What is the highest purpose of community engagement? Why do some planners go all out to hear from the public? This article dives into these questions based on nine interviews conducted at APA 2016.

Community engagement is a required component of planning projects. Some planners take a “check the box” approach and others go out of their way to hear from the public. I was curious what motivates planners to go the extra distance on outreach so I did an informal survey at the American Planning Association National Conference. The most common answer surprised me. They said some version of, “It gave courage to our elected officials.” There’s a great deal of insight packed into this answer.

At the APA 2016, I conducted nine interviews with planners who were being celebrated for excellence in community engagement. I didn’t set out to conduct a scientific survey. I was creating a marketing video of interviews with planners who used our community engagement software. In looking through the program, there were 11 presenters and two award recipients to track down. I caught up with nine of them making for nice, albeit unscientific, set of interviews.

I say unscientific because this was a rather small sample. They all used MetroQuest as a part of their community engagement effort, and they were selected because they happened to be presenting at the APA conference. They did have one thing in common: they clearly felt that community engagement was a high priority. At the end of each interview, after all the project related questions, I threw in a question for my own curiosity. I asked, “Why?”

All of these planners went above and beyond in the area of community engagement for their planning projects. Quite separate from how they did it, I was curious about why. I really wanted to know what difference it made. Why bother?

This question made people pause. After a moment of reflection, the most common answer surprised me. I was expecting people to talk about democracy, transparency, and listening to residents. While these goals were certainly part of it, that’s not what they talked about. These planners felt that the most significant benefit of outstanding community engagement was that it gave courage to their elected officials. I probed to learn more. What they told me was something that I’ve thought about many times since.

The fact that elected official were a critical audience for the results of community engagement makes sense. After all, these are the people making the community-changing decisions that emerge out of planning projects.

The idea of giving elected officials courage was the interesting part to me. There’s so much in that word and when I probed further here is what they said.

A “business as usual” plan doesn’t require nearly as much courage to approve as an ambitious plan calling for dramatic and lasting changes to the community. Deciding to change takes courage. It’s as true for people as it is for communities.

I asked about the ingredients of courage. From a community engagement perspective, what does it take to give decision makers courage? Once again the responses formed a consistent pattern. According to the planners interviewed there were three required elements that community engagement must have to provide courage to decision makers:

1. Critical mass – Elected officials, at least those interested in being re-elected, are swayed by large numbers. While it can be easy to disregard the input of a small group of usual suspects, it’s quite another thing to disregard the input of thousands of engaged citizens especially when they are calling for change. Essentially elected officials are asking, “Will approving this plan make me more or less popular with voters.”
2. Diversity – Large numbers of participants are much more persuasive if you can also demonstrate that the participation was diverse. Diversity includes race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, and so on. Beyond these categories, the business community, special interest groups, community organizations, and faith-based communities all need a voice. These groups have unique needs and perspectives and can also organize powerful opposition. Essentially elected officials are asking, “Will these groups support the plan?” Or perhaps, “Can I defend the plan in front of these groups?”
3. Informed input – I’ve sat in many council meetings where community engagement results were being presented only to see things grind to a halt when someone criticizes the questions people were asked or the way they were asked. Planning choices can be complex and each option comes with benefits and trade-offs. In order to be confident that people really support the changes being called for, it’s critical to be able to make the case that the people who provided input were well aware of both the benefits and costs, especially the costs. It does little to have a “cover your butt” answer. Elected officials don’t think like lawyers when it comes to community engagement. The costs and trade-offs can’t be in the fine print. They have to be unmissable. Then, and only then, will they trust that people are willing to make the trade-offs associated with the changes in order to reap the benefits. It’s always the trade-offs that make the plan vulnerable to criticism and backlash. Essentially elected officials are asking, “Can I trust this community input?”

As I sifted through all the interview footage these three elements came up repeatedly. It was interesting to me that the emphasis was on creating a defensible case for change. It is a perspective on the role of community engagement that is not discussed frequently. It only emerged when I asked, “Why?”

Since the sample size was small and rather self-selected, I’ll end with a question. Does this resonate with you? Is giving courage to elected officials a critical goal of your community engagement. What is your “Why?” Feel free to use the comment section or email, whichever suits you best.

This article was published in Planetizen.

Whether you attended the American Planning Association 2016 National Conference or not, you likely missed some of the great dialogue on community engagement, because the program was packed. As I do every year, I did my best to catch as many highlights, takeaways, and trends as possible. Here are ones that stood out for me from my four days in Phoenix. Please join the discussion in the comments to share your own takeaways.

