To design more rewarding opportunities for public engagement, first understand the status quo and how people perceive and interact with the institutions around them. Interview community members, officials and local stakeholders, such as neighborhood groups, PTAs and faith-based organizations — the entities “on the ground floor of democracy that [may be] much more accessible to people and could be great allies,” said Matt Leighninger, Director of the National Civic League’s Center for Democracy Innovation.
There’s also much to learn from social media activity, news coverage and knowing where people get their information. Understand what relationships your community members trust and whom they listen to, he said. What comes through no matter whom you interview or survey is that each side blames the other for the status quo, Leighninger explained. For example, government officials and staff reject ideas for new meeting formats because residents allegedly won’t support them. Community members say that local institutions won’t embrace change. “There’s some inertia based on what they think the other side will tolerate,” he said, “and also a whole lot of resignation.”
Case in Point: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Spearheaded by the city’s planning department, which undertakes numerous large-scale projects, Pittsburgh wanted to better understand community values and concerns to more effectively engage residents in city decision-making. So, officials invited people to apply for membership in a Public Engagement Working Group, using various channels to encourage applications — city Facebook and Twitter accounts, Pittsburgh’s Nextdoor online community, all Carnegie libraries in the city, coffee shops and museums, and other venues, plus invitations to faith-based and other entities.
The working group, representing a broad cross-section of the population, helped create a guide and toolkit, which outlined 42 outreach options, including meetings-in-a-box that give community leaders a literal shoebox-size container filled with info for discussing city issues during neighborhood meetings. There’s also stakeholder mapping, in which people create relationship diagrams of influential groups in their neighborhoods to help the city plan future outreach. “Dialogue is more than one-way and one-time communication,” the engagement guide notes. “It is a two-way conversation that occurs over time.”
This article appeared in slightly different form in our guide, “State and Local: Better Public Service Through Innovation.” To learn more about how state and local governments are enhancing both outreach and efficiency, download it here: