Case Study: City of San José achieves inclusive, accessible public services and scalable emergency response with Zoom Video Communications

How the City of San José Uses Zoom to Protect and Connect a Diverse Public

The City of San José — a diverse, 1 million–resident municipality in the heart of Silicon Valley — faced a sudden need to protect lives and maintain services when COVID-19 upended daily operations. The Emergency Operations Center had to scale rapidly (staffing grew from about 50 to 700) while ensuring continuity of public safety, city services, and equitable access to information across many languages and communities.

San José deployed Zoom across its EOC and public-facing work to enable remote operations, multilingual trainings, closed captioning/ASL, transcreation of messaging, and distribution of hotspots and devices. The platform helped sustain police, fire, water, and sanitation services, support testing/vaccination and homelessness programs, and run virtual public meetings — boosting average meeting viewership from under 50 in-person attendees to about 263 virtual viewers (peaks to 573) and up to 4,000 recording views; transcreated emergency pages saw 147,000 visits. The result: more inclusive engagement, streamlined emergency response, and a lasting shift to a digital, accessible government.

City of San Jose

Raymond Riordan

Director, Office of Emergency Management