Category: Urban Planning

[SURVEY OF THE MONTH] A MetroQuest Survey Identifies Community Priorities for WalkEC, a Comprehensive Pedestrian Plan
We’re excited to introduce the Survey of the Month: an exceptionally well-done example of a MetroQuest survey created by one of our users. We’re consistently impressed with the amazing public engagement surveys that MetroQuest subscribers launch to gain valuable public input for their plans. We want to share their inspiring work!

Going forward, every month we’ll show you how one agency or firm put together an outstanding survey and highlight a few takeaways to inspire YOU to create equally engaging surveys!

This month, we’re thrilled to introduce a Comprehensive Pedestrian Plan for Elizabeth City, in collaboration with MetroQuest subscriber Kimley-Horn and Associates and the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT). Jonathan Whitehurst and his team at Kimley-Horn created an amazing MetroQuest survey to identify obstacles and solutions to building a more walkable city as part of a strategic plan to stimulate community growth.

What’s the story behind WalkEC? It’s Elizabeth City’s First Comprehensive Pedestrian Plan

Elizabeth City’s “Vision 2020” was a community planning initiative that aimed to create economic and community development. Initially, a dedicated committee worked together to create a strategic plan that could guide Elizabeth City’s upcoming developments using data from research and focus groups, reaching all segments of the community. With these, the committee previously recommended that increased sidewalk connections would provide better access to health and social services, trails in nature, parks, and other destinations, elevating Elizabeth City’s ability to serve and support the community.

As a continuation of this larger community strategy, “WalkEC” is a Comprehensive Pedestrian Plan that will set priorities for new sidewalks, multi-use paths, and street crossings. It will also review policies and programs to ensure that the community can make the best use out of the new infrastructure. Jonathan Whitehurt worked together with Elizabeth City and NCDOT to create the WalkEC MetroQuest survey for this plan, looking for actionable community input that would allow them to identify obstacles and create community-backed solutions!

Anatomy of a Survey: How WalkEC’s MetroQuest Survey Gathers Actionable Public Input

WalkEC’s survey has great flow from screen to screen, first identifying how the community prioritizes five themes, then identifying potential obstacles to achieving those goals, and finally creating a space for citizens to safely suggest solutions.

TRY DEMO

In more detail, the survey starts by presenting some background information to help provide context and let citizens know how their input will be used: namely, to help ensure that the community will be able to make “the best use of these new investments.” It then dives into the first interactive data collection activity, presenting five themes from the statewide North Carolina bicycle and pedestrian plan, called WalkBikeNC.

Participants are asked to rate each theme on a 5-point scale and can submit optional comments on each. The five themes are: Safety, Health, Economy, Mobility, and Environment. Understanding how important each of these state-identified themes are to Elizabeth City residents will help shape the pedestrian plan around the topics that are most valuable to them.

In the second activity, participants are asked to rank the 5 biggest obstacles that prevent them from walking or from walking more frequently. Because one goal of the comprehensive plan is to help the community utilize pedestrian infrastructure, it is important to the Elizabeth City team to make sure that they identify concerns and attempt to solve them where possible.

The list of obstacles includes: Personal Safety, Poor Sidewalk Conditions, Lack of Sidewalks/Paths, Physical Health, Unsafe Crossings, Weather, Distance to Destinations, and Unsafe Vehicles Nearby. Understanding obstacles to walking will help Elizabeth City to become safer, more enjoyable, and more accessible.

Finally, before asking a few demographic questions, participants are asked to map their thoughts and show issues and ideas spatially by dropping markers onto a virtual map. Jonathan and his team configured markers that people can use to show the location of their Safety Concerns, Project Ideas, and Destinations, as well as showing where they live (My Home) and providing additional ideas (Anything Else). This survey screen gives participants the option to show exactly where they want more pedestrian infrastructure, where they feel unsafe, and where sidewalks, trails, or crosswalks are needed. By giving participants the option to share these in a clean map (without existing markers that cause bias), Elizabeth City is giving each citizen an equal opportunity to have their voice be heard.

If you’d like to try a demo of the survey, click the button below. This will not affect Elizabeth City’s survey results, so feel free to click around.

TRY DEMO

The accompanying project website can be found here. This survey is currently live, and we are looking forward to seeing great public engagement results!

5 Tips from Elizabeth City: How to Make an Effective Online Survey for Public Involvement with MetroQuest

The survey the team created is fantastic in many ways. They made the most out of MetroQuest by translating the goals of their comprehensive plan into an accessible survey that could collect actionable information from the broader community.

