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500+ local governments and organizations trust Go Vocal with their community engagement. Explore our case studies to discover insights and best practices from successful initiatives leveraging our digital platform. Enhance your participation projects by learning from the experiences of fellow engagement practitioners.
Linz (204,846 inhabitants), Austria’s third-biggest city, is known for its baroque architecture, its museums, its centre for electronic arts… and its actions in digital democracy. In 2019, the city launched a new participation platform to widen the scope of public engagement, allowing citizens to participate on any topic, from anywhere, at any time.
Amstelveen, a picturesque Dutch municipality neighboring Amsterdam, is a model for building a culture of engagement. The participation team’s focus on promoting engagement internally, clear roles, and successful deployment of their Go Vocal platform through training sessions and a “participation garage” have been instrumental in this process.
The City of Benicia faced a significant challenge in developing an industrial safety ordinance to regulate a local oil refinery. This was a highly polarizing issue, with conflicting concerns about public health and safety, and the economic impact on the community. Della Olm, Management Analyst & Fire PIO, discusses the city’s efforts to create a space for constructive dialogue, inclusive engagement, and transparency, and how Go Vocal’s engagement platform helped.
Faced with the daunting task of allocating $250 million as part of the Rams settlement fund, the City of St. Louis and the Board of Aldermen embarked on an ambitious digital community engagement strategy to involve residents in the fund allocation process from the start.
Cambridge experienced first-hand the power of Go Vocal's AI assistant in the analysis of open-ended text responses during their Design Code consultation for northern Cambridge neighborhoods. Discover how it helped the team save 10 precious hours and opened the door for including more free-text questions in future consultations, enriching the depth and quality of community engagement.
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In August 2023, the City of Copenhagen took a bold step forward on their participatory democracy journey with a new community engagement initiative: encouraging residents to submit proposals for city improvement projects.
INJUV, Chile’s National Youth Institute, is a public institution that collaborates with the government in designing policies related to youth affairs. To give millennials across the country the chance to voice their ideas on local community development, INJUV launched an online platform in the winter of 2019.
With around 300,000 residents, Newham is one of the biggest and most diverse boroughs in London, so it should be no surprise that it’s not new to community engagement. In fact, Newham’s recent leadership has prioritized involving residents and creating a more participatory democracy, including via a dedicated Resident Engagement and Participation team.
“The people are listening.” Creating a city’s inaugural comprehensive plan is a daunting task. Comprehensive planning requires the collaboration of a wide variety of community stakeholders, and affects every resident in a community. Seeking to craft a vision for a revitalized Struthers, local officials in the city’s planning department and their partner Samantha Yannucci (Director of Planning and Community Development of KO Consulting of Ombud) have been working hard to ensure that this plan is inclusive and representative of their entire community by going directly to their residents with a range of innovative methods.
Here at Go Vocal, we love to celebrate the successes of our clients. With so many incredible community development and engagement projects taking place on our platform across the world, we hope to record some best practices and share them with local governments to encourage peer learning and inspiration.
From urgent calls for racial justice in public spaces to the recovery of small businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s obvious that urban main streets face unique economic and social challenges. Against this backdrop, cities across the country have been piloting new approaches to people-centered main streets.
Ghent, known for its beautiful market squares and stunning medieval city center, is the capital of the Belgian province of East-Flanders. With more than 260,000 inhabitants, Ghent charmingly combines the hustle and bustle of a bigger city with a small town’s cozy atmosphere.
Executive Summary: Looking to create a more official and consolidated platform that allowed for additional oversight and increased transparency in government operations, such as the redesign of public spaces, the Carlisle team began looking at community engagement platforms. In mid-2021, they launched a CitizenLab platform and set out to generate ideas about how to use their new public spaces and what they should look like.
Participatory budgeting is one of the most popular forms of citizen consultation. More than just a buzzword, the tool is used by elected officials who want to make public governance more accessible and transparent. Far from applying a generic formula, each community creates its own process based on its own reality.
Localized flooding and poor stormwater drainage can significantly disrupt communities, causing problems from road and property damage to safety issues due to hydroplaning. In a city like Lancaster, stormwater management is particularly important as they run on a combined sewer system, meaning it collects and transports both domestic sewage and rainwater from the City’s storm drains into a single system of pipes – meaning, these pipes have a lot of work to do! As part of their collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on their larger Green Infrastructure project, the City of Lancaster is seeking to improve their community’s stormwater management quality.
Do you have a small team dedicated to community engagement efforts? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. The City of Allen has demonstrated how a small team can achieve excellent results by fostering widespread support throughout the organization and crafting a robust engagement strategy, strongly facilitated by its online community engagement platform.
Newham recently evaluated their Community Assemblies initiative, now known as People Powered Places. This article outlines a summary of the report’s key insights and ideas for future improvement. Read on to kindle fresh ideas for invigorating engagement within your own community!
The climate crisis is forcing governments around the globe to reassess and change direction. Vienna, the capital of Austria, is no exception. The city – famous for its baroque streetscapes and imperial palaces – aims to be climate-neutral by 2040 and is therefore prioritizing climate and sustainability projects. Since 2022, the Vienna Climate Team has been actively engaging residents in a collaborative and inclusive effort to shape a sustainable climate future together. Let’s explore what their participation project has achieved to this day!
By definition, comprehensive plans are complex, long-range, and broad in scope. The planning and engagement processes for these plans often take over two years to complete. This can make it difficult to establish and maintain meaningful engagement with community members throughout the process. Using CitizenLab’s user-friendly and accessible online engagement platform, the City of Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) reached thousands of residents in their planning process over 2022, all while supporting their goal for inclusive and equitable engagement.
How do you cross the digital divide and blend online and offline (traditional) community engagement? What about during a pandemic? The City of Lancaster used online, offline, and blended approaches to ensure their diverse population was well represented in the City’s new engagement initiatives, which ranged from policing to mobility planning.
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