Category: Public Engagement

In recent years we have witnessed the explosive growth of internet users on mobile devices around the world. In 2015, there were more Google searches on mobile than on desktops for the first time. 47% of Facebook’s 1.55 billion users only use it on their phone. Our own results point to this growing trend as well. On an average MetroQuest project, over 33% of participants are using a mobile device.

What’s more, people are routinely using multiple devices. According to Forrester Research, 75% of US adults use 2 or more devices connected to the internet and 67% have switched devices while completing common tasks. In addition, 62% of US online adults expect a mobile-friendly website.

Pew Research found that in 2015, 99% of smartphone owners use their phone at home, 82% use their phones while in transit and 69% use their phone at work each week. As more and more people use their phones and tablets as a part of their everyday life, you need to make sure that you’re not left behind. You need to reach your community where they spend their time – go to them!

So, now that you know how important mobile optimization is – how do you reach your community on their mobile devices?

Make Sure Your Engagement Process is Optimized for Mobile

This is key. Do you use sites that require you to pinch, scroll and zoom around on your phone just to be able to properly read them? The online world is moving away from this, towards a mobile-first environment where everything is optimized for mobile use.

From your project website to your engagement tools and processes, everything that you’re doing online has to be done with mobile in mind.

In order for users to enjoy the best experience (which will lead to better engagement), make sure that your project website and all other online engagement efforts are done using mobile-friendly sites and apps. MetroQuest is optimized for mobile use and offers an easy-to-use and engaging experience. This opens up a whole new avenue for participants to give their input, and also helps to engage harder to reach segments of your community.

Make it Simple

Remove any friction that will make the experience difficult on a mobile device. Keep your text short and relevant. Avoid overly complex graphics. The ultimate goal is to help your community find what they need and do what they want to do more easily.

Be on Social Media

These days, with everyone glued to their phone and their favorite social networks, you need to be where the conversation is. With notifications and easy to use interfaces, social media platforms are a great mobile-centric way to reach your audience.

… And Don’t Forget About Email!

As a rule of thumb, keep in mind that over half of all emails are now opened on mobile. This means that you need to make sure that your emails are optimized for mobile too. Use large, easy to read text and images. Keep the layout simple and use attention-grabbing calls-to-action, both for the subject line and in the email itself.

Keep these principles in mind when planning your next public engagement process. By adapting to these changes in participants’ digital behavior, you’ll ensure that your project has the potential to engage more people than ever before.

In the past few months, the public engagement community has ramped up dialogue about how to measure success. It’s a tricky question since metrics like miles per gallon are hard to find in the “social sciences.” A great place to begin in any such exercise is to clearly define what success means so we decided to do some research.

Once a researcher, always a researcher I suppose. Our software is the result of a university research project, and to this day we still use research to guide us. To address this question we spoke with planners and public involvement personnel at 150 government agencies throughout the US and Canada. Here are the top 4 answers to the question: “What does better public engagement mean to your agency?” Two of the answers related to quantity and two related to the quality of public engagement.

1. Quantity: Engaging more people

A common source of stress for agency staff is getting up in front of council to report on the results of their public outreach process and being asked, “How many people did you hear from?”

For public agencies with political leaders, the total number of citizens engaged is top of mind. Let’s face it – it’s difficult to put much faith in what 50 people said about a city-wide plan. Online community engagement platforms are helping to reach more people than ever before. Using our own projects as examples, the typical project that uses MetroQuest engages several thousand participants – many engage over 10,000.

2. Quantity: Engaging a broader demographic

The desire to engage people of all ages, races, national origins or incomes is a top priority with government agencies. When we look at the narrow demographic of people who frequent public meetings, it’s easy to understand why. There are several powerful strategies to increase the breadth of community engagement. We are currently working on a guidebook on this topic so stay tuned for its release in early 2016.

3. Quality: Collecting informed input

Quantity without quality is meaningless when it comes to public engagement. Planning agencies are dealing with complex topics. Yet, many of the latest public engagement strategies use overly simplistic activities to gather input. Multiple-choice survey questions without the proper context won’t lead to informed input from participants.

The agencies we talked to were looking for new ways to build education into their public engagement activities to ensure that the input being gathered is as informed as possible. At the same time they also wanted it to be fast and fun to avoid scaring people off so it’s challenging.

For example, when polling the public about planning alternatives people should have a variety of ways to evaluate the options. They should be able to see what they look like and how they perform on various metrics before they weigh in with their opinions. Using tools like visual preference surveys and scenario comparisons can be an effective way of educating people on alternatives while keeping the experience fun and easy to follow.

The strength of traditional face to face public meetings is that people are there long enough to learn about the issues in depth. That allows these participants to provide informed input. With more engagement going online, it’s important to include educational aspects into the process. There are a variety of specialized screens in MetroQuest that combine education with engagement as well as other online tools dealing with participatory budgeting that provide good examples.

4. Quality: Collecting actionable input

Agencies are calling for public input that can be more easily used to support decisions. Typically the “product” out of public engagement activities that is used to influence decision making is not raw input. It is more likely the summary graphs and conclusions based on trends and patterns observed based on the analysis of the results. The nature of the end “product” is often not considered as carefully as it should be in the design of public engagement activities.

Public agencies seeking to be viewed as open to new ideas are tempted to ask open-ended questions. The problem is – how do you use hundreds or thousands of open-ended answers? It’s difficult to summarize text input responses in reports and reach strong and defensible conclusions.

