From WhatsApp to a Structured Civic Channel: Results from the IOparteciPA Pilot in Pieve Ligure

Six months of real-world use show what happens when citizen reports, feedback and official communications become part of a single digital connection between a municipality and its community.

Phone calls, emails, WhatsApp messages, social media, informal conversations

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For many municipalities, day-to-day communication with citizens is still spread across multiple channels. The challenge is not simply receiving a report. It is about turning it into structured information, managing it, preserving its history and providing feedback to the citizen.

From March to August 2026, the Municipality of Pieve Ligure tested a different model.

For six months, IOparteciPA was used in a real-world environment: citizens reported issues across the local area, the Municipality managed them through a single digital workflow and, during the final stage of the pilot, began using the same infrastructure to send official communications directly to the community.

This was not a laboratory test. It was a field trial of a new digital relationship between a municipality and its citizens.

Six months later: what the numbers tell us

By the end of the pilot on 31 August 2026, IOparteciPA had handled 133 citizen reports.

More than 80% had already been closed, with an average time of approximately 3 days to take a report in charge and approximately 6 days to close it.

There is another figure that helps illustrate how far the platform reached within the local community.

During the pilot, app downloads reached an estimated 20% of Pieve Ligure's resident population.*

For a local digital service introduced only a few months earlier, this provides an initial indication of its ability to reach a meaningful share of the community.

But downloads alone are not enough.

The more important question is: after trying the service, did citizens continue to use it?

The pilot data says they did.

More than one in two citizens came back

Among citizens who used IOparteciPA to submit at least one report, 54.5% used the service again.

What this means is:

More than 1 in 2 citizens who submitted a first report went on to submit at least one more.

This is arguably one of the most significant findings from the entire pilot.

Downloading an app can be driven by curiosity. Using it once may simply mean trying it out. Using it again suggests that the channel is beginning to become part of how some citizens interact with their municipality.

One piece of feedback received during the pilot brings this to life:

“Thank you for promptly resolving my previous report.”

The message was left by a citizen when submitting a new report.

A report. Action. A response. Then another use.

This is the cycle IOparteciPA is designed to enable:

Signal from the community → Action → Feedback → Trust

For the Municipality, the real change is in the process

Digital transformation is not simply about replacing a phone call with an app.

WhatsApp is digital. Email is digital. A social media post is digital.

The problem is that when reports and requests arrive through different channels, information remains fragmented. Reconstructing previous interactions, tracking the status of a request, identifying recurring issues and providing feedback all become more difficult.

With IOparteciPA, the workflow changes.

A citizen report enters through a structured channel, is managed by the Municipality, retains its status and history, and allows the citizen to follow its progress.

By the end of the six-month pilot, more than 8 out of 10 reports had been closed.

This does not mean attributing the Municipality's operational performance automatically to IOparteciPA: decisions, organisation and interventions remain the responsibility of the local authority.

What the platform does is make the process more structured, traceable and measurable.

Citizen reports become civic memory

A problem reported through a phone call or an informal conversation may be resolved, but it often leaves behind little structured information.

When the same report enters a digital system, it becomes part of a history.

After six months, the reports collected in Pieve Ligure already provide insight into the types of issues that recur most frequently: waste accounted for approximately one third of all reports, followed by roads and pavements, public green spaces, traffic and mobility, and water-related services.

This is not yet “territorial intelligence” in its most advanced form.

But it provides the raw material needed to build it.

As this information base grows, isolated citizen reports can progressively become structured civic memory: a body of information that can help public authorities identify recurring issues, understand local needs and make increasingly informed decisions.

It is the transition from a single ticket to Civic Intelligence.

Then the information began to flow the other way

In August, something equally important happened.

IOparteciPA began to be used not only to bring information from citizens to the Municipality, but also in the opposite direction.

The Municipality sent 17 Official Communications in a single month, mainly concerning weather alerts and updates, as well as traffic and mobility.

