December 2025 Product Release Notes

Overview

December’s release continues helping you turn community voice into faster, clearer government action. This month’s updates deepen cross-platform visibility, broaden the reach of resident input, and streamline core workflows—reducing friction and helping teams get from signal to decision even faster. Each enhancement reflects our ongoing commitment to make insights easier to find, understand, and act on every day.

• AI Assistant - new capabilities 
• Platform Topics Dashboard
• Listen: YouTube added 
• Ask: New Survey Homepage 

ZencityOS 

AI assistant improvements

These updates provide more clarity, stronger transparency through source URLs, and new collateral-generation capabilities, making the assistant more powerful and seamless to use—and better supporting the workflows that matter most to you.

• Source URLs now included directly in key findings for improved transparency
  
   
• Enhanced calculation guardrails to ensure consistent and dependable data handling
  
   
• Streamlined, user-friendly messages that provide clear guidance
  
   
• Strengthened safety and bias controls to support well-grounded, high-quality responses
  
   

NEW - Data driven communications plans and collaterals can now be produced directly with the AI assistant

 

Platform Topics Dashboards

One place to understand what your community is saying about any issue. Your new Platform Topics Dashboard brings resident input from all your tools into a single, easy-to-scan view so you can identify trends and act on whatever needs attention faster.

What’s New

• Centralized topic dashboard with all resident input (surveys, social, engagement, direct channels) in one screen
  
   
• Real-time feed showing every relevant activity and comment
  
   
• Summary cards with key metrics, trends, and quick links to deeper dashboards
  
   
• Deliver regular reporting on strategic initiatives, performance, and communications with greater breadth of data
  
   

Listen Module 

YouTube Sources Available

YouTube comes up a lot in client conversations, 25% of the time in fact in the top week this past year. Listen now captures resident input from YouTube—expanding reach and bringing a richer view of public conversation into your day-to-day decision workflows.

What’s New

• YouTube videos are now analyzed on Listen after we evaluate the title, description, comments, sub-comments, likes, shares, and views (not the video’s contents itself.)
• Full engagement data: comments, sub-comments, likes, dislikes, shares, views, and comment-level engagements.
• Automated topic and sentiment analysis applied to every video and comment—just like all other Listen sources.

November 2025 Product Release Notes

Overview

November marks our third monthly release, delivering transformative platform intelligence capabilities. Following September's navigation overhaul and October's rapid deployment of AI-powered features, this release deepens value across all modules. We’re demonstrating our commitment to systematic value creation - making every interaction more intuitive, every insight more actionable.

• Search & Explore
• Short Topic Summaries
• Resident Hub (invite only!)
• Enhanced Analytics Visualizations 

ZencityOS 

Search & Explore

A new simple way to navigate the platform and find everything you need -whether it is a page, or the answer to a question.

What’s New:

• Instantly find and navigate to pages, reports, surveys, tools and topics — or ask the AI Assistant anything about your data.
• Designed to make Zencity faster, easier, and more intuitive than ever.
• Try it now and see how quickly you can get where you need to go.

Availability: November 5, 2025

Help article here [add link]

Listen Module 

Short Topic Summaries

Short Topic Summaries uses AI to create an immediate and concise summary of a social media Topic, for any time frame, so the customer can gain an immediate high-level understanding of the discourse - for any topic and time frame. 

• Value from the first 30 seconds
• Reduce time to insight
• Give your research direction
• Make high-level reporting super easy

Availability: Nov 10, 2025

Help article here [add Link] 

Communicate Module 

Resident Hub

The new Resident Hub is a Resident Communications Management Platform where customers can manage lists of residents and their respective groups, based on their characteristics (area, demographics, interests), subscriptions and sign-ups to city activities. 

• Enable customers to target the right residents for any communications purpose.  

• Make direct communications from city to resident easy and centralized
• Internal: create a data asset that supports retention by creating a virtuous cycle with 

Roll out: by invitation - CSM responsibility, support opens the flag

Help Article: Link

Demo account: Zencity

Included in client email: No - invite only 

Additional enablement: Training TBS

Don’t present it as “your new CRM/RH” - focus on the communications flows

Newsletter users will have the biggest incentive to adopt

The same contract amendment flow as in newsletters is required

Invite only to begin with

Ask Module

Enhanced Analytics Visualizations 

Drill down into the results of individual questions. Providing in-depth insight not only into each aspect score but into each question that is in Zencity-certified surveys. It paves the way to display any survey through a unified dashboard, allowing us to expand our survey offering quickly.

• Roll out: All clients, November 5
• Help Article: In process
• Included in client email: Yes

October 2025 Product Release Notes

Overview

This release marks a major shift for the  second month in a row furthering users  ability to power their government work with community voices. The October release brings three significant changes to Zencity Ask and ZencityOS. 

