below:

Calling all marketing apprentices! This January, Vivacity Technologies is partnering with Riipen Level UP and Thompson Rivers University to offer a remote, short-term paid market research project for business students looking to supplement their studies with real-world experience. During this project, students will conduct market research and develop customer profiles, helping create strategies to optimize our value proposition to these profiles through our communication channels. Students will have the opportunity to collaborate in a professional setting, working closely with leadership and in a flexible work environment that complements their class schedules. Over the project’s 6-8 week timeline, we’ll support students with regular check-ins to help stay on track and provide opportunities for mentorship. We’re recruiting three registered Riipen Level UP students in their 3rd year or higher in a Bachelor of Business or other equivalent degree program. The deadline to apply is December 15, with job details on the Riipen experience page. We can’t wait to work with some new students and collaborate together to help reshape Vivacity’s marketing environment!

Last week we hosted our third VivaCitadel Design Partner session, and were grateful to be joined by representatives from the City of Kamloops, City of Kelowna, District of Sechelt, and City of Vernon, BC, Canada. In this session, we shared a bit about our limited user testing with the City of Kelowna, and took some time to introduce our partners to our next use case for the platform. While we find these sessions very helpful to collect consumer feedback and gain more insights into the pain points and challenges that surround these processes for municipalities, there is another reason we host these sessions. Municipalities by nature are very collaborative. They love to share information and improvements they’ve made to help lift each other up. That’s exactly what we try to help foster with these sessions. In session 3, we were thrilled to see our design partners sharing their experiences with managing change and implementing new technologies and processes in their municipalities. Our partners were very open to sharing some of the harder lessons learned, and how those lessons have impacted and improved their service delivery to their municipality. We at Vivacity Technologies love having the opportunity to help create spaces for these meaningful and important conversations, and we thank our Design Partners for their attendance, vulnerability, and desire to help their counterparts.

Discover the latest updates and achievements of Vivacity Technologies in VivaScoop November 2024. From winning awards to launching VivaCitadel, it's all here!

After working a productive summer and fall with us, Kobe Shimoyama is in the final stretch of his extended Co-op term with Vivacity Technologies! Between projects, he’s been spending some time shadowing the development team working on VivaCitadel while getting mentorship from our frontend engineer, Jackie Gorman. We asked for his thoughts on the dev experience so far: “I hope to go into software development after I finish my computing science bachelor, but have never worked with a professional developer before, much less one on a production-ready project team. When leadership told me Jackie was looking to do some mentoring and was interested in shadowing, I thought it was too good to be true! It’s been amazing hearing her story and watching her and the dev team work in real time. I got to sit in meetings between the dev team and a professional software architect, learning about automated end-to-end testing, and planning sessions not unlike the scrums I read about in class where the team scoped out sprint activities and used project management tools like Notion I had never heard of. With Jackie, I got to watch her fronted dev routine where she showed me how to develop and test components with the help of Storybook, and how to configure parts of her environment as well as her favourite tools. Next, we’re working on creating a sandbox environment for me to inspect and run code using the same tools! I can’t thank the team enough for creating space for me to explore and ask questions so relevant to my long-term goals; hearing about Jackie’s journey and experiences made me confident in the direction I want to go with my career.” We’re happy to see Kobe grow during this Co-op and excited to see where he goes from here!