The Center for Digital Government awarded the State of South Carolina fifth place in the overall state category of the 2020 Government Experience Awards.

South Carolina, which partners with digital government solutions firm NIC South Carolina, located in Columbia, was honored for recent improvements to the sc.gov digital government platform, introducing the state’s first chatbot, Caroline, and launching accelerateSC, a one-stop COVID-19 recovery tool with its own chatbot, Axel.

Accessible from SC.gov and on citizens' mobile devices, Caroline assists users in finding a variety of information instantly, ranging from renewing a license, paying a traffic ticket or contacting their legislature. Since her debut in January 2020, Caroline has helped multiple concurrent users at once and answered over 17,000 questions.

The accelerateSC website was developed at the request of South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster in collaboration with the Department of Administration to quickly direct people to trending topics and information related to the State's COVID-19 response and revitalization efforts. A chatbot named Axel was added to the website in June 2020. Axel has 136 questions and answers. Since launch, Axel has had 1,147 conversations with 3,572 questions answered.

“We are so proud of our longtime partners in the state of South Carolina for this exciting and well-deserved achievement,” said Corinne Holland, General Manager of NIC South Carolina. “The two chatbots, Caroline and Axel, and our COVID-19 solution, accelerateSC, are incredible digital tools. We look forward to partnering with South Carolina to continue developing innovative solutions connecting citizens and businesses to the governments that serve them.”

The Government Experience Awards recognize the achievements and best practices of states, cities and counties that excel at creating useful online government services and applications. The Center for Digital Government is a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and sets the standard for measuring best practices in state and local government.

NIC South Carolina

NIC South Carolina is a public-private partnership with the state of South Carolina and is part of digital government firm NIC's family of companies. Columbia-based NIC South Carolina has been working with the state on digital government solutions since 2005.