2016 National Planning Excellence Award for Public Outreach

The big community engagement prize winner this year was Southern Nevada Strong, a HUD funded regional planning effort for Las Vegas and the surrounding region. The project team shown receiving the award above was led by the city of Henderson. This project exemplified best practices in community engagement in numerous ways. Three things struck me about their effort: massive online engagement in English and Spanish, multiple supporting strategies to target typically underrepresented groups, and unique urban ethnographic research partnership with the University of Nevada. The APA describes how their efforts paid off, “SNS received unprecedented community engagement and collaboration among local municipalities. The engagement efforts set a new standard among Sustainable Communities grant recipients. An estimated 6,000 community members participated in the process and nearly 70,000 inputs were received…” Congratulations to the SNS team and all of this year’s Public Outreach award applicants.

The need to better define social equity

One workshop on social equity sparked some valuable ideas. Cali Kay Williams from New York City Economic Development Corporation suggested that a more consistent definition of social equity is needed. She felt that given the looseness of the term, groups can cherry pick the elements that are most convenient to them and claim that their process meets the criteria. The dialogue then went further, suggesting that we need to better define metrics for community engagement, especially as they relate to social equity. So often we hear about how many people were engaged and not about the diversity of the participants.

The importance of educating the community during the engagement process

Jamie Greene from planning NEXT spoke about the challenge that many community members do not have the information they need to make choices that we are giving them. As an example he suggested, “We need to help people understand the financial implications of the choices during the community engagement on your comprehensive plan.”

Other sessions built on this idea highlighting techniques like participatory budgeting and scenario planning that use interactive educational tools to highlight benefits, tradeoffs and real world constraints into the community engagement process. Victor Dover spoke about the Seven50 project in Southern Florida that presented scenarios online for the community input using MetroQuest. The scenarios illustrated the costs and benefits of alternatives and after over 2,700 participants had their say, to their surprise they found that over 73 percent of people preferred the scenario that focused on smart growth principles. He credited the educational components of the process with that outcome.

The rise of targeted community engagement

The award-winning Southern Nevada Strong team and many panelists this year were talking about the success they had dovetailing traditional and online engagement with targeted engagement to ensure broad representation. To be fair, targeted engagement is not new, but there is a dialogue emerging about the benefits and strategies for evaluating the gaps using a demographic analysis and then using specific strategies to target the missing voices.

Darlene Walser of Hennepin County in a panel session entitled “Community Engagement in TOD Station Planning” talked about a three-level community engagement strategy. She recommended beginning with a baseline communications strategy followed by a formal public participation process and finally targeted engagement. It was this last phase where they had success leveraging partnerships with community groups to target difficult to reach audiences.

Multigenerational engagement strategies from Baby Boomers to Gen Z

One of the most interesting sessions for me was the panel on “Picking the Right Tool: Multigenerational Engagement.” Each of the panelists covered one generation and talked about their characteristics and strategies to engage them. There were many takeaways. The ones that stuck out for me were the lessons about Gen X and younger cohorts that they described as underrepresented in face to face community engagement.

Linda Vela of the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization talked about Gen X born between the early 1960s and early 1980s. She described this cohort as fiercely independent, informal by nature, outcomes-focused and many caring for kids at home. Gen X are generally poorly represented in face to face community meetings so online and other alternative engagement strategies are suggested. Online, facebook is their preferred social platform and most will use laptop or desktop computers to surf the net over mobile.

Tina Geiselbrecht of Texas A&M Transportation Institute talked about millennials or Gen Y born between the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Like Gen X, millennials are interested in engaging online though most access the internet on mobile devices and choose Instagram and Snapchat more than facebook so campaigns to leverage those networks can be effective.

Trish Wallace of the city of San Antonio talked about Gen Z or boomlets born between the early 2000s and early 2010s. She talked about the benefits of using games and craft activities at community events to engage even the youngest residents. The results were compelling and these activities also gave planners an informal opportunity to talk to parents while the little ones were busy. Many of the tweens in this cohort are glued to their devices and love taking selfies. Trish talked about engagement strategies that invited people to take selfies in places related to the project as a way to engage youth in the dialog about community planning.

I tip my hat to these planners who took every opportunity to broaden the community engagement to include each cohort.

