Public service has always interested me, so I’ve been fortunate to have made a career out of it. Five years ago I became the Public Affairs Director for the City of Orlando. In this role, I wear many hats, but no matter what the task, I’m always looking for ways to improve the way we operate and connect with our community.

In June 2012, we had the privilege of hosting the 80th Annual US Conference of Mayors, a prestigious event that attracts around 1,300 attendees. As the host city, one of our chief responsibilities was to secure sponsorships totaling more than $1.2 million to fund the convention. This was a huge undertaking and we had to be very organized when tracking sponsor information, funds and invoices.

Normally, keeping track of this constantly changing matrix of information would have required us to create an Excel spreadsheet, which we would’ve sent to each other via email as updates were made. With a conference of this magnitude, this would have flooded our team members’ email inboxes with dozens of different versions of the same document. We needed to find a better, less convoluted, way to collaborate.

Since the City of Orlando had been using Google Apps for Government, I decided to create a Google Spreadsheet to track sponsorship information for the Mayors Conference. With Google Docs, the spreadsheet lives in the cloud, so our whole team could update the doc at the same time, eliminating version control. Google Apps allowed our team members to access the sponsorship spreadsheet and other important documents from any location on any device. For us, this was a game changing way to approach a shared project.

Even though this was one of the largest events we’ve ever hosted and managed, it was the most organized. Consequently, we hit our sponsorship goal in time and received high praise for the meeting. We’re looking forward to using Google Apps on our next major collaborative project.