Cherokee Nation Advances Citizen Engagement in the Cloud
Meet the industry's next trailblazer.
The Cherokee Nation is one of the largest tribe in the United States, and is led by a federally recognized sovereign government that serves more than 400,000 tribal citizens worldwide as it works to protect its inherent sovereignty, preserving and promoting Cherokee culture, language, and values, and improving the quality of life for the next seven generations of Cherokee Nation citizens.
In other words, it is a government organization that is committed to making sure the Cherokee people it represents have easy access to any and every program or service that helps the community thrive — which has been no small feat in the shadow of COVID-19.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is the worst public health crisis in generations and has impacted every Cherokee Nation citizen in some way, whether it was losing a loved one, losing a job, or feeling more economic strain,” said Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. “The ripple effects from this pandemic create challenges at home with health, school, food security, isolation, and so on. It’s our responsibility as a Nation to ensure we have the programs in place to help our citizens recover as quickly as possible.”
Enter: the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), and a subsequent portal built on Salesforce that directly helps Cherokee Nation citizens with direct services and funds to help recover and rebuild from the pandemic, but also sets the example for how Cherokee Nation will deliver a number of programs and services to citizens moving forward.
Cherokee Nation looks to move Federally-funded grants into the hands of the people.
When Congress passed the ARPA, it made over $1.8 billion in recovery funding available to help implement jobs, training, infrastructure, direct services, and programs for the Cherokee people. Principal Chief Hoskin and the team went to work defining the process for getting these dollars into the areas that needed the most help. “And — having a response that has been guided by facts, science, and compassion since day one — we decided to take a people-first approach, prioritizing the services that would make the most impact within households,” said Corey Bunch, Chief of Staff.
The team established the Cherokee Nation’s Respond, Recover and Rebuild spending plan that outlines how the Nation would prioritize ARPA dollars, focusing on efforts like: offsetting unexpected household expenses, maintain food security, protect employee paychecks, expand health care services for testing and response, expand programs that protect Cherokee's most vulnerable, helping students with technology for virtual learning and securing, producing and distributing enough PPE to employees and schools.
“The problem was these are all different services, run by different programs with different entry points to different departments,” said Bunch. “Additionally, the way citizens engage with these services varies. Some of our citizens prefer self-service options or email. Others live in very rural environments that don’t always accommodate luxuries like reliable internet. Thus, we needed a way to (1) unify the service intake process while also finding a way to (2) diversify the communications and delivery process.”
And they had to do both quickly, as COVID-19 has proven to be a crisis of speed time and time again. “People can’t wait to buy groceries. People can’t wait to refill their prescriptions or postpone doctor appointments because their benefits lapsed,” Bunch continued.
With people as the center focus and processes in place, the team turned to technology to enable services more quickly and found their answer in the cloud.
Introducing a portal that is quickly becoming the front door for all Cherokee services.
The team launched the Gadugi Portal (Cherokee for “working together”), a contact center and grants management system in one, on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform for government. It gives Cherokee citizens a consistent, single “front door” experience for accessing any of Cherokee’s services on the front end without compromising the team’s ability to configure workflows to meet unique, program-specific workflows on the backend.
The team piloted the portal with the first Respond, Recover, Rebuild effort, $2,000 payments were given to Cherokee Nation citizens to help them recover from the impacts of COVID-19, and it was successful. Here’s how it works:
The Gadugi Portal delivers meaningful results and impact to Cherokee citizens.
- Surveys: The Gadugi Portal uses Salesforce Surveys to determine the mix of programs and funding that will be a best fit in helping citizens respond to and recover from the impacts of COVID-19.
- School clothing assistance: Cherokee Nation provides clothing vouchers to students in need. The year before the Gadugi Portal was launched, the team distributed 4,000 vouchers manually. This year, they distributed over 28,000 vouchers – a 7x increase – via the Portal, requiring manual intervention in rare or exceptional circumstances.
- Cherokee Warriors database: The team also collects contact information on the thousands of citizens who are proud Veterans of the US Military, helping the tribe better connect Veterans to the programs, benefits, and services they earned. It has been integrated into the Gadugi Portal, extending the same self-service options to this group.
- Wildlife harvest: Cherokee Nation citizens can also use the Gadugi Portal to report deer, turkey, and Paddlefish harvests, which then automates the reporting process back to the Department of Natural Resources.
- Controlled hunts: Using integrated eligibility rules fueled by someone’s profile, those who are eligible for hunting and game license lottery categories like Out of State, Senior, or Youth can submit an application, and then the Portal randomly selects winners for each round of drawing.
And this is only one of many successes Cherokee Nation has seen come to life on the cloud. In addition to the Gadugi Portal, a sister team from the Health care side of Cherokee Nation launched a contact tracing system, also built on MuleSoft and Health Cloud. It provides positive test results to tracers and coordinators in near-real-time, accelerating tracking of the spread of COVID-19 across communities. Leveraging the MuleSoft HL7 Connector and Accelerator for Healthcare pre-built templates, Cherokee Nation’s IT team was able to connect, parse, and translate sensitive patient data throughout their contact tracing operations securely, leveraging best practices for HL7 and FHIR APIs. They then expanded it to manage vaccine distribution in a similar manner, empowering the team to adapt processes as the world moved through the various phases of COVID-19 response.
“We have all been through a very difficult year, but this strategy will help us recover faster, together,” said Gourd. “This portal signifies our Cherokee spirit and the dedication of every Cherokee Nation employee working together for the betterment of our citizens.”