How did they make their survey so engaging? Below are 5 aspects to keep in mind as you build your next MetroQuest survey to ensure that yours is just as successful.
1. In a brief introduction, convey the goals of your plan and show participants how their input will have impact. There’s no need to go into great detail—that’s what the project website is for—but knowing that their input is valued and will be acted upon will motivate participants.
2. Use a simple call-to-action so that participants have an immediate and obvious next step. The example WalkEC uses in the introduction screen is simple yet effective: “We want to hear from you!”
3. Enhance your text with icons and relevant images – it draws the participant in, makes the survey more fun and visual, and encourages the participant to connect to the questions and identify their priorities. For example, the second screen of the survey uses a picture of two children at a crosswalk to illustrate the theme of Safety. Help participants link the concepts in the survey to their everyday lives!
4. Keep all text short and precise and use simple language instead of jargon. WalkEC is a Comprehensive Pedestrian Plan. While citizens might not know what that type of plan is, they’ll certainly understand that the city is looking to “help ensure our community makes the best use of these new investments.” Follow this rule of thumb in the survey itself, too. For example, when discussing barriers to walking, this survey explains “distance to destination” plainly as “it would take too long to walk from point A to point B.” Simple, everyday language like this helps participants think about their everyday concerns more easily, all the while subtly educating the public and helping you to collect informed input!
5. Allow for specific and quick answers. Notice that the questions in WalkEC are drag-and-drop or can otherwise be answered in one click! For example, the map uses icons that can be dropped onto different areas, with drop downs that pop up to capture additional information. This makes answering the survey fast and easy, instead of forcing participants to verbalize and type out all their answers. This also makes it easier to aggregate the data afterwards. Win-win!
Congrats to Jonathan and the entire team at Kimley-Horn & Associates, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, and Elizabeth City for creating a fun interactive experience for WalkEC!

For more great tips on how to make the most out of MetroQuest, contact your Customer Experience manager or reach out for more information!

Want to learn more about MetroQuest? Check out our recent webinar:

Optimizing Online Engagement for Planning with MetroQuest

Online tools are a critical part of the planner’s public engagement toolbox, especially as we look for safe, effective methods to engage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Find out which options result in positive, actionable community input for your urban and transportation plans.

WATCH WEBINAR
May 29, 2020
Austin Engaged 5,100 People Using Nextdoor to Promote its MetroQuest Survey
In my last post, I shared six tips for using Nextdoor to promote your agency’s survey to effectively engage thousands online. Let’s now turn our attention to the City of Austin’s success story, and how they turned their Nextdoor residents into survey respondents with a well-designed MetroQuest survey.

Facing rapid population growth, America’s number one boom town needed to plan for the city’s transportation future and started the process by engaging the public. In partnership with national firm, Kimley-Horn & Associates, Austin had spectacular success with its MetroQuest survey for the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan (ASMP). In all, the team engaged over 5,100 survey respondents, and using Nextdoor was clearly a great strategy for them.

Liane Miller, Senior Business Process Consultant at the City of Austin recently guest starred in a MetroQuest webinar, where she explained how Nextdoor helped her team expand their reach not only to Nextdoor members but also beyond as members took the information off the platform into their own messages and newsletters, spreading it to their networks.

Nextdoor helped Austin get thousands of visitors to its MetroQuest survey for FREE!

Posting a message to all subscribers of the City of Austin, Liane’s initial post used clear and unambiguous language without jargon or acronyms. It was short, to the point, and included a clear call to action front and center. “Public Feedback Needed!” was stated in the subject line. This post made it easy for people to find the link to the survey as well as the link to the city web page featuring project information. Check out an image of Liane’s first multi-lingual post below.

The follow up post, only a few weeks later, highlighted that thousands of other residents had already weighed in. It asked those who had participated to spread the word, and it invited those who hadn’t provided feedback yet to do so now. Given that only a few days were left, a sense of urgency was created by calling attention to the upcoming closing date right in the subject line: “two more days to share your voice!”

The FREE posts had their desired effect! Two of the three massive jumps in participation numbers correlated to these two posts on Nextdoor. In Liane’s own words, Nextdoor was “really helpful in expanding our reach!” The slide from Liane’s webinar presentation (shown below) highlights MetroQuest participants over time. A third jump, in the middle, is attributed to an employer-based engagement strategy, which Liane discussed in the webinar.

A well-designed survey helped drive high public participation!

Let’s dig a little deeper into the MetroQuest survey itself, and why great design is so important to public participation. To satisfy your curiosity, you can try a demo version of the survey here:

For a bit of background, Austin’s population is expected to double in the coming 30 years. At the time of the survey, the City was in the second phase in the process of developing a transportation plan, called the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan (ASMP), which included mobility-related goals to plan for Austin’s near- and long-term transportation investments. Policies, programs, and projects related to all modes of transportation were included, such as driving, transit, active transportation, and carpooling.

As a first interactive exercise, the survey asked participants to rank their top five out of eight goals: namely, Innovation, Sustainability, Travel Choice, Commuter Delay, Placemaking, Affordability, Economic Prosperity, Health and Safety. These goals had been identified in the first phase of their plan development and engagement. Starting with prioritizing goals that matter to residents was a terrific way to get participants engaged in the survey.

