March 01, 2023 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM
All right, those that are joining us live. Just a heads up, we'll get started here in just about one minute. For those of us joining, for those of you joining live, we'll be getting started here in just a moment. All right, we are right at two o'clock. So to be timely and respectable of tend to respect everyone's time, let's go ahead and get started here today. So welcome everyone to the 2023 Public Input annual Certification event. We are gonna be diving into session two today. Excited to do that and just have a couple housekeeping things I wanted to dive into as we kick things off. First things first, session one, we had some feedback that our screen resolution was a little bit tough. We've got that solved and we will be addressing that learning. Number two was that it would be very helpful to have a a third or a third person, a facilitator, be able to man the chat and respond to things live so people can kind of keep up if they have any questions. And we're very fortunate to have someone volunteer their time here today to join us. I'm very excited about that. I'll be introducing them to you in just a moment. So as we kick things off, I'll just do quick introductions. First O Up is Sophie, which many of you met her in the first session. But Sophie, go ahead and tell folks you know what team you're on here at Public Input.
Excellent. Yeah, last time Sophie kind of led me in building and this time I'll be leading Sophie in building out these solutions. So we're gonna kind of switch roles a little bit here today. Keep it fun for everyone. Next up joining us as our facilitator, which thank you, thank you, thank you is Amy. Amy is our customer onboarding manager. And Amy, tell us a little about your role here and, and actually I know we have a ton of clients on on the participating in the event and so Amy May be a familiar face to many of you.
Hi. Yeah, so I'm Amy and I am the customers onboarding manager. I also do a lot of the training as well, so I'm sure I will see some familiar names in the chat here. So essentially during the, during the certification, if you have any questions, go ahead and throw them in the chat. If I can't answer them immediately, I'm gonna take note of your name and send you an email after the event.
How much better is that than the process we had last session? So thank you Amy. This is fantastic. Also, last but certainly not least, we've got Jay Dawkins, founder and CEO over here at Public Input. He's joining us today to kind of kick off and frame up the session. And so Jay, welcome.
Thanks me. Yeah, hey, it's great to be here and be part of this. Really excited to see the group that has come together for this. And yeah, it's pretty wild from our humble beginnings in in 2014, just throwing together some solutions to bring some more people into the process that this many folks can leverage public input to do their work and to build better relationships with the community. So thank you for being here and yeah, excited for what we're gonna cover today. Yeah, really important stuff.
Yeah, thank you Jay. And just a little background on Jay. I mean, Jay's been in this field. He started out as consultant. He's a licensed pe so he knows a lot of this work is kind of where this all came from. He saw the need and started creating a platform and then kind of spiraled into what it is today and serving over 200 government agencies, thousands of users monthly. And it's just been a lot of fun. So I will go ahead and make sure we frame things up before we get into a kind of like the, the bulk of what we'll be diving into today, which is session two of our participate, our participant packet. So gimme one moment while I pull a couple things up to help you all get your bearings. And as I do, you'll notice bef below our meeting, one thing that you can do with our public input virtual meetings platform is you can kind of create some engagement opportunities.
Absolutely. Thank you, Merv. Yeah, so the whole idea of today is to, to look at different formats of engagement. And really when we think about different formats, we're talking about multimodal engagement. Historically, getting mixed mode or multi-mode responses is gonna lead to better sample and, and better feedback overall. So our, our philosophy of public input is that every additional format through which you can engage people in your community broadens the potential pool of voices and respondents that you're gonna hear from. And that's important for a number of reasons. Obviously, what we want to hear from a broad representative sample of the community, but hopefully the diversity of voices matter too. So for every different format, we're potentially engaging people that have different preferences for how they engage. So from a public input perspective, we think the technology should be here to make that easy. If you do this manually, you know, setting up additional like phone and text and in person or, or print options through a traditional process, add hours and hours at the beginning of your process.
