Go Vocal’s blog—get insights, advice, and all the latest information on trends to help you foster meaningful engagement.
Engaging the public on the complex topic of local planning poses significant challenges. To explore how a well-crafted communications strategy can help overcome these hurdles, we sat down with Mark Prichard, the Head of Communications for West Oxfordshire, Cotswold, and Forest of Dean Councils (UK) to talk about their recent success.
Many local governments struggle to include more residents in their projects and often find that some voices are much louder than others, and many people aren’t heard at all.
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.
If you clicked the title of this article, you’re probably looking for a way to leave a mark on your local community. But it’s easy to get sucked into the grind of everyday life.
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.
Combining online and offline participation is often the best engagement option to reach a wide audience. Almere, a city in the Dutch province of Flevoland, decided to create a comprehensive strategy to support its older population.
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.
This blog post is inspired by the article “Understanding New Power” by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, which is an extract from their book New Power.
Grand Paris Sud (346,826 inhabitants), an intercommunal structure south of Paris, decided to pull up its sleeves and work towards progress. In the spirit of democracy, they chose to seek the opinions of those who know best: the citizens.
This article was published on Apolitical. Find the original article here.