Then, the survey presented three scenarios that differed in their levels of investment in various transportation types. Survey respondents were asked to rate each of the scenarios on a scale from one to five stars.
- Scenario A emphasized roadway projects and continued the trend of investment in public transit, bicycle, and pedestrian projects across the city.
- Scenario B emphasized a more balanced investment in roadway, public transit, bicycle, and pedestrian projects along corridors and within activity centers.
- Scenario C emphasized investing in public transit, bicycle, and pedestrian projects along corridors and within activity centers and fewer roadway projects.
To create a more personalized and educational experience, the goals previously prioritized by the survey respondents were listed on the right-hand side, with a visual indication of how each scenario performed against selected goals. This made it easy for participants to easily see which of the scenarios best aligned with their prioritized goals.

Finally, before wrapping up with links and a few demographic questions, additional questions were asked on the items the participant had identified as important. For each priority, a number of potential strategies were presented, and participants were asked to identify the ones that promoted the priority best. The survey stated, “One transportation scenario will become the starting point to tailor a strategy for Austin. Your answers to the survey questions on this screen will help create our preferred strategy.” It asked which of the scenarios should be used as a starting point.

Austin’s survey was so well designed and engaging that it received a completion rate of over 62%. This is especially impressive when compared to the standard public completion rate of 10 to 15% for online multiple-choice surveys.

Austin collected 101,979 valuable data points of informed public input!

The City of Austin’s ASMP results are impressive in many ways. A few interesting statistics, straight from their report, are shared below.
- A total of 5,774 participants provided their feedback online.
- Commuter Delay is clearly the number one priority, with Affordability as a close second. Health and Safety, Travel Choice, and Sustainability are tightly grouped as the third through fifth most important priorities.
- For People with Mobility Impairments, Travel Choice is the second highest priority in terms of times ranked.
- For Seniors, Health and Safety is the second highest priority in terms of times ranked.
- For both Youth and People of Color, Affordability is the number one priority in terms of times ranked; however, Commuter Delay also ranked highly.
- Scenario C was the highest rated option; it received almost double the amount of 5‐star votes over A or B. In fact, 42% of the overall population chose Scenario C as the starting point, with Scenario B as the second most popular choice. That meant Scenario A, with a focus on roadway over transit, was least popular.
- The top strategy chosen to address transportation issues is to “provide more public transit service and enhance connections to/from public transit.”
- More than one-third of all comments discuss the need or desire for more transit in the city.
- There was a focus on four traditionally underrepresented groups, namely Youth (Age 15-24), Seniors (Age 65 and older), People with Mobility Impairments, and People of Colour. A total of 1,844 survey respondents fell into at least one of these four groups.
Source: Phase 2 Engagement Report

The full results can be found in the report here. These results informed the third and final phase of the plan development and engagement, which concluded the ASMP. The results from the third phase can be found here.

Congratulations to our friends at Kimley-Horn and the City of Austin for a fun and informative MetroQuest survey and very impressive results!

For an in-depth look at the City of Austin’s successful engagement strategy watch Liane’s full webinar here.
March 10, 2020
5 Reasons Planners Need a Unique Online Public Engagement Toolbox

For government agencies, “online public engagement” encompasses a particularly wide array of tools and services – from chat bots on websites to digital town halls.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, for instance, tell us in a recent report that “the practice of using social media is not only routine, it is considered in many ways a key factor in public engagement.”

Indeed, state and local governments use social media to alert the public of major events, like transportation disruptions. It’s also used for casual storytelling with photos and videos. The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), for example, uses Facebook to bring the public “Behind the Scenes,” featuring employees engaged in interesting activities like treating roads with brine to keep motorists safe.

With so many online tools and options for public engagement – from social media to community forums, each used by various departments of government – it can become challenging for our friends in the planning department to get access to the right solution. Why? They have unique requirements not always well understood by decision makers and influencers in other departments. Let’s help provide clarification.

Planners have unique public engagement objectives. They need to collect informed community input on complex topics to support their urban and transportation plans.

Urban and transportation planning projects tend to be critical make-or-break points in an agency’s relationship with the public. These projects directly affect quality of life and represent major public investments. Ineffective public engagement can have grave implications – scrutiny from decision makers, important plans not getting approved, public backlash, bad press, ousting of elected officials, and delays in critical infrastructure – all detrimental to the wellbeing of our communities. The importance of public engagement for planning is clear.

So, what makes for effective public engagement? Since 1997, we at MetroQuest have dedicated our life’s work to answering this question. Collaborating with all the industry associations and thousands of AICP certified professionals, we’ve learned that planners need public engagement to deliver unique outcomes so they can stand confidently before councils and demonstrate support for plans, backed by credible data that proves that their plan represents true public priorities and preferences.

