Image: 2019 Mike Belleme
In 2020, many of us have been forced to fully embrace digital life. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink how we work and how we engage with one another. When it comes to moving urban planning/design projects forward during these uncertain times, teams are increasingly turning to digital tools to interface with the public out of necessity. Yet, even prior to the normalization of social distancing, public engagement in its traditional sense had its fraught moments. Large public meetings, often held at days and times inconvenient to many working people, also tended to be dominated by groups with specific agendas who, more often than not, hijacked the conversation. With poor attendance and lack of diversity in the feedback, engagement tactics were ripe for new strategies and technology.
Today, there are a plethora of new software platforms on the market, and in most cases these tools are not designed to supplant in-person meetings but complement a suite of traditional efforts. Engagement tools include things like project websites, social media, virtual meeting platforms, and web platforms designed for information sharing, gathering feedback, and facilitating interaction with community members. This virtual interaction can be static or interactive and according to the APA, “include virtual meetings and events, online surveys and polls, project visualizations, interactive maps, and crowdsourcing”.
However, these tools have their own caveats. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 15% of households do not use the internet at all, and 9% use it outside the home but do not have a home connection. This highlights why teams cannot rely on digital tools alone, especially when striving to seek input from all generations and a diverse socio-economic and cultural constituency. Several best practices have emerged in the engagement arena, and more specifically in the use of digital tools for public engagement including;
Map networks of people with whom you wish to engage, critically looking for under-represented communities.
Assemble a diverse sample of the community-at-large, as a critical mass for your efforts.
Involve people in one-on-one or small-group discussions, then mix in larger forums for amplifying bigger ideas and moving the discussions forward.
Give participants the opportunity to share values and stories by creating shared work and ideation spaces.
Allow citizens to mutually consider a range of options, to understand priorities, trade-offs and choices inherent in the process.
Determine project metrics, measure often to gauge the success or failure of campaigns. Learn from your findings.
Create conversations that appeal directly to people’s core interests and find ways to propel that dialogue.
Add tools like Wikis, polls, surveys, mapping and crowdsourcing functions that promote direct involvement.
Gamify the engagement process in ways that produce hard data.
Our team has shifted rapidly into virtual online formats, in some cases partnering with organizations who have robust digital outlets. On our Moakley Park project in Boston, we are working with with Boston Harbor Now for virtual community forums as a way to update the community and seek additional feedback. For a project in Downtown St. Louis, our collective team lead by Interface Studio, has launched a robust and interactive community open house that is achieving some press coverage!
In the past few years, new software tools have continually come on the market and are evolving quickly into easy-to-use graphic platforms that have a wide array of tools and functionality. We’ve compiled 9 platforms (none of which we endorse) as a quick snapshot of what is available right now.
Digital Platforms
-multi-platform online surveys
-micro-learning and mini-games embedded
-community collaboration platform
-surveys, idea submission, idea refinement, idea voting, interactive budgeting, and community challenges
-Listen. Use a combination of forums, polls, and other tools to better understand your community’s perspectives and needs.
-Inform. Communicate initiatives through newsletters, blogs and social media to keep your residents informed.
-Measure. Advanced analytics and reporting deliver actionable insights and data-driven evidence for better decisions.
-Build community. Capture participant information, develop resident profiles and target communications
-provides communication and reporting tools for developers and planners
-project background & updates
-forum moderated by coUrbanize
-timelines and schedules
-share files, presentations, and images
-surveys, forums, interactive mapping, ideation tools, participatory budgeting, pages, stakeholder management
-customizable discussion forums, comments, surveys & polls, alerts, voting
-customizable social mapping, gather input, discussion forums, surveys & polls, Q&A, participatory budgeting
-civic engagement facilitation
-digital advisory boards
-innovation or idea management
-crowdsource and track ideas
Digital engagement tools can certainly foster a faster, easier and less intimidating way for the public to participate in helping to shape their civic life. Project teams can reach a more diverse group of people and these tools have a longer shelf-life than traditional outreach, collecting data continuously through the life-cycle of a project. That being said, the overall community engagement strategy for any project should include a robust mix of online and in-person channels which in tandem will reach a diverse and representative sample of the community.
Other Resources:
Interesting interactive lab: https://elab.emerson.edu/
Good resource for best practices: http://www.futurewise.org/assets/reports/CET.pdf