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Go Vocal’s blog—get insights, advice, and all the latest information on trends to help you foster meaningful engagement.
For many governments, building trust and ensuring transparency in budget allocation are ongoing challenges. Enter participatory budgeting: a proven approach that empowers communities to have a say in how public funds are spent. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the advantages and challenges of participatory budgeting, explore real-world examples, and provide actionable steps for getting started.
Community engagement is a strategy to involve community members in policy development and decision-making, fostering transparency and community ownership.
Are you tired of seeing only the same faces show up at every town hall meeting? Frustrated by low engagement rates and lackluster feedback? You're not alone. Many peers struggle to engage their communities and get meaningful input. But it doesn't have to be this way. This blog post will share ten best practices to help you break the cycle of low engagement and boost participation.
Are you struggling with low survey response rates? You're not alone. Survey fatigue is a common issue that can hinder your ability to gather accurate and representative data. But there are ways to overcome this challenge and ensure that your community's voice is heard. Read on to discover effective strategies to combat survey fatigue.
Citizens’ assemblies and panels are on the rise, at all levels of government. Between September 2021 and September 2023, the OECD collected 160 new cases of representative deliberative processes. In this article, you’ll get a deeper understanding of deliberative democracy, its principles, and how it contrasts with other forms of democracy.
Surveys are used across our platforms to gauge communities' opinions on pressing issues. However, crafting an effective community engagement survey is far from simple. How you structure your questions can make or break your project – it affects the quality of data you collect, the number of responses, and, perhaps most importantly, the level of public engagement you’re able to generate.
Dialogue, debate, or deliberation — what's the difference, and why does it matter? These three methods shape how communities discuss, decide, and drive change. Dive into their unique roles in community engagement.
Participatory democracy is a form of government that has gained significant traction over the past years, making government more responsive and decisions more equitable. This article explores the principles, benefits, and challenges of participatory democracy, comparing it to other forms of democratic governance.
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From costly expenses to loss of control, several misconceptions about community engagement can hinder local governments from unlocking the full potential of participatory democracy to this day. In this blog post, we’ll explore five of the most-heard myths and why they’re not true.
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.
Artificial Intelligence, Collective Intelligence… these notions might sound like they come from coming from a distant future, but they are actually becoming reality.
Over the last few years, there’s been a shift from top-down governance to more horizontally organized types of governance. This new political current includes all the stakeholders of public policy projects, such as public organizations, businesses and community members, into the decision-making process.
Traditionally, community engagement has been compartmentalized into offline and online methods, often treated as distinct and separate elements. However, the evolving needs and preferences of the public call for a paradigm shift. It’s time to blend these worlds, for instance by using digital engagement platforms as enhancers of offline community engagement. This integration promises to streamline processes and enrich the quality of participation.
By the time you finish reading this sentence, around 30,000 tweets have been posted and 200,000 searches have been made on Google.
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.
It sounds like a contradictio in terminis, like ‘sound of silence’ or ‘sensible Twitter debate’. But ‘slacktivism’, a contraction of ‘activism’ and uh, ‘slacking’, has become a widespread phenomenon that urges us to reflect on the nature of activism and participation.
An effective community engagement team, similar to a well-tuned orchestra, relies on a mix of diverse roles each playing their unique part in harmony. As for most teams, the key to success lies in bringing together people with different personalities, skills, and abilities. We sat down with Hugo De Brouwer, CitizenLab’s Head of Government Success, to discuss which roles and skills an organization needs to take participation to the next level.
Ever wondered how you match up on your community engagement efforts? We’ve got just the quiz for you. Answer a few questions, get a clear score of your efforts, and get resources to support you as you level up.
Born in 1981 in Taiwan, Audrey Tang has made waves as a software programmer and civic hacker-turned-Digital Minister.
Citizen participation may be hot and happening right now, but it’s not a new phenomenon.
If you're committed to continuous improvement in your community engagement efforts, you need a clear understanding of your current performance. Measuring community engagement KPIs helps assess your participation projects and strategy, improve processes, and show how public input shapes decisions. But which ones should you look at? Let's have a closer look at some of the key metrics to track engagement.
As one of CitizenLab’s co-founders, current Commercial Director, and previous Head of Government Success, Aline Muylaert has extensive experience working with local governments to develop and implement successful community engagement initiatives. We sat down for an interview with Aline to discuss the importance of leadership buy-in and ambition in building a culture of engagement.
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. To remedy this, cities are trying to increase their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
Whether you’re looking to launch a project, are already running one, or have reached the report-out phase, a strong communications plan will help drive the success of your efforts. In this article, we discuss the five basic principles of a good communications plan for your community engagement efforts.
Running inclusive and participatory community engagement projects requires meeting people where they are. In part, that means having a plan for multilingual engagement to ensure that everyone in your community has the ability to participate. By removing language barriers, your community engagement efforts will be more inclusive, participatory, and representative.
Every local government and organization that has ever launched a community engagement project knows the challenge: How do you reach underheard groups? In this article, we’ll cover some of the good practices to follow for inclusive community engagement so that you’ll be ready to set up your participation broadly and activate even hard-to-reach target groups.
We live in an era where online privacy is a vague concept and citizen’s trust in their governments seems to decline every day. And the introduction of an online platform can raise a lot of questions among citizens. What is it for? Why should they make decisions if they have a government who’s paid to do that? And what difference is it going to make?
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.
When we’re juggling work, school, hobbies, chores, and family time, participating in your local government seems like a great idea in theory. But how do you possibly make time for it? The good news is that participation doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. There are many things you can do as a community member to uplift your community and the people in it. Some of them will cost you little to no effort, but with such a tangible impact on your neighborhood, how could we ever call them ‘small things’?
During the holiday season, you might find some more time to grab a book and learn about the possibilities to innovate our democracies in the digital age and how you can help build better politics. Not sure where to start? Our curated list of favorite books, listed in no particular order, has you covered. Let’s dive in!
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