And of course at the end you've gotta try to bring this stuff together. So, you know, our whole approach there is just to make the addition of those other formats almost automatic or, you know, very low friction to add. So if you're enabling these things, we're gonna walk through how to do that today, how to set some that stuff up. The, a little bit of philosophy behind that, like what to expect, don't necessarily expect a ton of volume. I think that's maybe one of the, the key things we want to caveat is most of your volumes probably gonna come through your online survey, maybe through email. It's more about hearing from voices that are not gonna come through those channels. So when we think about text, and let's say we have a, a text engagement with the community and get a thousand people to participate online, you look at your text numbers and you know, gosh, we, we've got 15 people to participate via text only, like, like three of those were in a foreign language.
My gosh, that's actually a really great thing. So for every, if we didn't do that, those 15 voices may not have been heard at all. Those are, those are voices that have been silenced in our process. Those are perspectives that we don't get, get to add to the mix and, and then we can't point back to our results and really have confidence that we've heard from a broad array of people. So ultimately as you do this, you're, you're making your process better and, and we are here to make it easier to deliver that a good process. And of course, on the, the tail end of that, bring it all together in one place so you can understand the result of all of this should be able to, you can have confidence in the data you've collected and you can also go to your stakeholders, whether that be your client or that be your city or county manager or for MPOs and dots, even if it's prep, prepping for FHWA or FTA to review your data and your information. You have confidence and you can point to your process. So we're super excited to, to make that easy and to cover some of these today. Hopefully this will be new for a lot of you or, and if, if it's familiar, maybe we'll find a few things that you didn't know about so that I'll hand it back to me and Sophie then to walk through some of these options.
Thanks so much Jay. And I like the, the point that you mentioned there around, you know, these may not be high volume, like if we enable text participation, we may not see a lot of volume in some of that. Maybe not as much as we would see if we, if those folks or compared to our online participation, but it's still, it's a, it's an additional voice that has been heard and someone that may have been silenced, like you said, if we didn't enable those options. So just, yeah, keep that in mind is like, this is what it's all about, making sure that everyone has a voice and can participate in the process. Thanks Jay. All right, sofa, I think you'll be sharing your screen here today. Oh, and by the way, I think some folks are being a little bit, I need to remove the pin from j. Sorry about that. Alright, so for you sharing your screen.
So another good way to use the platform and because some of the trails may have been in low bandwidth area, they use the text message feature. Got great participation, it's fantastic project. All right, cool. So we did this, we created a new segment. Let's go ahead and add that keyword. Now Sophie's Sophie's Park is what's going to start this text message or start this survey. Okay, so next up we would like to go ahead and review your default questions. Now this is really important. Do you remember we created a couple questions that were map based questions. Now those are not going to be very easy to, they're, they don't turn into a text participate version very well. And so what are your thoughts on your parks? That second one down a hundred percent, that's easy. That's just a, we can keep that one. But where do you live?
We're expecting to receive a pin on a map or some kind of la long to be able to do that. That one's not gonna work out for us. So let's go ahead and disable that one and then the one below it, where would you like to park? Again, that's another mapping question, so let's disable that one as well. Now keep in mind that we could, we decided that this feature was important. We could go back and edit those questions, make them different types of questions, like please provide your address, your home address and then someone could text in and still participate with that. And then below there you can see our demographics module already created there with the the different responses. So this is already set up for us, we don't need to do anything on that. Perfect. So I don't know if you need to scroll down, scroll up. Is there anything to save here Sophie? I think we're good.
I think we're good. Yeah, I'll just add to you were kind of talking about it with that trailhead where they had used a couple different keywords. This is just especially great too if you're thinking about the Audi, the type of audience you wanna engage. Maybe if you're trying to engage people as they're on the go, since we're talking about a park here, we wanna capture people who are park users or maybe who are just active. So maybe we post stickers and flyers in other parks around the area of our project and that's just the kind of the, the strategy that would be best practice here. And actually I live in Charlotte, North Carolina and last summer there was an effort to rename a street down here in our downtown area and I live on that street. So it was super cool to go out and get my morning coffee and see signs saying, Hey, we're renaming this street, text us your, your name suggestions. So it was just a really cool kind of real life example. Shout out to our Charlotte practitioners over there.
