From Two Systems to One Source of Truth: How Castlegar Modernized Its Business Directory
Castlegar’s economic development team wanted something simple on paper and surprisingly hard in practice: a clear, up-to-date view of the businesses in their community, and an easy way to share that view with the public. Getting there meant rethinking how their business data lived and moved across systems, and it’s turned into one of the clearest examples of what happens when a community consolidates around a single source of truth.
Client: City of Castlegar Economic Development Location: Southeast British Columbia, Canada
The Problem
Before working with ExecutivePulse, Castlegar managed its business directory across two separate platforms. A WordPress site handled the public-facing side, listing business names, industries, contact information, and locations for anyone in the community to browse. Behind the scenes, a second system held the working data.
Running two platforms sounds manageable until you’re the one maintaining them. In practice, it created a steady drag on the team:
- Staff engagement dropped, simply because keeping two systems current took real time and effort
- Updates made in one platform frequently didn’t make it to the other, so the public directory and the internal data quietly drifted apart
- Duplicate data entry led to inconsistencies that were only caught later, if at all
- Keeping both systems aligned required ongoing manual audits, which ate up hours that could have gone toward actual economic development work
- Changes to the website weren’t tracked, so there was no way to see what had changed, when, or who made the change
That last point turned out to matter more than anyone expected. At one point, changes to the website resulted in a complete loss of directory data, with no earlier version available to restore. The information was simply gone.
The Solution
ExecutivePulse built Castlegar a custom business directory designed to mirror the look and structure of their existing website, so residents and visitors would see no disruption, just a cleaner, more consistent experience. The new directory is organized, professional, and searchable, making it easy for anyone to find a business by name, industry, or location.
The bigger change happened behind the scenes. With everything now running through a single system, Castlegar’s team updates business information once, and that update is reflected everywhere it needs to be. Duplicate entry is gone. The quiet data drift between systems is gone. And because the ExecutivePulse platform keeps a full version history, an accidental change is no longer a permanent loss. If something goes wrong, it’s a rollback, not a rebuild.
The Impact
The shift to one system paid off in two directions at once. Internally, Castlegar’s staff spend less time reconciling data and more time using it, and engagement with the system has improved now that maintaining it isn’t a two-platform chore. Externally, the public directory has become a genuinely useful tool: anyone outside the area, whether a prospective business, a site selector, or a curious resident, can explore Castlegar’s business community by industry in a few clicks.
For a small economic development team, that combination, less time spent maintaining data and more value delivered from it, is exactly the kind of return that’s easy to feel every day but hard to capture until you compare it to what came before.
In Their Words
“The ExecutivePulse team was very proactive in suggesting things I had not even thought of yet.” — Castlegar Economic Development
Want to see what a single source of truth could look like for your community? Contact the ExecutivePulse team to learn more.