About Government Outreach

Government Outreach is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, and provides citizen relationship management solutions to city, county, airport, and public transit agencies.

Founded on the belief that there is a better way for public officials to connect with their citizens, Government Outreach brings the CRM solution into the public sector with a suite of products that support the unique needs of local government agencies.

Government Outreach's founders have extensive local government and customer contact software industry experience.

GO's Management Team

Steve Brozosky - Founder

Following his election to the Pleasanton City Council in 2002, Steve Brozosky learned quickly that the city, like most local governments, faced a major challenge to easily process the thousands of requests for services received by the city from citizens, visitors, and businesses. Meeting the classic definition of marketing, he saw the need and, using his vast experience as a software engineer, immediately set about filling this need. Thus was born Government Outreach, the leading provider of citizen relationship management software that helps local governments provide exceptional customer service to citizens.

He was particularly well-positioned to help meet this need as prior to his election to the city council, Steve served as Director of Technology Planning for Vantive Corporation, a market leader of customer interaction software applications. Vantive was acquired by PeopleSoft and subsequently Oracle. He set the technology vision for the firm, which provided customer interaction software that enabled businesses to improve customer satisfaction and automate customer support, sales, field service, and internal help desk functions.

Steve has served as a Pleasanton council member, vice mayor, as a board member of a regional transit system, and as a member of numerous local organizations.

Kendall Smith - Founder

Kendall Smith brings a very unique set of attributes to the local government clients served by Government Outreach: he’s a visionary who bridges the worlds of technology and engineering and is . . . well, understandable. Kendall observes the needs of local agencies and then can articulate cutting-edge solutions so that managers and IT staff come together to better serve citizens.

He gained these skills via a variety of engineering and marketing positions for technology firms based throughout the Bay Area as well as in the UK. Most visibly, Kendall served as Vice President and Founding Engineer at Documentum, whose enterprise content management software lets global companies' employees simultaneously update and manage business content through the Internet and corporate intranets and share it with partners and clients. Users can troll e-mail, news feeds, the Web, and other content for specific data, and then organize it to develop presentations and proposals. Documentum was acquired in 2003 by EMC; the company now operates as a division of EMC.

Tim Schmidt - Vice President

Find a better way – particularly when it comes to leveraging technology to improve customer service. That philosophy summarizes Tim Schmidt’s impressive career and makes him a valued member of the Government Outreach team. As Vice President at Vision Internet, he led a transformation in the way governments serve their community via the web and helped make Vision Internet a leading website development firm for local government; as an employee for a southern California city, he created the way workforce development services were provided; and in the ski industry he helped create systems that let skiers go direct to lift and bypass the ticket line. Each of these innovations resulted in major improvements in customer service and each resulted from his rich background in technology, operations, and communications.

Tim is once again leading the way to reinvent an industry. His experience gives him unique insights into the needs of local government while his innate creativity is helping solve old challenges to find a better way for governments to dramatically improve customer service and streamline operations.

Scott Summerfield - Vice President

Scott Summerfield has a natural curiosity about how things work. From radio stations to professional sports to government agencies, Scott knows the right questions to ask and instinctively knows how to translate industry jargon to words that we all can understand. It’s an invaluable skill as Scott provides senior counseling services for clients of SAE Communications, a firm he helped transform into the foremost local government communications consulting firm in the western United States.

Based on his experience as Director of Communications for the Bay Area city of Newark and as Communications Director for the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, Scott has advised a diverse client roster, including the California Lottery, the League of California Cities, Waste Management, Inc., the State of California Office of Emergency Services, and dozens of local government entities. Scott is a past president of the California Association of Public Information Officials, which honored him for his lifetime contributions to local government, and a crisis communications instructor for the State of California. He’s a past radio journalist in Southern California and media relations coordinator for Bay Area professional football.

Sheri Benninghoven, APR - Vice President

As far back as high school, Sheri Benninghoven was fascinated by the work of her hometown city government. She followed the actions of the City Council and paid close attention to who managed the city and its various departments. Sheri found a way to combine this passion for the public sector with her innate skills as a strategist and communicator to start SAE Communications, specializing in helping local government agencies prepare and implement strategic communications programs. She has owned the firm since its inception in 1991.

Sheri served as the first Communications Director for the League of California Cities and is a former Public Information Officer for the City of Anaheim. She also held the position of Vice President/Group Manager for Ketchum Public Relations Worldwide, managing global high technology public relations programs as well as numerous public agency and corporate accounts. She is a recipient of the Paul Clark Award from the California Association of Public Information Officials and a founder of the City-County Communications and Marketing Association. Sheri is also a member of the Adjunct Faculty at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication.