Author: Dave Biggs

Civic tech, and particularly online community engagement, has grown dramatically over the past few years. For years the field was in it’s infancy with only a few players and early adopters experimenting with new approaches. We’re now in the teenage years, with rapid growth in the number of vendors and agencies taking the leap. As every teenager knows, every growth spurt comes with both positives and negatives, and today’s world of online community engagement has its share of both.

The Good News

1. A Maturing Field of Vendors

In the early days a great deal of online engagement tools were not yet fully developed platforms. Most of them were developed for one particular project and then an attempt was made to commercialize the technology to offer the same functionality to other projects. This product development pathway often resulted in products not designed for the needs of the broader market, making it time-consuming and labor intensive to customize for new projects. Nearly all of these early platforms, if they are still around, have matured into fully templated products that can be configured quickly to meet the needs of new projects. The newest platforms, for the most part, have been designed from the ground up with the latest “software as a service” capabilities.

2. Costs Coming Down

Partly as a result of the maturing of the software-as-a-service platforms offered and partly as a result of increasing competition in the market, prices have come down dramatically and are now within reach of even the smallest communities. This shift is opening up the market to a much large number of clients, many of whom have little experience working with these technologies. What is needed now more than ever are educational sessions demystifying and providing best practices and guidance on online engagement. Groups like IAP2, NCDD, and Planetizen Courses are helping and even more is needed.

3. Technology and Expectations Are Driving Uptake

According to Internet Live Stats, internet connectivity has risen to 88.5 percent in 2016 in the United States and Canada. This rise over the past five years, along with the penetration of smartphones, has been dramatic. While some critical populations are still left out, there is no denying that online engagement is a critical channel to broaden the reach of community engagement. It’s easy to see how much of people’s attention is now directed towards their devices so the importance of this engagement channel is clear. Given the cost effectiveness of many of the online tools, agencies are now able to engage an increasingly broad audience online and save some of the “boots on the ground” effort to target the underrepresented demographic community members.

The Bad News

1. Over Promising and Under Delivering

The nature of start-ups and the pressure of their investors can create some unhealthy tensions. Tech start-ups often germinate with a great deal of passion around a new idea, a hasty business plan showing dramatic growth projections and high hopes of winning the attention of investors. The start-ups that do attract investment are often under a great deal of pressure to rush a solution to market and grow aggressively. This dynamic can introduce a great deal of confusion into the marketplace for clients. Since these technologies are new, it’s not yet clear how they will perform in the real world or what niche they will fill. Vendors, under pressure from investors, can be overzealous and create unrealistic expectations in order to secure early growth. If expectation are not met, agencies, particularly ones that are new to online engagement, can become disenchanted with online engagement in general, painting the entire industry with the same brush. The wisest and most savvy agencies realize that a suite of tools is needed. Despite marketing messages to the contrary, there is no one tool that will meet all of your community engagement needs. Take the time to look past the brochures, probe deeper and speak to other agencies whenever possible. If you are willing to be an early adopter of a new and somewhat untested technology, do so with a spirit of experimentation.

2. Large Projects Getting the Press

Planning conferences are filled with sessions highlighting case studies that have successfully leveraged online engagement. It’s great for people to share success stories and it’s very helpful when they talk about lessons learned and best practices that can be applied elsewhere. The problem lies in the types of projects that win time at the podium. Here’s a recent example: At the APA National Planning Conference in Phoenix, the city of Henderson took home the 2016 National Planning Excellence Award for Public Outreach. They had a great deal of success with online engagement and used a broad mix of other tactics as well. One of the first things you’ll hear in the award video describing the project is “funded by a $3.5 million grant…” I can imagine how disconcerting this must sound for other communities trying to increase the effectiveness of public involvement on meager budgets. If we primarily hear about major projects with big budgets, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that online engagement is reserved for those kinds of efforts. There are plenty of small projects that have had great success using online tools as a cost effective way to broaden the engagement but we seldom see them represented on the podium.

3. Out With the Old, In With the New

Online engagement tools are too often presented as solutions to replace outdated face-to-face engagement strategies. This may be due to overzealous marketing or simply a misinterpretation that happens when vendors try to boil their value proposition down to punchy bullet points. The result can be quite detrimental to the field in general. Firstly, as a practitioner in the field of online engagement, I’ll be the first to admit that no online tool has ever come close to replicating the rich interchange that can happen when community members and project leaders meet face to face. It’s foolish to suggest that one replaces the other. Secondly, many of the best potential advocates of online engagement are public engagement professionals who make some or all of their living planning and facilitating face to face events. To suggest that the value that they add is being replaced by a technology will only serve to alienate them. These savvy folks are keenly aware of the fallacy in this notion yet also aware how beneficial online engagement can be when woven smartly into a multi-pronged engagement strategy.

Still, I’m optimistic. The online engagement field is seeing positive progress on many fronts. The infusion of new creative energy, investment and experiments that are happening all over the continent are great sources of learning. To the many communities who are weighing into this territory with caution, I wish you nothing but success. There’s a great deal of choice available and I know it can be confusing. The best advice I can offer is this: the more clearly you can state your goals and objectives before you go searching, the better prepared you will be to evaluate the capabilities of competing options to meet your needs.

This article was published in Planetizen. 

One of my pet peeves is how we fill conference programs and websites with the most successful case studies and we don’t talk about our most potent learning experiences – when things went wrong. Maybe we just need a safe place to talk about these important learning opportunities. When things go wrong in public engagement, they can go spectacularly wrong. The result isn’t just frustration for project leaders. It can spell costly delays, failed or overturned planning efforts, or the loss of public support for politicians and government agencies. Introducing the Fiasco Files – a lighthearted opportunity to look back on those times when things went sideways. We’ll have some fun with it and also draw out some valuable lessons that will help us all avoid them in the future. Names will be withheld in order to avoid any embarrassment to any people or organizations involved and keep the focus on the lessons learned. These stories could happen to anyone.

Fiasco Files #1: A Vocal Minority Dismantles a Community Meeting

Being vulnerable and talking about personal disasters can be intimidating so I’ll go first. This is the story about one of the last public meetings I ever facilitated. I was on the public engagement team that was charged with conducting a series of community workshops throughout a metropolitan region to discuss a long range regional vision for land use and transportation. The first few workshops were held in urban areas and went smoothly. We weren’t aware what was brewing as we prepared for our 3rd workshop – this one in the suburbs.

We learned later that the evening before the workshop a local group of people strongly opposed to the direction that the planning process seemed to be going met privately. They studied a manual on how to disrupt a public meeting and developed a strategy. With the project team blissfully unaware, this group of 40 or so arrived the next morning and positioned two of their members at each of the 20 tables set up around the room. A mere 30-seconds into my introduction it started.

One by one, members of this group started interjecting, some by raising their hands, others by shouting out. When one would say their piece, a cascade of approval spread around the room as other members of the group chimed in. I still recall the looks on the faces of the non-group members which made up the majority of the audience (though it was hard to tell since they were silent). It was a look of “Gee, I’m the odd duck here.” In speaking with participants afterwards I heard statements like, “I disagreed but everyone seemed so fired up that I kept my head down.” These sentiments spoke to the effectiveness of the intimidation and influence that a vocal minority can wield at a public workshop.

Despite the finger-pointing, personal attacks and criticisms leveled against me as a representative of the agencies involved, I listened to their input and tried in vain to move forward on our agenda. I was under strict direction from the lead agency that participants should be allowed to have their say for as long as they wish. When we were 45-minutes into the session and still barely past the first stage of our workshop plan I took a moment to confer with the team. “Let them talk” was the directive. Needless to say we were unable to follow our workshop plan and we did not collect any structured input that could be compared with input gathered at other workshops. We left feeling frustrated, humiliated and sympathetic for the majority of the participants who were robbed of their opportunity to express their views by the vocal minority.

Anyone who has a few community workshops under their belt has experienced a disruptive vocal minority though they are not always as well-organized as they were in this case. With the benefit of hindsight there are several things that we could have done to help the situation. Here are some steps that helped at subsequent workshops:

1. We got into the habit of making the rules of conduct at the workshop clear and got the audience to agree to them at the beginning of the session.
2. If people disrespected the agreed-upon rules of conduct steps were taken to restore order – gentle at first and if those didn’t work, increasingly direct. On one occasion a little humor alleviated an outburst.
3. On other occasions we used the wireless voting keypads to ask the audience whether they wished to continue entertaining interruptions or move on with the agenda. Because of the anonymity of the handset voting, the vocal minority was outnumbered by a wide margin.
4. In some situations we reduced the opportunities for disruptive plenary outbursts by organizing table discussions.

I’d like to say that these measures fixed everything. They certainly helped a great deal but there still was moments of chaos and disruption at the remaining workshops and I think the agencies involved came away feeling pretty drained and bruised from the face to face process.

In this particular case one of the things that helped was the concurrent option for people to participate online. In fact this experience caused us to double down on online community engagement. The disruptors not only showed up at community workshops, they also tried to stack the deck online. In this case, we were thankful that MetroQuest had fraud detection capabilities allowing the fraudulent entries to be easily identified and removed from the results. That combined with the sheer number of online participants (over 11,000 participants online) meant that the sentiments of the general population carried the day. The absence of an open forum online meant that grandstanding opportunities did not exist. Thankfully the intimidation and alienation that occurred in the workshop was not part of the online experience.

It is important to learn about the views of all stakeholders though there are far more productive ways to gain those insights than a chaotic public meeting. We did learn about the nature of the concerns from our very passionate minority group. That knowledge helped to shape not only the plan but also how those divergent views could be mitigated during the implementation process to avoid a political mess down the road.

We also came away a little wiser about how to structure a public workshop to avoid this kind of disaster and gained a greater appreciation of the relative safety of online engagement. While there are certainly opportunities for chaos online, well-designed software can help to mitigate these potholes to a great extent.

This post was published in Planetizen.