• Elicit precise community input with our highly customizable yet simple survey builder
• Data can be overwhelming. AI Assistant 2.0 simplifies community data and helps you uncover the best next step to deliver for your community
• We deliver reports, insights, and highlights of your community input. The ones most relevant to your particular work now jump out with Smart Feed Topics

Communicate Module Enhancement

Feature - Zencity Newsletters

What's new:

Contacts

Upload contact lists any groups of interest - usually subscribers for a specific newsletter; segment the contact list by any input

Content

Create newsletters from templates or from scratch and personalize to city branding

Campaigns

Create dedicated campaigns for a target audience and design content templates and share with any resident group

• Manage

- Measure key metrics and create campaigns

- Automate workflows on the fly (e.g. new user welcome email). 

Availability: October 16, 2025, upon request

Help article here [<-- add link]

ZencityOS Enhancements

Feature - Smart Feed Topics Enhancement

What's new:

• Automatic topic tags: Insights, reports, and highlights are now automatically tagged with relevant topics, displayed below the source information in both list and card views
• Topic filtering: Filter Smart Feed by topic (Transportation, Public Safety, Housing, etc.) to quickly find content relevant to your department without scrolling through everything
• Combined filtering: Use topic filters alongside existing filters (date, source, etc.) to refine your feed and find exactly what you need

Availability: October 2nd, 2025

Help article here [None]

AI Assistant 2,0

What’s new:

• Revamped UX and UI: updated the chat look to make the experience more comfortable, added extended and full page view on top of the bubble chat view
• Connected to all modules: the AI Assistant is now able to pull data from all modules and do cross-module analysis and focus on workflow-ready documentation
• Structured output: outputs have been improved and will follow strict guidelines (in terms of format and logic) and guardrails

Availability: October 15th, 2025

Help article: https://help.zencity.io/hc/en-us/articles/39544125140241-AI-Assistant 

Ask Module Enhancements

Feature - Reimagined Engagement Builder

What's new:

• Intuitive Engagement Builder: Brand new engagement  builder with enhanced functionality including  an intuitive drag and drop interface, in page previewing and  additional question and content types. 
• Advanced Skip Logic: Additional "if-then" rules to direct respondents through different, customized question paths based on their answers, creating a more relevant and efficient engagement experience. 
• Optimized multilingual capabilities: Introduced smart defaults based on organization settings, automatic background autotranslation and an updated UX experience. 

Availability: October 2025

Help article here https://help.zencity.io/hc/en-us/sections/37407749585553-Questionnaire-Setup

September 2025 Product Release Notes

Overview

This release marks a significant transformation of the Zencity platform, introducing the foundational infrastructure for ZencityOS - our evolution from a resident feedback aggregator to the  first platform that powers the work of government with community voices. The September release brings major enhancements across all modules, with a focus on unified user experience and cross-platform intelligence.

Major Features

ZencityOS Foundation

SmartFeed

A new centralized hub that consolidates all Zencity-generated intelligence (Reports, Highlights, Insights) into one trusted feed.

What's new:

• Single destination for all platform insights and reports
• Clear distinction between analyst-created content (with green certification badges) and analyst-generated reports
• Cross-module intelligence in one unified experience
• Filtering and search capabilities for quick access to relevant content

Availability: September 15, 2025

Help article here

Topics

A unified taxonomy system that automatically categorizes all platform data into standardized topics across all modules.

What's new:

• AI-powered automatic topic mapping for all content
• Consistent tagging across Listen, Ask, and Communicate modules
• Foundation for upcoming cross-module analytics and AI features

Availability: September 15, 2025

Help article here

Redesigned Navigation

Navigation has been restructured around user workflows rather than data sources, featuring a clean white sidebar design.

What's new:

• Tools grouped by Jobs-to-be-Done: Listen, Ask, and Communicate
• Unified "Ask" section combining previous "Engage" and "Surveys" sections
• All survey types now accessible from a single "Survey Results" page
• Engagement Pages relocated under "Communicate" alongside Social Media Management
• Dedicated "Reporting" section for DIY report creation and storage

Availability: September 15, 2025

Ask Module Enhancements

Benchmarking

Compare your survey results against similar communities and national averages for better context and decision-making.

What's new:

• Cohort comparisons representing ~10% of U.S. population most similar to your community
• Visual indicators showing whether your results are above or below benchmarks
• Percentage point differences clearly displayed
• Available for standard Zencity questions in recurring surveys (Blockwise and Community Survey)

Availability: August 19

Help article here

New Survey Templates

Professionally designed, department-specific questionnaire templates starting with Public Health.

What's new:

• Methodologically vetted questions ready for immediate use
• Fully customizable through the Questionnaire Builder
• New templates to be released monthly for different departments

Availability: Public Health template now live; additional templates rolling out monthly

Listen Module Enhancement

Multi-threaded Summaries

AI-powered summaries that consolidate all conversations within a Topic into clear, actionable insights.

What's new:

• One-click summarization directly from the dashboard
• Key themes extracted from community comments
• Opinion mapping showing sentiment distribution per theme
• Share of discourse metrics
• Representative quotes and examples
• Available for custom Topics (Zencity preset Topics coming soon)

Availability: September 15, 2025

Help article here

Additional Improvements

• Improved Forced Ranking Question Analysis (Engagement surveys): Enhanced visualization and analysis for better understanding of ranking results

 Create Topics Directly from Search: turn useful queries into recurring automatic analysis