Go Vocal’s blog—get insights, advice, and all the latest information on trends to help you foster meaningful engagement.
Online engagement tools enable you to reach a large number of community members in an instant. But not everyone is so simple to reach. Here, we meet four local governments using low- and no-tech engagement methods like WhatsApp, SMS, in-person visits, and the good old telephone to ensure the underheard voices in their community get a chance to have their say.
A comprehensive community engagement strategy is key to ensuring the smooth launch of – and satisfying outcomes for – projects. Before initiating a project, it’s best to set clear objectives, define roles and responsibilities, and select the most promising communication channels. Looking for some guidance? Discover CitizenLab’s Online Engagement Canvas and how it can help you design your strategy.
Community engagement platforms can increase civic participation, improve trust between residents and governments, and can help collect data that increases the impact of your projects. When you optimize the way you use social impact data, there’s a real opportunity to assess a project’s performance and outcomes, improve future processes, and run more efficient and ethical projects.
Objectively, climate change and environmental issues affect everyone. It’s also undeniable that marginalized groups are affected disproportionately by them, having traditionally lived and worked closest to pollution hazards such as hazardous waste facilities or in communities with a lack of clean water.
Have you ever logged into an analytics dashboard and felt daunted by all the numbers on your screen? You’re not alone. When trying to measure the effectiveness of your online community engagement efforts, the challenge is to sift through numerous available metrics and analyse the relevant ones so you can get to actionable insights.
Participatory budgeting can be a powerful tool for local councils to educate, engage, and empower communities. As one of the methods ranking highest on the participation ladder, this kind of engagement project transfers considerable decision-making power to residents and stakeholders and thus maximises the many benefits of community engagement. But what does it all entail? And how do you get started?
Ensuring that your community engagement is successful and worthwhile requires full buy-in and continuous support from all levels of the community, starting with your organisation and eventually also your residents. It comes down to creating a culture of engagement. This doesn’t have to be daunting, and in the long run it will save you time, money, and headaches.
The terms “community engagement” and “community development” are sometimes used interchangeably. After all, both ideas are based on the strength and improvement of our communities. Nonetheless, there are a few key distinctions between the two concepts. Let’s take a closer look at what they are.
Participatory budgeting — or, in plain English, involving community members in the allocation of public funds —is a powerful tool for councils to empower their community members and co-create more pleasant, accessible, and equitable places.
When local governments tackle comprehensive mobility planning, they also undertake the important task of expanding and improving infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. By ensuring that bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure is safe, expansive, and comfortable, local governments can make these modes of transport more accessible.
In recent years, citizens’ assemblies, panels, and committees have increasingly been implemented at all levels of government across the globe. They’ve been particularly useful to address polarising issues such as climate change, with the infamous Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat commissioned by French President Macron as a recent national-level example.
Whether it’s a commitment to sustainable urban development, waste and pollution control, managing biodiversity, or educating households and businesses on environmental policy, local governments play a critical role in moving forward environmental programs in their local communities. Because environment and sustainability projects are so complex and far-reaching, when creating plans to tackle these issues it’s important that local governments engage their communities to identify priority issues and co-create actional solutions.
In the aftermath of a polarising debate, public servants are expected to put the pieces of the puzzle back together. But how do you bridge this divide and inspire your community to move forward together? The answer could lie in community engagement.
When it comes to community engagement, most governments’ first concerns are the associated costs. Large-scale projects involving thousands of people must be incredibly costly, right? Well… not always. An online community engagement platform can drastically reduce the cost of participation. Let’s dive deeper into the investment and what you get in return.
Trust is a two-way street. To convince your community that your engagement efforts and digital community engagement platform are trustworthy, they need to feel heard and included. In our experience, it takes time to build trust, but there are several good practices to help you get started.
In a time where problems with governance can be overwhelming, governments are frantically searching for a solution. There is a constant debate about how exactly a government should go about facilitating change, whether that be with incremental improvement or radical change.
Planning involves making decisions about the future of our cities, towns, and countryside. So it goes without saying that involving as many people in your community as possible is crucial. As a council, this means making community engagement in local planning a success. In this article, we list best practices and share examples of effective local planning consultations to get you inspired.
If you’re reading this post, chances are you’re probably already convinced that citizen participation is a good thing. However, what you might not be so convinced about is that involving community members in decision-making can be done without huge amounts of resources. And yet, it’s true thanks to digital participation!
Local governments are tasked with some of the toughest decisions for future-proof policy and program planning. Making those decisions behind closed boardroom doors, in silos, is not the solution. Turning to community members and tapping into real-time community data is a better alternative. A digital community engagement platform will get you more data, speed up data processing, and makes it easier to extract actionable insights.
Starting on April 1, 2023, the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) will require that all registered providers of social housing need to collect and publish a range of information on areas such as repairs, safety checks, and complaints to follow a universal set of requirements. Based on their consultation on tenant satisfaction measures (TSM), these new regulations will allow tenants to hold landlords more accountable to provide safe homes and quality service to tenants.
From shaping the future city of Lancaster to improving parks and rec in Carlisle, PA, surveys are used across our platforms to gauge a community’s opinions on specific topics. Surveys and polls are easy to set up and provide a low-threshold way for community members to weigh in on policy topics, which explains their popularity as a participation method. Still, they only scratch the surface of what community engagement can really accomplish. Let’s examine a survey tool’s main strengths and limitations.
At CitizenLab, we believe that a combination of synchronous and asynchronous participation opportunities make for the most qualitative processes. Before Covid shook the world, these synchronous opportunities were mostly happening offline.
At COP26 – the United Nations Climate Change Conference – countries agreed to address coal’s role as the most polluting fossil fuel. But not before the wording was watered down from “phasing-out” to “phasing-down” coal power. Since then, the UN’s António Guterres warned in April that “governments and corporations are…adding fuel to the flames by continuing to invest in climate-choking industries” and yet, just this month – on the heels of this year’s COP27 – the UK approved a new coal mine. One step forward, three steps back? Unfortunately, this is just one example from many governments’ missteps on climate action. If the world’s democracies are failing on the climate crisis, how can we motivate them to step up to the challenge? In our experience, participatory democracy is up for the task.
The world has received a crash course in digital interaction and tools during the COVID-19 pandemic. With social distancing as a catalyst for digital engagement, Civic Tech started to invest in facilitating digital deliberation; a field that historically had not been its forte.
You know that your residents want to be more involved in local decision-making, but how do you involve them both meaningfully and efficiently? Community engagement can help by facilitating more active collaboration with the residents, businesses, visitors, and other stakeholders in your community.