Hey there's, and there's a, a group of 'em on. So fantastic. Nice work y'all. And, and great to see public input like in the wild. I can't tell you. It's exciting when it happens. So thank you for, for being great practitioners over there and leveraging some of the kind of more seldomly used features, but very powerful as well. Perfect. Thanks Sophie. And actually Sophie, that was perfect cuz you bought me some time because the next part of this is go ahead and text in and take your survey, test it out, see if you like the sequence. If not you can change your sequence of your questions to make it the way that you'd like to. But I'm gonna go ahead and test this right now. I'm texting Sophie's Park to that phone number.
So it's pretty, it's a wave to, sometimes we want to, I don't know, accept comments but ma vet 'em a little bit and then we can do that through the platform or just make sure that comments don't have curse words or something before we play them live into a meeting. Perfect. We'll go ahead and save those settings and then we're gonna call in and listen to what this sounds like And y'all, I am not sure, just hear me. I'm from Iowa guys. I just said y'all, I live in, I live in North Carolina now, so I don't know guess it's rubbing off on me. All right, phone number (855) 925-2801. When I go ahead and hit call, put this on speaker phone
Hello, this is Michael Murphy. I'm a resident here and I think that parks are very important, but I'd like to make sure that we keep in mind public safety for our children. We need to have good fences and good locking gates so that our chi children can't wander out of the space. Thank you so much for, for that consideration and I'd like this to be part of the public record. Bye-bye. Perfect. So I just left the voicemail and that's how that works. And you could actually hear Sophie's text there at the very beginning, an intro message, please leave your feedback. It could have been like, Sophie is fantastic and then we would all know that that's exactly what Sophie wrote in there, right? Perfect. So one thing that's gonna happen, I think we can, do you see that little refresh button where it's his phone comments?
Let's go ahead and hit that refresh and see if that comment is actually coming in. So there's, y'all are welcome to text message me, but that is my phone number there. You can say hi if you'd like, but I text message in, it's gonna transcribe that comment that was just received. Another option that we have is that we can set it up so every time we receive a voicemail comment we receive an email with the com with a comment attached as well so that we are able to respond back to them pretty quickly. So great, great feature, we'll see it transcribed in a moment, maybe we'll pop back over and check that out. But again, we're enabling folks that may not have access to internet to be able to voice an opinion or make a comment about a project. Is it, you know, the, is it the best way to make sure that we, they can take the entire survey?
No, they can't take the survey by voice message, but they can at least let us know their thoughts and share some things about it if it's important to them. And again, it's opening the opportunity for folks that may not have access to internet. That's a fantastic tool as well. Perfect. We're gonna go to our social tab next, Sophie. So let's go ahead and kind of, we're, we're walking through our tabs here and this social tab is good. If we are trying to capture discussions and things that are happening about our project and we want to associate it with maybe some comments from this project or different information, we can do that. So for example, if your agency has made some posts or someone's making posts about, we can grab those posts and associate them with this project so we can capture those comments and Sophie's gonna show us exactly how to do that. Yeah,
Yeah, just time out. If you are seeing this on a feed, you would go over that next to it, you see that one day next you'd actually side click that and then there's a, there's a thing that says copy save link address. And because Sophie's already done that, you're seeing this where it's just this post. But if you're seeing it in a feed, you can't just grab the url, you're gonna need to go there and grab that copy, that address. So just a little additional information there.
And the nice thing about hybrid meeting is it's gonna have this virtual option like you're participating in here today, but it's also going to have a, a location option if you have some folks meeting in person. We don't need to put a location in there, but yeah, let's go ahead and add a date and time for the project for the meeting. Actually Sophie, I lied to you. You need to add adult meeting location. Oh yeah, sorry. Yeah, you can pick someplace. Easy street. Love
Then you can, let's see what else we have. Add a tag for a participant so that we know, maybe call it like meeting one or something. Add a tag and then add a public description, right? This is where it gets fun and I know we've got a ton of clients are cons, you know, current clients on the call that have used this feature. So some of this may be a little bit redundant, but I do want to show a little what's below like these additional options. So under display, more under display options, select text message and in and include, include in project milestones. So we're gonna click those two. Perfect. What this is gonna do is gonna add us to the timeline that we created with the milestones and then when we're adding text message, it's gonna allow people to text in to make a comment about the project simply by text messaging.
