Use Claim Codes to Attribute Records to an Applicant Account for Renewal Campaigns (ex. Historical Records)

Renewals of permits and licenses require the following information at minimum:

• the permit or license expiration date
• the applicant name
• the street address, and
• an applicant's email address (suggested)
• a specific location address (optional)

When historical data does not have all this required information, it is discouraged to use historical data for renewals. Subsequently, in this situation, governments should encourage citizens to create an OpenGov login using their email address and resubmit an application in OpenGov Permitting & Licensing to ensure their permits and licenses renew for the first year after OpenGov is live. This will ensure renewals in future years will be completed through OpenGov. With this approach, OpenGov Permitting & Licensing will hold the most recent permit and licensing records with up-to-date information from the citizen, without any corrupt data.

What are Claim Codes?

Claim codes are unique identifiers that are linked to Records without registered OpenGov Applicants. When a renewal campaign is created, any OpenGov record that does not have an Applicant linked to it (e.g. Records with historical data from a legacy system) will be given a claim code that can be used by the Applicant to claim the Record as their own.

In order to generate the claim code, you will need to create a renewal campaign and then create and export the Renewal Campaign to a .csv file. All Records in the Renewal Campaign that aren't linked to a valid Applicant profile will be given a claim code that is visible in the rightmost column of the Renewal Campaign's exported file.

Once an Applicant receives their claim code, they can log into the Public Portal, scroll to the bottom of the homepage, and click "Claim a Record" to enter their claim code and become the Record's Applicant moving forward.

How are Claim Codes used after a historical data migration?

When all of the required information for renewals is available in the legacy data, and the government decides to use historical data for renewals, please see the below diagram on how Claim Codes allow applicants to connect permits and licenses from the government’s legacy system to the new permitting system in OpenGov.

Using historical data expiration dates, OpenGov creates a renewal campaign that produces a Claim Code for each of the expiring permit and licensing records. Upon exporting the CSV list of renewal campaign records and their associated Claim Codes, government staff can use Mail Merge to distribute paper renewal notices sharing the Claim Codes with citizens.

When the applicant receives this paper notice, they should create an account on OpenGov and log in to use their Claim Code to reconnect to their expiring permit or licensing record. The applicant can now start a renewal on the public portal. The applicant will do this by:

1. Navigating to the “My Account” section of their screen and
2. Submitting a new renewal permitting or licensing record with updated information.
3. Using the renewal workflow process newly created in OpenGov, government staff can approve the applicant’s newly submitted renewal record.

Tip: The applicant can only submit a renewal record if the renewal campaign has begun. Thus, we encourage governments to send out Claim Codes well in advance (months) before the renewal period so that applicants will sign up for an OpenGov user account and receive email reminders prompting them to renew permits and licenses.

Related Articles:

Email Template for Applicants using Record Claim Codes

Version 1