How EB Systems Helps Downtown KC Track What Works

Guest Post by Jon Ruiz, Co-Founder and CEO of EB Systems

You’ve probably seen the Downtown Community Improvement District’s (DCID) ambassadors out on the sidewalks of Downtown Kansas City. They pick up litter, give directions, check on merchants and help visitors find their way around. Most people don’t see what happens next. Since 2015, the DCID has used Electronic Beacons Systems’ (EB Systems) mobile workforce app to log that work as it gets done. An ambassador finishes a task and taps it into the phone in their pocket. That becomes a record with a time and a place on it. Eleven years and many thousands of activities later, the DCID has a detailed picture of what its teams do downtown, block by block and hour by hour.

The detail is what makes it work. Ambassadors log the kind of work they’re doing, so cleaning, safety assists, merchant check-ins, community outreach and hospitality each land in their own bucket. That lets the DCID see where problems are building up, which blocks need more coverage on a Tuesday morning and which need it at midnight on Saturday, and whether a change in deployment made any difference. At the end of the year, the report writes itself.

The World Cup was the biggest test of the system so far. Downtown’s ambassadors logged close to 5,000 activities over the course of the tournament. They pulled thousands of bags of trash off Downtown streets, checked in on merchants, made community contacts and pointed a lot of first-time visitors in the right direction. While they worked, EB Systems’ CrowdFlow beacons counted the crowds. CrowdFlow reads Bluetooth signals anonymously. No cameras. No personal information. The beacons have run through the Summer in the City series to measure the visitors each event brings into Oppenstein Brothers Memorial Park. The Oranje Fan Walk was on a different scale. They counted 36,496 people along the route, and the DCID could watch that crowd move through Downtown hour by hour while it was happening.

The same approach carries over to public safety. EB Systems takes incident data from Titan Security and builds corridor reports for the DCID, including a close look at Grand Boulevard, that show where incidents happen, when they happen and what patterns they fall into. The DCID uses those reports to make decisions about staffing, lighting and patrol coverage. EB Systems is a Kansas City company and a winner of Downtown Council’s entrepreneurial start-up program, LaunchKC. The program provided EB Systems with a $50,000 grant to build and grow their business here, and it has been the DCID’s partner since 2015. No district in this metro has measured itself this closely for this long, and plenty of bigger cities still can’t tell you what their ambassadors did last Tuesday. When the Downtown CID says Downtown is cleaner, busier or safer than it used to be, there’s a record behind the claim.