Category: [TIPS]

Image from book launch event courtesy Hoggan & Associates

My interview with Author James Hoggan: ‘I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up’
Published by New Society, May 2016

James Hoggan has influenced my work for two decades. I find myself quoting his work in many of my public speaking engagements and the lessons he has articulated have shaped MetroQuest and the best practices listed in our guidebook in numerous ways. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to sit down with Hoggan to discuss his new book, “I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up.” After years of research that included interviewing some of the world’s most profound thinkers on democracy, conflict and consensus-building, Hoggan has cleverly articulated not only what’s wrong with public discourse but also what must be done to fix it. Here’s our conversation.

Dave Biggs: You named your book ‘I’m Right and You’re an Idiot.’ What does that title mean to you?

James Hoggan: The title I’m Right and You’re an Idiot describes today’s warlike approach to public debate. It’s a style of communication that polarizes public conversations and prevents us from dealing with the serious problems stalking everyone on earth.

It is an ironic title, chosen because it epitomizes the kind of attack rhetoric we hear so often today. It reflects the opposite of the real message of the book, which was best said by peace activist and Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh who told me to: “Speak the truth not to punish.”

Dave Biggs: It’s clear that you covered a great deal of ground in researching this book. Tell me about that journey? What motivated you to go to such lengths?

James Hoggan: I was driven by curiosity about how we might create the space for higher-quality public conversations. What passes for public discourse these days is little more than antagonistic name-calling, where each side accuses the other of bad faith.

This bitter combativeness has replaced healthy debate, during which passionate opposition and science can shape constructive mind-changing conversations without creating polarized gridlock or deep animosity.

I am interested in why are we listening to each other shout rather than hearing what the evidence is trying to tell us about problems such as climate change.

How have we come to a time when facts don’t matter and how can we begin the journey back to where they do?

No single person has the answers to these complex questions but collectively the experts I interviewed offer incredible wisdom. Many of the thought leaders I spoke to have spent their entire professional lives working to find answers to these tough change resistance questions.

Dave Biggs: Many of our readers are involved in community engagement for planning projects and, as they can attest, it can get quite heated. You describe public discourse as increasingly “toxic” and “polarized.” What do those terms mean to you? Is the situation getting worse? What’s driving it?

James Hoggan: Today’s public square is a toxic mix of ad hominem attacks, tribalism and unyielding advocacy. It’s a kind of pollution that sabotages public discourse and discredits the passion and outrage at the heart of healthy public debate, because it polarizes people and stops them thinking clearly.

Fear is what propels toxic discourse and it is happening on both sides of the Atlantic, in North America and Europe. Sadly, facts do not compete well when leaders whip up primal feelings around fear, whether it’s about immigration, jobs or economic woes.

Rather than confronting the substance of an argument itself, people tend to attack the motives of opponents and stir up hostility towards groups that hold differing opinions.

This dangerous habit of attacking the character of those who disagree with us, rather than focusing on specific issues, distracts the public from what’s really going on.

Accusing opponents of corrupt motives is a highly confrontational technique that deflects attention and makes it easy to dismiss well-founded criticism. This aggressive approach to public debate leaves little room for the middle ground and as Debra Tannen wrote, “When extremes define the issues, problems seem insoluble and citizens become alienated from the political process.”

Dave Biggs: I’ve started a series called “Fiasco Files” to see what can be learned from the wreckage of public engagement disasters. Have you looked at specific case studies where things went off the rails? Does your book point to common mistakes and how to avoid them?

James Hoggan: One of the best example of a fiasco in Canada was in 2012 when the oil & gas industry and Conservative government campaigned to convince Canadians that British Columbians who opposed pipelines and tankers on the west coast were extremists working for American business interests.

A tremendous amount of information was provided, by both government and industry, regarding Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline project and TransCanada’s Keystone XL and Energy East.

Despite armies of PR people and volumes of communication materials, the mismanagement of communication around these proposed oil sands developments became textbook examples of how not to achieve social license.

When it comes to public opinion, there’s a common belief among proponents that providing facts is the best way to sell a story. But in the oil sands case, when the companies and government failed to achieve their goals, they resorted to a combative, underhanded style of advocacy.

The Prime Minister’s Office called opponents “foreign funded radicals.” The Minister of the Environment and the Minister of Natural Resources accused environmental charities of criminal activity.

Senator Don Platt said ‘where would …environmentalists draw the line on who they receive money from. Would they take money from the Al-Qaeda, the Hamas or the Taliban…’

This highly polarizing strategy backfired badly as opposition to pipelines grew and community groups and First Nations became better organized. It failed because the government and industry started with a mistaken assumption that anyone who disagreed with them was either misinformed, unreasonable or even a wrongdoer.

Despite assurances from oil and pipeline companies that these projects will create jobs, are safe and will respect the environment, the public continues to see the benefits as small and the risks as unacceptably high.

It’s not that information doesn’t matter, but a growing body of research on how people develop perceptions of risk shows that facts and statistics alone do not change people’s concerns about what is risky. Emotions play a huge part.

University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic has studied the various social and cultural factors that lead to disputes and disagreements about risk, and says the problem lies in the diverse ways in which “experts” and the public view risk.

Experts look at risk as a calculation of probability and consequence. The public takes a more personal approach; their perceptions are around personal control, voluntariness, children and future generations, trust, equity, benefits and consequences.

Slovic says the mistake experts (and the companies and governments they represent) make is viewing themselves as objective and the public as subjective.

They perceive the public as being too emotional and having irrational fear. The public’s attitude is then dismissed as laypeople getting the facts wrong and not understanding the evidence.

“Laypeople sometimes lack certain information about hazards,” Slovic says. “However their basic conceptualization of risk is much richer than that of experts and reflects legitimate concerns that are typically omitted from expert risk assessments.”

This is where a company’s decision to “educate” the public to adopt its point of view can really backfire. People aren’t sitting around waiting to be told what to think. In fact, few of us like being told what to think.

Communicators need to be sensitive to this broader concept of risk. Facts aren’t just facts. They aren’t as objective as we assume they are. Facts and risk are subjective for both experts and the public. They are a blend of values, biases and ideology.

The hypodermic needle theory of communication, where we believe we can simply inject information to cure people of their misunderstandings, doesn’t work. Neither does demonizing opponents or polarizing people.

Dave Biggs: I’m always on the lookout for emerging best practices in community engagement. Government agencies are hungry for strategies to improve the dialogue in face to face events as well as online. What lessons can you share to help them broaden the dialogue to a wider demographic and collect meaningful and constructive public input to inform their decision making?

James Hoggan: We often don’t even get the basics right. Learning to engage in emotional dialogue is a good place to start.

Curtailing the growth of unyielding one-sidedness begins with the assumption that people who disagree with us have good intentions. They aren’t idiots or evil.

It is important to recognize that in a time when mistrust and polarization have soared to all-time highs, conversations aimed at injecting information into people in order to cure them of their misunderstanding will fail.

The power of emotion is a critical consideration. No matter how good you think your argument is, regardless of how provable your facts, if the public feels its liberty, right to fair treatment or livelihood is threatened, you’re losing the battle to dread.

Opposition is often based on feelings of dread that citizens have about the impact a project could have on their way of life, a mistrust of the companies behind it and skepticism around government regulators charged with oversight.

Fear can grow despite a steady stream of facts and expensive PR campaigns from proponents claiming their projects are built to minimize risk.

Opponents often don’t accept the proponents’ facts, but are instead driven by what Paul Slovic calls the “dread factor” — the prime predictor of a strong reaction to risk.

According to Slovic, risk resides in us mostly as a “gut feeling” rather than the outcome of analytical calculations. The most powerful of these feelings is dread and it is linked with a sense of having no control in a situation, inequality (where others get the benefit, while they get saddled with the risk) and how catastrophic a risk is seen to be.

His research shows that reliance on feelings as our guide to risk causes us, when we see risk as high, to also believe the benefit is low. The opposite is true if we come to believe the benefit is high, we tend to see risk as low.

Misunderstanding the “dread factor” and the possibly legitimate concerns that fuel it, intensifies the problem of unyielding one-sidedness that we see in so many public disputes.

It is also difficult to be seen as authentic in an argument if you don’t understand what Slovic calls the “whisper of emotion.” This is the emotional meaning; the good or bad feelings and gut instinct that can help people make decisions. Sometimes these feelings are misguided, but they are usually a sophisticated compass that directs us through life efficiently and accurately.

We need to be more conscious of emotional dialogue because this is where most risk communication fails. And we need to recognize it needs to be a two-way process where both sides have something worthwhile to contribute.

If you hold your views lightly and remember you could be wrong, people are more likely to trust you and be more receptive. It’s about communicating trust, by having an open mind, open heart and an open will.

This post was published in Planetizen here.

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.

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?