This is where the nature of the platform begins to change.

From:

Citizen → Municipality

to:

Citizen ↔ Municipality

And for citizens, that can translate into a very tangible benefit.

A road is closed. Knowing before you leave can change your day.

On 21 August, a dangerous tree forced the closure of the SS1 Aurelia road in the neighbouring Municipality of Sori.

The Municipality used IOparteciPA to send an alert directly to citizens' smartphones.

For someone about to travel, this is not simply an “official communication”.

It is information received while there is still time to act on it: choose an alternative route, delay a journey or change plans.

When the road reopened, citizens received a second notification. Both communications were successfully delivered to 100% of the reachable devices for those two alerts.

This illustrates one of the most immediate benefits of a Municipality → citizen communication channel.

A road closure. A weather alert. A change in traffic conditions. A school that will not open the following morning.

These are public-service updates, but above all they are pieces of information that affect people's everyday lives.

Receiving them promptly on a smartphone can mean reorganising a journey, adjusting work plans or making childcare arrangements in time.

And citizens can access the service through a free app.

An app that remains useful even when there is nothing to report

This introduces another important development.

An app designed exclusively for citizen reports is mainly used when someone encounters a problem.

Official Communications provide another reason to maintain an active digital connection with the local authority: receiving useful information directly from an official source.

Citizen Reports and Official Communications therefore begin to form two sides of the same system.

On one side:

Citizen → Report → Municipality → Action → Feedback

On the other:

Municipality → Information → Citizen → Informed decision

This two-way cycle is one of the most significant outcomes of the Pieve Ligure pilot. The final pilot report also identifies the Municipality ↔ citizen relationship as one of the key elements validated during the trial.

What did Pieve Ligure actually validate?

Six months in a single municipality do not yet demonstrate that IOparteciPA can automatically be replicated with the same results across Italy.

It would be premature to make that claim.

Pieve Ligure validated something that comes first.

It demonstrated that the model can be used in a real public-administration environment, for months rather than during a one-off demonstration.

It achieved a closure rate of more than 80%.

Most importantly, it showed that more than half of the citizens who used the service to submit a report came back and used it again.

It began building a structured history of citizen reports.

And it activated both sides of the digital relationship:

Citizens → Municipality and Municipality → Citizens

These results move the pilot beyond a technology test towards the first real-world validation of a new model for digital civic engagement.

The question now extends to other municipalities

Many local authorities still receive citizen reports through phone calls, emails, WhatsApp, social media and informal conversations.

For six months, Pieve Ligure tested what happens when part of that relationship is brought into a single structured and measurable digital environment.

The question, therefore, is not whether a municipality should simply become “more digital”.

The question is:

Can we continue to accept that such an important part of the relationship between citizens and their local authorities remains scattered across tools that were never designed to manage it as a structured process?

The Pieve Ligure experience does not yet provide every answer.

But it provides something that was previously missing: real-world data and observed behaviour.

From signal to trust

IOparteciPA's ambition is not simply to digitise the reporting of a pothole.

It is to progressively build a civic infrastructure in which every signal from the community can follow a clear and transparent path:

Signal from the community → Action → Feedback → Trust

The citizen observes and reports.Technology structures the information.The public authority decides and acts.The citizen receives feedback.

And in the opposite direction, the Municipality can reach its community directly with useful, timely information.

When this cycle is repeated, what is created is more than a database of citizen reports.

It builds memory, knowledge and trust.

Pieve Ligure is the first community where IOparteciPA has been able to begin measuring this in the field.

The Pieve Ligure pilot shows what can happen when a municipality and its citizens share a single, structured, two-way digital channel. IOparteciPA is now opening new pilot programmes with other communities.

If you would like to explore IOparteciPA for your municipality, request a demo or contact us to learn more about our pilot programme.

* The estimated download rate, equivalent to approximately 20% of Pieve Ligure's resident population, is an indicative figure for the pilot period and does not represent the number of active users.