For this reason, engagement activities with quantifiable results are favored over open-ended input options. Better methods include asking people to rank or rate options and priorities. Quantitative inputs from exercises like allocating budgets to different categories lead to actionable data. These types of inputs are easier to compare across participants. When combined with demographic information, it’s easy for project staff to report on the trends and opinions of the community.

In a nutshell

We have summarized these four findings into one sentence:

“The best community engagement collects informed and actionable input from a large and diverse group of participants to inform decision making.”

You’ll notice that an additional criteria was added as a result of speaking with experts from the International Association for Public Participation and the National Coalition of Dialogue and Deliberation. It adds that the best public participation has a measurable and demonstrable impact on decision making. Together these criteria provide a framework for defining how to design effective public participation processes. They also form a basis for how to develop metrics to measure success.

What did we miss?

During our research we heard many goals for improving public engagement. While we’ve listed the four most frequently heard goals, we’d love to hear others from you. Have we missed a goal that’s top of mind for you?

When we talked to over 100 agencies about their goals for improving their public engagement activities, increasing participation rates came out #1. That was enough to motivate us to look into motivation. We did some research into the most important motivators for civic engagement and here is what we learned.

1. Fear

It turns out that fear is the most motivating force for civic engagement. Any first-year psychology student will confirm this finding. As Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs teaches us: when something we care about is threatened, we act.

We see evidence of this phenomenon everywhere. Voter turnout spikes when things get ugly. Public meetings get packed when new developments are proposed in people’s backyards. Of course for all these situations there are people who are in favor. They might even make up the majority, but they are seldom heard from because they are not as motivated. Satisfaction, happiness or even moderate concern are lousy motivators.

We will go to great lengths when our safety is threatened. When it comes to community planning, people become fearful when they perceive threats to their lifestyle and financial security. The same is true when the status quo is threatened (fear of the unknown).

Knowing the importance of this motivator is critical to coming up with effective calls to action and advertising for your community engagement activities. Consider what is at stake in the scope of your project and use that information to attract your community to participate. People are more concerned about immediate issues than longer term ones so these should be your focus even if it’s a long range plan on the table.

2. Herd Mentality

Next up on Maslow’s Hierarchy is our strong need for belonging. We found that the second most important motivator for civic engagement is what we refer to as herd mentality or “all the cool kids are doing it.” People engage when people they trust and respect engage.

Let’s face it – people often trust and respect their friends, colleagues and community leaders more than many government agencies. Anything you can do to encourage people to help you spread the word will pay off. On the surface, this seems like simply a strategy to have more people find out about the project. That’s true, but the more important factor is that when someone shares your project with their network, the call to action is now coming from them. This makes a huge difference when it comes to motivating action.

There are a few things you can do to make it easy for people to share. First, make sure that your content connects with strongly held values. People share things that align with their values. Secondly, incorporating social media sharing into your tools and event information so that people can share it with one click is critical. Thirdly, connecting with community leaders and special interest groups and making it easy for them to share your story with their networks is well worth the effort. Some of our clients have had great success using “share kits” which is essentially material that bloggers and community leaders can use to quickly cut and paste to create content for their tweets, newsletters and posts. They are always looking for content and the easier you make it for them to create a story, the better. Read more about promoting public participation here.

3. Sense of Power & Influence

The third most powerful motivator relates to control. If people feel that they will have a tangible influence over the outcome, they will be motivated to participate.

Before you design your engagement process and promotional material it’s important to get clear on what’s at stake in the project and what role community input will play in the outcome. Design your calls to action and promotional material to convey the biggest promise you can to the community about how they can control or shape the outcome.

It doesn’t end when the public engagement is over. A critical step is to circle back with the community after with a clear and powerful statement about how community input shaped the outcome. Some of our best projects have created infographics summarizing what the community’s input and how it influenced the final outcome. By getting this information out there quickly, you will be reinforcing the benefits of participating. These actions reinforce a culture of engagement and transparency that will benefit your agency for years to come.

4. Helping a Cause

Like the Lorax who speaks for the trees, the fourth most powerful motivator we found for civic engagement was altruism or helping a cause. Our values are critical motivators for action. Fundraisers and special interest groups know this well. It’s easy for planning agencies to talk to the community about infrastructure and policies because that’s what they know best. And yes, in most cases, that’s what the projects are about. If we dig a little further we can relate the project to strongly held values that can attract a broader community. Whether it’s protecting the environment or caring for the needs of the disadvantaged, tapping into the empathy, altruism and desire to protect the commons can be a powerful motivator.

Lowering the barriers

When people are motivated they will go to great lengths to participate. So the above motivators will help to dramatically increase participation. It’s also useful to recognize that we can increase participation by lowering the barriers.

When we lower the barriers to participation we are able to attract participants who are only moderately motivated and that’s often a good thing. In engagement activities that have high barriers (e.g. public meetings, online tools that require people to register,…), we tend to attract participants with an ax to grind because as described above, fear is a terrific motivator. These people are often the vocal minority.

If we lower the barriers (e.g. short, fun, easy and convenient activities,…) we open the participation to those who are less motivated. These folks often don’t have their minds already made up and have moderate views and perhaps some constructive input to offer. In most cases, these people are the silent majority. Read more about engaging the moderates in your community here.

In other words, if you feel like everyone is opposed to your project, perhaps your process is filtering out all but the most motivated. You might be surprised what you hear when you try a “low barrier” participation tool.

Now over to you. What did we miss? What have you seen in your work?