Increasing Community Engagement Begins with a Plan

For local governments, the coronavirus pandemic has sped up the public's interest in engagement technology.

"The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a wave of technology adoption across the public sector, in some cases hastening already planned transformations," notes a recent University of California Berkeley Labor Center study.

From providing access to public data to enabling online tasks such as applying for a permit or paying a bill, technology has transformed the way the public interacts with government.

The prioritization of increasing community engagement through tech is a driving force in the public sector's investment in technology because, as the Labor Center study notes, "Technology is framed as a core element of promises to make government serve people better and reinstill confidence in government."

In response to the benefits of digital engagement, the public sector is investing in solutions such as citizen self-service and mobile incident reporting.

How to Build Community Engagement

Dive deeper into strategies to improve community adoption of your engagement technology.

However, as it deploys engagement solutions, the public sector faces the challenge of maximizing community adoption. Unfortunately, building adoption is not as simple as a build-it-and-they-will-come approach.

Growing community technology use requires planning that aligns community benefit messaging, your resources, and your community’s makeup. For example, you might consider more emphasis on print outreach for an older constituency, while a concentration on social media might align more with a younger audience.

As with most projects, the key to success begins with a few questions to guide your planning. Questions include:

• How does the solution benefit our constituents and staff?
• Which type of marketing efforts will work for our constituents?
• When should we promote the app? Where can we effectively promote technology functionality?
• How can we make it easy to adopt and use the technology?
• How can we measure the success of the marketing effort?

These questions will help you develop the all-important benefits for the community messaging that should be front and center of your outreach. For example, highlighting the convenience of paying a bill from the comfort of home rather than waiting in line at city hall can go a long way to promoting the use of a payment portal.

The plan is the crucial first step. In the end, the rewards are worth it. For example:

• Since implementing Civic Access with Enterprise Permitting & Licensing [powered by EnerGov™], the city of Rancho Cordova, California, has served more than 5,000 registered users and determined that 38% of licenses were purchased online.
• Since launching its Open Finance site, the Franklin County Auditor Fiscal Division, Ohio, has provided the public with easy access to public records, which has reduced the time staff previously spent generating reports in response to public records requests.
• In the first three months after its My Civic launch, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, saw 1,500 downloads. The My Civic app is connecting the community to Moose Jaw's services, resources, and information.

Through print and digital messaging and superior user experiences local goverments have a number of effective strategies to bring their plans to life.