Creative ways to combine face to face and online engagement

In years past online engagement has been presented like a silver bullet touted to solve all of community engagement’s challenges. This naïve notion seems to have dissipated and the dialogue now has turned to a toolkit approach to leverage the strengths of a variety of engagement tactics. Michelle Nance of the Centralina Council of Governments demonstrated this well as she presented their project called Connect Our Future, a regional growth plan for greater Charlotte, NC. Early in the process they engaged over 400 participants in one of the largest Reality Check events ever held. These hands-on workshops allow participants to allocate expected growth using chips or legos on large-scale regional maps. The four scenarios that emerged from this process were then loaded into the MetroQuest online engagement tool to allow the broader community to assess and provide input on the scenario options. Nance reported that over 8,400 people were engaged and closed by saying with satisfaction that, “Everyone said it would be impossible to reach consensus but we beat the odds.” What struck me the most is the value of the co-creative process of coming up with the scenario alternatives with hands on input from residents early in the process before going out to the broader community online.

Techniques for dealing with contentious groups and individuals

The heat must be on because several sessions highlighted tools and techniques for dealing with contentious participants at community meetings. Della Rucker of the Wise Economy Workshop ran a session called “Manage the Ax-Grinders: Do Better Public Participation” and led participants through role play exercises and provided tips on dealing with disruptions. In particular she highlighted the value of breaking into smaller group discussion to encourage people to work together constructively while also giving more time for each participant to speak.

Roberta Rewers of the APA led a session on “Working with Contentious Groups” and provided helpful tips to prepare planners for community meetings. She highlighted the need to establish and reinforce rules of civil discourse and define the purpose and agenda of the meeting early on. When disruptions happen she recommended that leaders do not debate, mind their manners, thank individuals for the comment and do what they can to stay on track and stick to their key messages.

Participants chimed in with additional suggestions including sitting down and talking with a vocal community member in advance of the project moving forward to allow them to be heard while avoiding public disruptions.

One participant said that when seeking community input, tables in the round didn’t work in his community as like-minded people would band together and make people with a different opinion feel like outsiders. This may be another reason to heed Della’s advice and break participants up into table discussions.

The spirit of these discussions was about giving people equal opportunities to be heard and avoiding disruptions that might compromise the right of other participants to have their say by either dominating the dialogue, hijacking the agenda or intimidating others so they are afraid to speak up.

Building trust and creating an engaged community

Several panelists highlighted the frustration that many community members feel about not feeling like they have been heard. Begin transparently about what’s on the table and how the community input will be used was a common theme. This year more than ever, panelists were talking about the value of communicating with the community following the engagement to reinforce the value of participation. Darlene Walser of Hennepin County commented that, “When people start seeing what they say reflected in the plans they remain engaged and engage again next time.”

Overall, APA 2016 did not disappoint. It had community engagement enthusiasts looking for a cloning machine. I look forward to hearing other insights that people took away from their time in Phoenix.

This article was published in Planetizen

Presentation at 2016 Sustainable Communities Conference (Westin Ottawa)

In February 2016, over 400 municipal leaders and sustainability professionals gathered at the Westin in Ottawa, ON for the annual 2016 Sustainable Communities Conference. MetroQuest Chief Engagement Officer, Dave Biggs was honored to share the stage with Andrea Reimer (Councillor, City of Vancouver), Patrick Moody-Grigsby (Creative Director, Ayogo) and Katie Harper (Director, Project Neutral) in a session on leading edge civic tech for community sustainability moderated by Yellowknife Mayor, Mark Heyck. The session was recorded and we are pleased to share it below. You’ll find videos of each of the four presentations separately followed by the full session. Enjoy!

Session Description

Should municipalities promote energy and water conservation through app development? How can you crowdsource local knowledge and prioritize solutions with interactive maps, forums, and discussion boards? Who is best positioned to leverage these tools, and can they replace more traditional public consultation? This panel discussion profiles municipalities and web developers to examine how – and if – open data and social media can achieve concrete environmental results in a community context.

Presentation Videos

Unlocking Hidden Support for Sustainability (13 minutes)

Dave Biggs, Chief Engagement Officer, MetroQuest

A Politician’s Guide to Gamifying Policy Change (13 minutes)

Andrea Reimer, Councillor, City of Vancouver

Civic Tech – Enabling Community Engagement (14 minutes)

Katie Harper, Director, Project Neutral

The Quantified Sustainable Self (15 minutes)

Patrick Moody-Grigsby, Creative Director, Ayogo

Full Session: Gamifying Behavior Change — How to Engage Citizens Through Technology (56 minutes)

I recently gave a presentation “Go Viral – Best Practices for Online Public Engagement for MPO’s” at AMPO 2015, the annual conference for the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations. We had a great time in Las Vegas speaking with MPO staff and public communications experts.

Above you’ll find a recording of my presentation, and you may also view a copy of the slides here.

Below you’ll find the full panel presentation in its entirety. This was a session called “Public Involvement – Part 1” and featured myself, Lorna Parkins from Michael Baker International, James Rojas from Place It and Shelley Whitworth from H-GAC.