We are very pleased to announce that the ZoetermeerPas, a city card developed by Visma Connect, has been given the Gouden Giraffe Award (Golden Giraffe Award) by the municipality of Zoetermeer.
The city card is a service the municipality offers to low-income citizens, in order to enable them to enjoy leisure activities, sports and cultural events with a discount and at times, for free. These special offers were previously distributed using paper vouchers. The city card digitises these offers and significantly reduces the administrative burden for the municipality and participating partners. By granting this award to the ZoetermeerPas, the municipality recognises it as a daring project that stands out, has recognisable development potential and significantly improves their way of working.
In the past, citizens that were eligible for the city card were given paper vouchers for use at participating businesses and institutions in the Zoetermeer area. Creating, distributing and reporting on these vouchers was a very manual and work-intensive process. When a user presented a voucher, service providers would have to scan them, collect them and then manually process the information to issue invoices for the municipality.
Now, every citizen gets a card with a budget they can spend as they see fit. Service providers simply scan the card and every transaction gets stored in the blockchain. Transactions are then read from the blockchain to create invoices and (financial) overviews. The municipality also benefits from greater efficiency, as they no longer need to process these vouchers and the associated invoices manually. Moreover, because every card has a photo of the user on it, the system is less prone to misuse. Only citizens who are truly eligible can enjoy the benefits.
Zoetermeer is not the only municipality that uses blockchain for this purpose. Groningen’s city card is also enabled by blockchain. However, for Zoetermeer, the main reason to choose Visma Connect was not necessarily our blockchain expertise, but our price point and experience with other government projects.
“We are thrilled to hear that our project earned the Gouden Giraffe award,” says Steven de Graaf, Business Consultant at Visma Connect. “Everyone at the city hall could cast a vote, so it shows that our work had a profoundly positive impact on their way of working. It’s something we are very proud of.”