Engage Your Community
The PublicInput.com Blog
As government agencies and municipalities continue to adopt software solutions, typical approaches to community engagement are being augmented. While public involvement efforts in the past mostly focused on manual processes and in-person communication, technology is making these efforts more efficient, targeted, and scalable.
Cities of every size are subject to traffic and parking issues. Every town has roads, commuters, pedestrians, bikers - not to mention limits created by zoning, space, or capacity for infrastructure.
Exeter, New Hampshire is a town of 15,000 residents. Over the past year parking and traffic have been garnering more attention from the public, the Select Board, and regional press.
Held in Milwaukee this September, the 3CMA Annual Conference gathered hundreds of government communicators eager to learn from one another about how to accomplish better community engagement. There was plenty to be inspired by, as speakers presented on their efforts both offline and online.
We heard about how Kansas City, Missouri was reaching a new audience by holding public meetings at breweries and how Sandy, Utah was making more informed policy decisions through data collection and visual reporting…
Cities across the country are wrestling with housing affordability. Durham's planning team realized there might be misconceptions among residents, especially for 'missing middle' formats like duplexes and triplexes.
Using the platform, Durham engaged over 1,200 residents in a highly-visual interactive experience that educated and gathered input on potential solutions. Turns out only 18% of residents could identify the duplex in a lineup:
Last October, the owners of Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew announced that they were contemplating relocation. Austin was at the top of their list. But could the city handle the responsibilities that would come with it? Would taxpayers be willing to give up city-owned land for a new stadium?
Here’s how the city’s communication team used data to build stakeholder confidence in online engagement.
With community needs assessments becoming a popular tool for identifying key needs, we took a look at the key approaches we've seen work especially well.
Read about it in our recent post here: Four Key Strategies for a successful Community Needs Assessment
This past week, I found myself unable to put down a book by New York City's former transportation director, Janette Sadik-Khan. In Street Fight, she outlines her experiences of making big transportation changes in a city where change is notoriously hard.
One story in particular caught my attention. When working on the citywide roll-out of Citi Bike, New York's bike share system, Sadik-Khan did something unusual with the public engagement process. She used data in a surprising, effective way.
We recently dropped in on an engagement activity with one of our clients. The City of Raleigh Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department is undergoing a dog park study to determine the public's interest in dog facilities in the park system. As part of that process they have created a set of questions for the community and created an engagement portal on PublicInput.com.
Despite the proliferation of online discussion forums and social media, many agencies have struggled to embrace online dialog as a functional part of the public process. Their hesitation is simple - curating these spaces has historically meant significant investments of time and worry over what might be posted.
New tools are giving organizations the power to more efficiently manage public discourse within their comfort level.
