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Let’s take a look at what’s working best in online community engagement In the early days of online community engagement tools there were plenty of experiments happening and not enough information to allow any meaningful pattern analysis. With those early days behind us, it’s finally possible to tease out best practices and evaluate critical success factors. After looking across hundreds of outreach project that used online...

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...

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...

In order to compete with the clutter of information that bombards people every day there are many strategies to keep in mind to kick start your participation and keep the momentum going throughout the engagement period. One of the most important aspects of driving participants to take action is crafting powerful calls-to-action. Strong messages are those that are concise and connect with people on a deep...

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...