1. Planners need high levels of public participation.

Our planning friends require very high levels of public participation across a broad demographic, not just from the same small group of beneficiaries or naysayers. Ideally, thousands of people across a broad demographic provide input. To move forward with oftentimes bold recommendations, planners need to make the case to decision makers that the broader public is behind their plan.

2. Public input must be informed by weaving in education.

Planners need to educate the public about complex issues before providing input – yet residents won’t read long PDF project documents full of planning jargon. Education must be woven into the online engagement experience as microlearning, ideally with visualizations and interactivity, so the public can quickly learn about project nuances and tradeoffs, improving the quality of their input.

3. The experience must be private for input that’s free of bias.

To uncover true public priorities, planners require input from residents that is not influenced by the stronger, louder voices in the community. This means that the online engagement experience needs to offer privacy to support input that is free from bias, bullying, and intimidation. This is particularly critical to broaden the reach to traditionally underrepresented groups.

4. A wealth of quantifiable input is needed for data-driven planning.

To be actionable, public input must be specific and primarily quantitative. Obtaining a wealth of largely quantifiable data points (50,000+) drives better decisions in planning, more so than qualitative input (via comments). Planners make risky and expensive planning decisions with long term impact. Clear, quantifiable input gives them confidence to build bold plans.

5. Input from the public must be defensible to get plans approved.

Collecting bias-free informed input from thousands of participants in the form of quantifiable data is what planners require to defend their plans. Indeed, getting multi-million-dollar plans approved by committees and elected officials takes data-driving planning backed by broad community support.

With declining participation at public meetings, planners have turned to online engagement to meet these unique objectives. Online tools offer the most cost-effective and resource-efficient way to broaden public participation. But, with so many digital options already available within their agency, do our friends really need another tool?

Can’t an online forum do the trick? How about a SurveyMonkey?

For answers to these questions, let’s explore how various online tools stack up against the unique requirements of our friends in the planning department.

Social media is a terrific communication tool, but it was never designed for public input in planning.

Social media is used by just about every government agency as an effective communication tool for announcements, soundbites, and casual storytelling, as we saw with GDOT. Social media – from free to boosted posts, from Facebook to Twitter – also offers one of the most cost-effective ways to broaden reach to promote other public input options like public meetings and online surveys. For example, South Carolina DOT recently used Facebook boosted posts to get over 13,000 residents to take their MetroQuest survey … for less than the cost of a single public meeting!

That said, social media alone is ineffective at collecting quantifiable public input to inform plans. Likes and retweets cannot support complex planning decisions. Social media posts by residents are difficult to analyze and can steer towards contentious topics outside the scope of planning projects. And let’s not forget that posts and comments are public, permanent, and polarizing. While definitely part of the planner’s toolbox for promoting public engagement opportunities, social media in and of itself is not used for quantifiable public input by planners.

Forums require registration, while comments are public, subject to bias and intimidation, and difficult to quantify.

Online forums (and other ideation tools) can be useful early on in a planning project to identify public priorities from vocal members of the community. They can uncover concerns and ideas not previously considered. While indeed a useful tool in the planner’s toolbox, online forums miss the mark in many ways.

Requiring the public to “register to join” has proven to reduce participation by up to 95%! And not unlike public meetings and social media, the open nature of comments can bias public input and tend to polarize views. Participation is particularly intimidating for residents who are learning English as a second language. And with reams of qualitative comments, including banter and tribal arguments, it’s difficult for planners to summarize the results for decision making.

While open-ended comments can be helpful in characterizing public sentiments, planners need structured data, summarized visually, that can be digested in minutes by busy decision makers.

Text-based surveys are boring, yield low participation, and are hardly educational.

Online surveys can be a great way to defeat the shortcomings of online forums. After all, each survey respondent gets the same private online experience, free of bias and intimidation. The data collected using multiple-choice questions is quantitative and easy to graph. Indeed, SurveyMonkey can be a great tool to quickly collect public input!

That is, until you need to engage the public on a complex planning project. When it comes to multifaceted initiatives – like comprehensive plans or transportation projects – simple survey data can fail when scrutinized by public officials. Text-based surveys don’t convey project nuances. People don’t read a PDF to learn about a project, then take a long survey that feels like homework. It’s no wonder that public response rates for text based surveys range from 10 to 15%, resulting in usually less than 100 participants. Would you take this survey?

For planning departments, success in public engagement typically means over a thousand participants from diverse demographics, each contributing 30 to 100 data points (priorities ranked, map markers dropped, images rated, etc.) – that means over 30,000 data points of unbiased public input to satisfy decision makers.

Over the past 20+ years, the team at MetroQuest has pioneered digital public engagement for planners – we’re intimately familiar with their unique objectives. So how can we help our friends to make the case that they need MetroQuest – the only specialized online engagement solution designed for planners? Let’s turn the spotlight on a 2020 success story.

