Prince George's County Digital Transformation

The Client

Prince George's County is Maryland's second-largest county, home to nearly one million residents and thousands of businesses. As a major municipal government, the County operates dozens of departments and agencies that deliver a wide range of public services, all of which depend on a reliable, accessible digital presence to connect constituents with the information and resources they need.

The Situation

Prince George’s County needed to move off of an inflexible CivicPlus CMS and replace an outdated, fragmented web presence with a modern, constituent-focused digital platform that could serve nearly one million residents and thousands of businesses across Maryland’s second-largest county. The County’s core objectives were to:

• Consolidate its digital presence onto a unified, secure platform that eliminates fragmented systems and inconsistent constituent experiences across departments.
• Streamline access to vital county services by creating tailored digital experiences that helped residents quickly find the information they need, reducing call center burden and improving constituent satisfaction.
• Improve operational efficiency for county staff by simplifying content management workflows, integrating SSO for secure editor access, and unifying search across Drupal and Salesforce PGC311 data.
• Establish a foundation for AI-driven engagement by implementing Acquia Conversion Optimization’s behavioral analytics, as well as implementing personalization capabilities and structured data export pipelines to support chatbot training and automated constituent interactions.
• Embed accessibility as a continuous priority rather than a one-time compliance exercise, ensuring the platform meets the needs of all county residents.

The Challenge

Prince George’s County has dozens of departments and agencies, each with distinct content priorities and workflows. As a result, its most significant business hurdle was navigating multi-stakeholder alignment within county government. 

On the technology side, the existing CivicPlus CMS was an inflexible COTS solution that made it difficult to leverage the County’s existing technology investments. Surfacing data from external systems required workarounds that cost extra time and money, and true integration was often impossible. 

The County’s old CMS offered little front-end design flexibility. Creating a microsite or a new page layout was either impossible or a painful, time-intensive exercise. The team also needed to:

• Consolidate disparate content sources into a unified Drupal architecture while preserving critical integrations
• Integrate Salesforce PGC311 search results directly into the Drupal site
• Implement SSO, balancing security requirements with the need for a streamlined editorial workflow
• Design data export pipelines to feed chatbot optimization
• Maintaining production stability on a high-traffic government site

The Solution

Prince George’s County tapped Acquia partner Tactis to lead the transformation. Tactis implemented a structured, multi-phased approach on the Acquia Cloud Platform, using Acquia Site Studio as the component framework. 

Phase I: Discovery

Tactis conducted research to understand constituent needs, service delivery gaps, and the operational realities of county staff managing web content. The team’s findings grounded the entire initiative in real user requirements.

Phase II: Strategy and Planning

Next, Tactis developed a constituent experience brief that defined the vision for the redesigned platform, then translated it into a roadmap of user stories and features, organized into an Agile backlog for iterative delivery.

Phase III: Most Valuable Product

Using Agile Scrum with two-week sprints, the team built and deployed the new princegeorgescountymd.gov. Acquia Site Studio was central to this phase; the team used adapted and styled pre-built components to meet county requirements, dramatically accelerating delivery compared to custom development. Additionally, the team integrated SSO to streamline the login process for content editors and deployed Salesforce PGC311 search to enhance unified content discovery.

Phase IV: Enhancements and AI Readiness

With the initial project complete, the team focused on continuous optimization. Key Acquia-enabled capabilities delivered include:
 

• Deploying Acquia Conversion Optimization to facilitate behavioral data collection, goal configuration, and session-level analytics
• Providing Acquia Conversion Optimization onboarding, including offering formal training for County staff and establishing session data export workflows designed to feed AI and chatbot training.
• Planning Acquia Conversion Optimization behavioral data and session exports as inputs to optimize the chatbot, creating a closed-loop system where constituent behavior directly informs AI-driven interactions.
• Deploying SOLR search infrastructure and continuously tuning it based on scrum review findings to improve result relevance.
• Embedding Acquia Conversion Optimization-powered survey instrumentation in the production environment (including footer feedback triggers via custom CSS selector targeting), establishing a persistent feedback loop for data-driven optimization.

Throughout the engagement, Acquia Cloud Platform provided the secure, scalable hosting foundation, while Acquia Site Studio’s component-based architecture enabled rapid iteration without compromising platform stability. The structured deployment governance model ensured the County maintained full control and traceability over every change.

The Results

The Prince George’s County digital transformation delivered measurable, structural impact on numerous fronts: 

• Platform consolidation: The County replaced its fragmented, outdated web presence with a unified Drupal platform on Acquia Cloud Platform, creating a single, consistent digital front door for nearly 1 million residents. All departmental content now operates within a shared architecture with unified taxonomy, search, and governance.
   
• Operational efficiency: With SSO integration, content editor access was streamlined, reducing friction for dozens of county staff members managing the site. Acquia Site Studio’s component-based approach allowed the team to deliver enhancements faster through reusable, pre-built components rather than custom development for each request.
   
• Search unification: By integrating Salesforce PGC311 search data into the Drupal platform via SOLR, constituents can now find information across county services, 311 data, and website content from a single search experience. This unified approach eliminates the need to navigate between disconnected systems and reduces the number of clicks required to reach the right answer.
   
• AI and personalization readiness: The platform is now instrumented with Acquia Conversion Optimization behavioral analytics, personalization goal tracking, and session data export capabilities. Together, unified search, chatbot, and personalization function as friction-reduction layers, each designed to surface the right information faster and move constituents from question to resolution in as few steps as possible. These data pipelines feed chatbot training and AI-driven personalization, positioning the County to deliver increasingly intelligent constituent experiences as Drupal AI capabilities mature.
   
• Continuous accessibility improvement: Rather than treating accessibility as a one-time checkbox, the team embedded remediation into every sprint cycle, resulting in ongoing compliance improvements deployed alongside feature updates throughout the 4+ year engagement.
   
• Sustained engagement model: The project has operated continuously for over four years, growing over $1 million in total contract value. This growth reflects the County’s confidence in the platform and the team, and demonstrates how a well-architected Acquia foundation enables long-term optimization rather than costly periodic rebuilds.
   
• Feedback-driven optimization: With Acquia Conversion Optimization survey instrumentation embedded directly in the production environment, the County receives ongoing constituent feedback, allowing it to make data-informed decisions about content, navigation, and feature priorities.