Actually we have that feature on today. You, you might be able to, I think we have it on for this meeting. You might be able to try that if you want to, if you scroll up above the meeting that's streaming live, there's some other options and you may be able to comment through those features as well. Perfect. Let's go ahead and make comments public and under more comment options, let's do, when are they accepted from the dropdown menu, select always and then toggle on, allow users to include attachments. And then let's create, let's allow a pdf.
So this can be, if we want to allow people to add resources when they're making a comment about a meeting, we can go ahead and do this. Is there some options for us to be able to do that? So I just wanna make sure that everyone's available, everyone is aware of that. Perfect. Now under event registration, you want to go ahead and enable registration. I actually did that for this event because I want to have an understanding of like who has participated live. So I put that on there so people have to respond or have to put in a little bit of information. So I know who actually participated live. This is an a very common option here. Under more registration options, go ahead and toggle on send meeting, registration, confirmation, email and toggle on reminder four hours before. So if you allow people to register for your meetings prior, you can allow public input to do the heavy lifting to make sure that as many registrants, as many people that registered show up.
As I mentioned yesterday, we had, or on Monday we had about 250 people sign up. Now these are optional sessions, but we know that only about 110 people participated live. So just something to keep in mind, how do we make sure that more people come? This is one way that you can allow public input so you don't have to be thinking about sending those reminder emails. Have us do that for you. Perfect. Now let's go ahead and let's see what I have. I don't have anything for registration, but you can see you can require different things. We talked about that a little bit where you can make sure things are some certain things are required. Excellent. Now under conferencing service there's a number of different options. You see here, the most common and the one we're using here today is Zoom. Let's go ahead and select Zoom for the conferencing option.
What we can do here is name the kiosk, whatever we'd like. And then under kiosk type, we're going to select event sign in screen. And then we're gonna associate the responses with the meeting that we have. And we've already select that. That's perfect. Add a custom opening screen content. Thanks so much for stopping by, we're glad you're here. Those types of things. And under fields to collect, you can go ahead and select show all. So we can capture as much information as required. It may not make sense to connect that to, to do first name, last name and name. That's totally my bad on editing this document. But yes, this is fine. Nicely done Sophie. If you all do this, that's perfectly fine. We do know that some in-person events require like an address, right? We need to know that you're a resident so you can make those things required. Maybe name and addresses required, but the other ones are optional. So we can go ahead and do that and then edit other options as desired. And then click save.
So this is actually what that looks like if you, yeah, turn that off there. This is what it would look like. Essentially you could have this on like a, a, you know, a Chromebook or something like this so people can sign in. Now the reason why I say Chromebook is a lot of times people think something mobile, they think tablet, but not everyone's comfortable typing on a tablet. So let's be mindful of the people that we may be users. We can actually have, you know, little low dollar laptops now that are just, you know, internet based Chromebooks are fantastic option. And allow people to approach that as kind of like a kiosk and sign in to the meeting. An additional option is you have someone welcoming folks and then you're keying them in one at a time as well. So this is that kiosk. I just wanna make sure that everyone knew that this was available since we associate it with the meeting. Everyone that signs in here will be logged in as an attendee for that meeting as a part of our records. Okay. All right. And then we're gonna add a new step to our project. So we're done here and let's go ahead and go up to the our page and survey. And this is where we were, remember we did this last week where we created our step options. Let's scroll down a little bit and let's add a new step. We're gonna call that one meeting.
We're gonna add our meeting to that tab. And so you'll find that under add other and then meeting or event, you can click that and if you've got more than one, you pick the one you want and then you just say add event. Now let's take a look at what this looks like Sophie.
Sure. Up here. So we've got our tabs and then we can see this newly added meeting tab. If we click that, we'll see the new meeting here, we'll see all of those different participate options that we enabled, including the text option. We'll see the information that we entered or the meeting description here. And then we'll also see of course the registration page for this meeting too.