GDOT collected nearly 50,000 data points to inform its 85 Corridor Study!

The Georgia Department of Transportation is conducting a comprehensive corridor study along I-85, between I-285 and I-985. The corridor is roughly 18 miles long, with 6 travel lanes, 16 interchanges, and serves approximately 300,000 vehicles daily. In the first phase of the study, the Office of Planning engaged the public to get input on how to reduce congestion, enhance traffic operations, and improve safety. Let’s look at a demo of their MetroQuest survey:

TRY DEMO

GDOT increased public participation to over 2,550 survey respondents!

For a corridor study, attendance at a typical public meeting might include 10 people, while a text-based online survey might reach 50 or 100. The planning team at GDOT successfully broadened reach, offering their MetroQuest survey in English, Spanish, Korean, and Vietnamese, to gain valuable public input from 2,550+ residents! Several unique MetroQuest features made such high public participation possible.

No Registration. MetroQuest doesn’t require registration and leaves demographic questions to the end. Planners don’t need participant names and contact information since personal responses are not expected. Eliminating upfront registration drives up participation rates from the standard 10-15% upwards to 50-80% with MetroQuest.

5-Minute Experience. Public participation drops drastically (by over 90%) when planners ask the public for more than 5 minutes of their time. GDOT launched a great MetroQuest survey that took just 5 minutes to complete. It was fast and easy for residents to provide input with a click, drag, and drop, minimizing lengthy typing.

Project-Specific Input Fast. Planners need time-bound feedback at specific stages of planning projects. GDOT engaged 2,500+ people in three months with their MetroQuest survey live from December 5, 2019 to March 2, 2020. All the public input stayed within project scope, with specific questions seeking public influence on key project outcomes.

Any Device. MetroQuest surveys are responsive and optimized for mobile. GDOT was able to engage Georgians across all their devices – from any smart phone, tablet, laptop, or computer connected to the internet – without the struggle of pinching and zooming. With MetroQuest, it’s common for 50 to 70 percent of respondents to participate from the convenience of their mobile devices, anytime, anywhere.

“Fun” Drives Social Sharing. Visually engaging surveys, packed with colorful images, are readily shared via social media, which dramatically broadens demographic reach. GDOT used MetroQuest’s social sharing buttons to encourage participants to share the survey.

Microlearning helped GDOT planners collect informed public input!

Completing an interesting, interactive survey that informs while collecting feedback is a rewarding experience. MetroQuest offers visualizations and interactive elements that feel more like games than surveys. Comments such as, “Great survey, wonderful project. So fun, I learned so much”, showed us that participants loved the experience. Georgians “learned while answering” with education weaved into the experience in microlearning moments, giving planners confidence that the input was informed.

Microlearning. In their MetroQuest survey, GDOT welcomed Georgians with a succinct overview of the 85 Study. Participants then ranked priorities with short descriptions. While rating strategies, they learned how to increase capacity and improve safety. People gained appreciation for the scope and scale of the project, while providing input.

Planning Templates. MetroQuest uses gamification to educate the public in minutes using survey templates designed for planning. Participants visualize the pros and cons of different scenarios, stack coins to allocate budgets, rate images (like ranking five kinds of bike lanes to realize nuances), gain appreciation for competing tradeoffs, drop markers on maps, and use dynamic slider bars to fund projects using taxes and fees.

Input from the public for the 85 Corridor Study was 100% free of bias!

The 2,550+ Georgians who took the MetroQuest survey each had an identical public engagement experience – a clean map for their ideas, identical priorities to rank, and the same strategies to rate. The 1000th participant used the same uninfluenced input mechanism as the 1st participant, unaware of prior community input.

Clean Map. Some tools allow residents to drop markers on public web maps – the problem is that input becomes biased by all the markers previously added by others. A cluttered map also makes it difficult for participants to see where to place their markers, particularly on smart phones. GDOT used MetroQuest to collect over 25,200 map marker attributes, free of bias, while making the experience quick and easy.

Private Experience. GDOT planners used MetroQuest for direct, one-way public input to uncover true community preferences, free of peer influence, social intimidation, and toxic banter. Each survey experience was identical and private.

Nearly 50,000 data points were collected to inform the 85 Study!

The Office of Planning now has nearly 50,000 data points to support data-driven improvements to the 18-mile stretch on the I-85. This quantifiable data includes 25,000 spatial map marker attributes and 24,000 strategy ratings – it will help in recommending projects that meet the true needs of local stakeholders who depend on the corridor.

Comments in Context. GDOT planners added comment boxes in their MetroQuest survey to add context for the quantitative questions they asked. They collected over 6,000 comments to bring color and commentary to supplement the data.

Charts & Graphs. Using the MetroQuest Data Center, GDOT planners are exploring charts and graphs to build their study reports. Colorful visualizations of all the quantitative public input will support their recommendations, impress the Board, and build confidence for project approvals.

We’d like to congratulate the team at GDOT for their outstanding online public engagement success! You’ve gained tremendous public support for your 85 Study. Thank you for subscribing to MetroQuest – our team looks forward to seeing many more surveys from GDOT this year.

We hope that GDOT’s success story will inspire other agencies to endow their planners with North America’s only online public engagement solution purpose-designed for planning. When more members of the public participate in planning we get more livable cities and we’re able to move more people. We all benefit!

To learn more, contact us today or watch the on-demand webinar: Optimizing Online Engagement for Local Government with MetroQuest.

Optimizing Online Engagement for Local Government with MetroQuest

Online tools are a critical part of the public engagement tool box. This webinar highlights how local governments are optimizing online engagement for the best results.

WATCH WEBINAR

March 2, 2020
6 Tips to Engage Thousands using Nextdoor to Promote Your Agency’s Survey
The City of Austin recently used MetroQuest, in partnership with national planning and design consulting firm, Kimley-Horn & Associates, to engage over 5,100 participants online! Their outstanding success is based on two factors: a great outreach plan and a fantastic MetroQuest survey that turned visitors into survey respondents. Before discussing the latter in my next post, we’ll turn our attention to one major aspect of their engagement strategy: their use of Nextdoor.

What is Nextdoor?

In a nutshell, Nextdoor is a social media platform connecting people based on their geographic locations, with the intent to “empower neighbors to build stronger, safer, and happier communities.” Using Nextdoor’s engagement tools, public service agencies including planning, utilities, police, and other local authorities can communicate with residents within their specific area or neighborhood.

Nextdoor members, meaning residents of a specific area, are automatically subscribed to receive messages from agencies that serve them, making it a simple yet effective tool to add to any agency’s engagement toolbox.

If your government agency doesn’t already have an account, you can sign up to use Nextdoor here! Nextdoor even offers a very thorough step-by-step guide on how to sign up, add users, manage the account, and view results.

How can your agency use Nextdoor for public engagement?

NextDoor’s main method of communication with your agency’s neighborhood members is via posts. There are four types of posts on Nextdoor for agencies.
1. Messages: these are the most common way to communicate with residents and can be used to invite them take your online surveys. Photos (of your surveys) or documents may be added to attract attention.
2. Polls: these are a quick way to ask for feedback on basic topics. Each member can vote only once. To gather more robust feedback or for more complex plans, a MetroQuest survey might be a better option. Nextdoor polls can help generate interest in your longer surveys by highlighting a single question to get people invested.
3. Events: these may include notices of public meetings, workshops, or other events that complement your online engagement efforts.
4. Urgent Alerts: these are exactly that – and are more applicable to public safety or emergencies.
When making a post, you can choose one of the above types, as well as indicate the target audience (more on that below). There is also an option to send a message directly to “Nextdoor Leads,” who are typically the most engaged members or the founding members of the neighborhood on Nextdoor. It’s also possible to share the message directly to other platforms including Facebook and Twitter for even greater reach and impact.

Here are 6 tips to effectively promote your public survey with Nextdoor!

What does it take to write an engaging Nextdoor post? Let’s explore six tips that can help you drive participation for your next MetroQuest survey.
1. Messages include a subject line as well as body copy. Use the subject line to include an eye-catching, urgency-creating call to action. Here’s a great example: Austin Strategic Mobility Plan Survey: Public Feedback Needed!
2. A major benefit of Nextdoor is the ability to choose the audience for each post – options include the entire service area/region, or a subset such as specific service areas or specific neighborhoods. Monitor the post results and use follow-up posts to target specific zip codes that received fewer initial impressions, or continue to be underrepresented in the survey.
3. Similar to the MetroQuest survey itself, the post’s tone should be precise, relevant, and simple, and should avoid jargon or acronyms.
4. Include a direct link to the MetroQuest survey to make it easy for people to immediately provide input, before they get distracted.
5. Use an image! Pictures of happy people taking the survey on a phone or iPad can be compelling. So can an image of the survey itself.
6. Create a follow-up post that includes a final call to action shortly before the survey closes. A “last chance” post always garners attention.
Nextdoor offers additional best practices, case studies, and several other resources here:
Tips are useful … but seeing them in action is even more practical. Stay tuned! In my next blog post, I’ll share how the City of Austin engaged over 5,100 residents by promoting their MetroQuest survey on Nextdoor. Here’s a teaser. Check out this powerful multi-lingual post:

Can’t wait? Liane Miller, AICP and Senior Business Process Consultant with Austin’s Transportation Department, tells all in her on-demand webinar: Online Public Engagement Playbook. Join me in congratulating Liane on her outstanding public engagement success by commenting below!
February 26, 2020
How Planning Consultants Win Clients with Exceptional Public Engagement
Consultants competing for urban and transportation planning projects with government agencies are always looking for ways to differentiate themselves with a competitive edge. As firms and government agencies alike struggle with engaging constituents at public meetings, increasingly, leading firms are using online public engagement prowess to win projects and increase client loyalty.

To learn more about this trend and what leading consulting teams are doing to enhance their public engagement offerings, we interviewed a range of firms, from the largest planning and engineering firms to smaller boutique public engagement firms. They agreed on three things:
1. Planning projects present unique public engagement goals,
2. The benefits for creating leading edge public engagement capabilities have never been greater, and
3. When used skillfully, today’s public engagement toolbox can deliver game-changing results.
The detailed results of this research are presented in a recent webinar recording: How to Optimize Public Engagement to Wow Clients on Every Project. Here’s a summary for quick reference.

We found 4 unique goals for public engagement to support urban and transportation planning projects.

#1. Increase public participation

Agencies cite increasing participation as their top challenge, nationwide. With dwindling attendance at public meetings, now averaging nine people per meeting, increasing the number of people engaged to inform and support planning efforts is top of mind for government agencies. Planning projects represent major investments of public funds and require major public participation. Firms with case studies that can demonstrate large scale public engagement stand out.

#2. Broaden demographics

Environmental justice and other directives require agencies to demonstrate diversity in their public outreach. Several key demographics continue to be difficult to reach with traditional methods increasing the urgency to hire a team with a track record and a plan to broaden the diversity of participation well beyond the usual suspects.

#3. Inform and educate

Planning projects deal with complex topics and any meaningful engagement must demonstrate to decision makers that the public input was informed. Planning decisions involve constraints, trade-offs, visual-preferences, and other complexities that need to be embedded skillfully into the engagement process to gather trustworthy community preferences. Teams with a plan for weaving education into their outreach process instill confidence with agency representatives.

#4. Quantify public input

Anyone who’s had the ‘pleasure’ of summarizing hundreds or thousands of community comments can appreciate the benefit of collecting quantifiable public input. Agency planning professionals must summarize public input in a clear and easily digestible format for decision makers. Consulting proposals that demonstrate a concrete plan for collecting data on public preferences in well-structured ways will generate confidence. Today, public input must support data-driving planning.

We’re always impressed with our friends at the national planning and design consulting firm, Kimley-Horn, who have consistently delivered great public engagement. To date, they’ve engaged over 68,000 people with online surveys and collected over 1.5 million data points to support both urban and transportation planning projects. That’s exceptional value for their clients! Stephen Stansbury, Vice President at Kimley-Horn, described the advantage of great online public engagement,

“Thousands of data points have just become a customary result … that increased volume of participation increases confidence in the results and makes our planning process go that much more smoothly. It’s adding value to the communities that we’re working with.”

We uncovered 8 benefits of leading-edge public engagement specific to planning consultants.

Another leading firm that needs no introduction is Michael Baker International. Our friend Kenneth Mobley, Associate Vice President and Planning Manager, described the struggles facing so many consulting firms during our interview,

“A lot of our meetings were having low attendance, and so, we were looking for something that was creative, that was online, and that we could use as an alternative to traditional meetings. We really needed to have something to distinguish ourselves from engagement firms that are small and very specialized. We needed a platform to get to a large number of people in a cost-effective way.”

Kenneth turned to online public engagement surveys years ago to solve these challenges. Michael Baker International was among many firms that were interviewed, which cited the following eight benefits of going beyond the traditional methods and delivering best in class public engagement services for their planning projects:
1. Impress clients with increased participation,
2. Champion data-driven plans,
3. Build public support and foster trust,
4. Reduce risk of public backlash,
5. Foster confidence with elected officials,
6. Get innovative plans approved,
7. Cultivate customer loyalty, and
8. Gain a lasting competitive edge!
Kenneth’s colleague, Lorna Parkins, Vice President of Transportation Planning at Michael Baker International described the impact of great online pubic engagement in serving her clients,

“We’re able to go to decision makers and show them ‘we got this much input, and these were the findings.’ This gives them more confidence to tell us that they’re ready to move forward. They feel that what they’ve heard from the public is reliable.”

In the webinar, we shared 12 keys success factors used by leading firms to optimize public engagement in planning projects.

The webinar outlines 12 key success factors in detail that leading consulting teams are using to meet the unique challenges of public engagement for planning clients. To pique your curiosity, each team is doing these three things incredibly well.

#1. Firms are dramatically lowering the barriers to engagement by using online tools.

These consulting teams are focussed on using fast and visually appealing online surveys as a primary source of public input. These tools help to engage larger numbers of people on every project and reach a broader demographic than more traditional techniques.

#2. They are weaving education into interactive online surveys to ensure that the public input they collect is informed.

