Cities and towns across Massachusetts and few in other states have adopted Visual Budget, either the new WordPress plug-in or the original.
Original Visual Budget Communities
The original Visual Budget (VB1) was a “one size fits all” web site developed initially for the Town of Arlington. Arlington Visual Budget was awarded a Kenneth Pickard Municipal Innovation Award by the Massachusetts Municipal Association in 2014, and a Digital Government Achievement Award iby the Center for Digital Government in 2015. Soon afterwards, Visual Government was organized to assist other towns in adopting the tool. We learned from this experience that every town had different needs, and that a more flexible platform was needed.
- Arlington, MA
- Ashland, MA
- Bedford
- Bourne, MA
- Charlottesville, VA
- Cohasset, MA
- Harwich, MA
- Mansfield, MA
- Melrose, MA
- Middleborough, MA
- Salem, MA 2018
VB2 on WordPress Communities
In 2018, Visual Government deconstructed VB1 and re-implemented it as a WordPress plug-in. WordPress is the most popular content management system, used in over 30% of the web sites on the web. WordPress is the foundation, and augmented by over 50,000 plug-ins which expand its functionality. The VB2 plug-in makes it easy to construct comprehensive and customized Visual Budget web sites to better meet the needs of any city or town. WordPress, most of the available plug-ins, like VB2, are “both free and priceless at the same time”.
* DIY installations