Love it. And then again, people can say if they're gonna be participating virtually or live as well or in person live, hopefully they're live for both of them, right? But, and then they can hit registered. The additional thing that we did is remember how we said add it to our milestones. You'll see there the timeline that we had built. That's that little event is there and we can go in and edit that slightly if we want to move it or, or whatever. We can change the location of it in our timeline. Perfect. Sophie did a great job. Did we miss anything?
Fantastic. Yes. Here, here's the thing I want to urge everyone. This is basically we're done with session two. So round of applause for everybody that has been able to follow along. And if not, you can get this replay right after this video and go ahead and maybe rewatch se sections. If you do have questions, put 'em in the chat box there. I'm gonna show my my face there. Welcome back everybody. If you do have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. We, we still have Amy here helping out. And before I welcome Amy in to navigate us with any question, question responses, I wanna remind everyone and it does say it in our participant, participant packet, now is the time to share your project with some colleagues, with other folks because in the next in on the session on Friday, we are going to be going over a data analysis, comment analysis, a couple other different features there.
Oh, perfect. Yeah, able to. So let me scroll up here before we kind of just jump right into it. So in the project dashboard you'll head back over to your settings tab and you'll scroll down past custom links and you'll see that there is a section here for tags. We can add Sophie as a tag. And when you're doing this, it's really important to hit the enter key. That's how that tag will actually get created. And then that's it.
Nice. Thank you Sophie. I was so glad. Thank you. The answer to that, that when I followed the process, I know the different pieces, but it like going back at same issue that Kevin had is like, how do I fix it if I've gone too far? Yes. Thank you Amy for bringing that up. What else?
Yeah, so let me share my screen here again, unless I'm still, no, I'm not sharing. So what happens is that the Google Chrome browser or your browser usually picks up the fact that it's another language, then your default language that you've said on your browser. So for example, when I open up this Spanish link here, we'll see a popup from the browser itself. It's not a public input popup, it's just a, here we go. Here's a good example. Hopefully everybody can see this right here. We can see it's coming from Google. It says it's translated in Spanish. Let me close out this. We can say that there's a couple options here. If you just hit this X right here, and because this is obviously translated with that language link, it should translate your page back to English.
So in this case we're actually looking at the Spanish version. But yeah, what would happen if, if you navigated back over to your English version, if you don't click that X, your English version might be showing in Spanish. And it's simply because the browser itself was like, Hey, you must be a Spanish speaker. I'm gonna translate everything into Spanish for you. And we're not, we're just trying to be mindful of our Spanish speakers, so we don't want those automatic translations to happen. And so we can go ahead and turn it off with that button that Sophie just showed. So I've totally experienced that myself. And I think it might have actually happened on the, when we were jumping back and forth while we were doing this, if you go back and watch the replay, you'll see Sophie go up and click that X when she goes back to her original project.
All right, I have one last one I think. So I think I'm, I think I'm understanding what they are sharing is about the, the timeline or the meetings. So a lot of questions about why didn't the meeting show up in my timeline and the timeline being created in the sidebar. And I think the answer to that really is, is that that's something that would be manually added and I'm not sure if they're having that issue, but maybe Sophie you can share how to add meeting information to, to a timeline.
Okay. No, I was just gonna say make sure that you did, you know, the first thing would be to check that you included that in the project milestones that was kind of a third option. It's a little bit hidden when we're setting up that meeting. So let me show you again where that is and if that's not the, if that's not necessarily what it is, then Michael, do you have a another suggestions?
And I thought it'd be cool if people put pins on maps this time. Instead of saying in the chat where you're coming in from, you can drop a pin on a map and let us know where you're coming from here live today. And we can kind of see this smattering across the United States and maybe even into Canada for some of the folks that are participating here today. So you can do that while I pull this up real quick, I'm gonna stop sharing for a moment cause I had a fancy sharing option on which I was afraid I'm not gonna be able to share my screen. Well go ahead and pull this up.