In order to ensure that the public input is informed, rather than providing documentation that is seldom read or detailed presentations that are poorly attended, leading teams rely on gamified and interactive tools that embed education into the survey process. The most successful teams have experience translating planning complexities into compelling questions and images that highlight trade-offs, limitations, visual-preferences, and other planning issues.

#3. Leveraging social media and other cost-effective techniques to promote participation.

A wide range of tools and strategies are available to agencies for promoting participation and targeting difficult to reach populations. To say that most agencies are overwhelmed by the options and unclear about which ones to use for which purposes would be an understatement. Consultants with experience and a track record for promoting participation have a significant advantage. Using boosted Facebook posts to promote their online surveys is one way that firms are repeatably able to engage thousands and impress clients.

The most effective strategies for these areas and each of the 12 key success factors are described in the webinar video using case studies and feedback from our consultant interviews. We’d like to congratulate all the firms nationwide on their outstanding public engagement success! Thank you for the opportunity to share your stories.
February 19, 2020
The Evolution of Public Engagement at APA NPC19

Each year at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference, when I’m not presenting a session, I can be found in the crowd at any public engagement related session. And each year, I share my thoughts and lessons learned following the conference.

Compared with past years, on the surface, public engagement seemed less prominent at NPC19. A deeper dive reveals that the dialog about public engagement was woven into a sophisticated treatment of equity and inclusion. This trend was first noticeable at NPC18 in New Orleans. This year’s NPC took it to the next level.

There are too many sessions to cover comprehensively, so I will focus on the sessions that inspired me the most. The first session that got me scribbling notes featured Kim Lundgren of Kim Lundgren Associates, Inc. (KLA) in her talk, “Beyond the Usual Suspects: How to Deliver Ongoing, Equitable Engagement.” She described KLA’s approach to reaching beyond the usual suspects using a toolbox approach in recognition that each audience group may require a different tool or engagement technique. This session was a refreshing move away from the one size fits all solutions we’ve seen in past years.

My second inspiration came from the description of the role that the City of Loveland, Colorado’s Youth Advisory Commission (YAC) was playing in the city’s transit planning. The most exciting takeaway for me was the part of the process where YAC conducted peer-to-peer engagement to influence the city’s transportation master plan. I’ll be following the YAC carefully as this demographic is so critical and has been the most challenging to reach for many communities.

I darted out mid-session to catch Darlene Flynn, from the City of Oakland, California, talk about “Strategies Toward Racial Equity in Planning.” I’m glad I did. Her powerful presentation about her work in Seattle and later in Oakland on racial equity in planning and city policy made it clear that it plays a central role in some of the most challenging issues facing cities and regions. She, and her co-presenters, encouraged the audience to look at the legacy of historical policies and planning decisions whose affects still linger across the country. The session dove deep into displacement, gentrification, economic inequality, criminal justice, and health disparities and connected these issues to historical planning policy so clearly that it changed the way I see cities. She made quite a few new fans that day, myself included.

I rushed from there to my own presentation on “Community Engagement Therapy” based on Pecha Kucha talk I gave at the Rail~Volution conference in Denver.

I offered a lighthearted and self-deprecating look at how vulnerable public engagement processes can be to vocal minorities and how new technologies can play a role in creating more balanced and safe ways for meaningful community dialog.

Watch the 6 Minute Talk Here

This “Fast, Funny, and Passionate” session was part of a series that the APA has been offering for a few years at the NPC and it is clear that they need larger rooms for these popular sessions. Our room seated 250 and organizers had to close the doors after well over 300 people crowded in!

Next up was an inspiring story about Akron, Ohio who is collaborating with community members to co-create public spaces to develop trust and inspire healing in this mid-size Rust Belt city. Citing increased polarization, segregation, social isolation, and economic inequality, this partnership with the national Reimagining the Civic Commons initiative is reinvigorating a civic pride and engagement in a way that can serve as a model for cities across the country.

Gabrielle Lyon of Lyon Strategies talked about the Chicago Architectural Foundation’s (CAF) Meet Your City initiative to engage with youth. As part of this initiative, CAF hosted a design competition and published a 144-page color graphic novel to help youth understand their role as city stewards and to encourage active participation in the planning process.

The passion and creativity of these planners to deeply understand and address the needs of all demographic groups in the communities where they work is inspiring.

I’ll use this inspiration to look more deeply into online engagement case studies to reveal best practices for reaching traditionally underrepresented populations. I’ve already found three excellent examples, so stay tuned for upcoming articles, case studies, and webinars.

I did manage to sneak in some fun time in the mist of all these amazing sessions. I had a great time playing with the Planetizen/MIG virtual reality setup.

Many thanks to the APA conference team for curating another thoughtful array of presentations and sending me home inspired to continue raising the bar for public engagement. I can’t wait till APA NPC20!

April 30, 2019