And here we are. Here we go. All right, pull this over. Okay, this is where you should be, or something very similar to this. It should say public input certification event at the top and this, then after that it should say the name of your firm or the organization that you're working with, and that's where you're gonna want to build. Last week we had a couple folks build, a couple of our clients built in their, their own backend, which is totally cool, no problem, didn't break anything. Our team is actually gonna help move those projects over into the correct space. And the reason is you may not have full access to everything that we're gonna be going over here today. And we just wanna make sure, or actually throughout the entire process, we just wanna make sure that you don't run into any licensing roadblocks or maybe maybe you don't have full privileges on your account.
And so working in this environment will be the best one for you. Now, you won't see as many projects as we see here. And again, it won't say public input here. It'll say the name of your firm. And then what you're gonna want to do is click the project that you started last week. If you haven't participated in session one yet, you're more than welcome to hang out with us and ask any questions. Just know that you may not be able to do everything that we're doing here today, because we're actually building on what we started in session one. So you're gonna want to get to that environment and start, get that pulled up and get ready to start building. And then lastly, what are we getting into? We are getting into the certification event packet. And by the way, our marketing team did a job on this.
I just wanna say like the fact that you can just click here and it gets you right to it is just like, come on, don't we have an awesome marketing team? So we are getting into session two here today, and we're just following these instructions. And so again, today is all about adding, oh, enabling equity and additional accessibility to our projects and why it's so important. And to help frame up why this is important, best practice as part of an engagement effort. Jay is gonna kick us off by adding a little context and then he'll send it back over to, to Sophie and I to just go ahead and start building out and following the instructions. Thanks, Jack.
That right now. Perfect. I think people are being a little bashful about putting a pin on a map. It looks like we've got 86 current viewers hanging out here with us today. And so if you haven't done yet, just scroll down a little bit, toss the pin on that map, we can see where you're hanging out with us from and you can even leave a little comment, say hi to folks. All right, total tangent, but let's get to it here today. Thank you Sophie. So Sophie's gonna be building for us today and like I said, completing or kind of continuing on what we had done. And as Jay mentioned, it's about adding additional equity and accessibility to our project effort. And to do that, we're gonna start with one of the tabs there that says text our text tab there. Let's go ahead and hit that text tab.
And what we're gonna do here is we're gonna enable, go ahead and toggle that enable SMS for this question set. What I'd like you to do is just go ahead and say edit number and you should be able to pick a number from the dropdown menu there. And by the way, you all may have different numbers in actually for this, you'll all have the same in your private client accounts. You may have a number of different options with public input. You can get local numbers and, and just a number of different features there. So just heads up on that. But yeah, you can go ahead and pick one of those and then let's go ahead and add a pre-survey message to folks.
And what this is, is when someone texts in to begin a survey, they will then see this prompt. It's like, hey, thanks so much for joining here. Please leave your feedback. Excellent. And then go ahead and check, send a custom. Yeah, perfect. And then whatever you'd like to say on completion, that's fantastic. Now here's the thing is like if you, if you have a question set and you don't do this, then they'll, they'll reply to the last question and they won't even know that they finished the survey. So this is a great thing to make sure you do here. And then also I've seen folks do things like add, hey, we plan on summarizing the data next month and or you know, give them a date and then we will be back in touch with everybody to summarize our learnings and you can part, we'll let you know when those are posted or something and you can do that with our platform.
We'll talk about that in a moment. Alright, thank you Sophie. Let's go ahead and click save settings. Cool. And then what we need to do is create a keyword. Now what this keyword does is initiates the survey. So go ahead and perfect. We're gonna do Sophie Park. Perfect. And then you can have this be a segment. Now this is sort of like the custom URLs that we built in that you can have as many of these as you'd like. You can add them to a segment. Actually there was a big master parks program that was going on, or excuse me, parks master plan that was going on. And they used a different keyword at different entryways to trail heads. And the interesting thing for for that was they knew the trails people were using or frequenting because of the way that they came into or participated in the mess in the, in the project.
So I don't know this, this is so not the way I want to do it. I was gonna show you, I can't show you, but this just happened. I've got the first question which asks, it says please leave your feedback, what features are important for a park. And if we scroll down or scroll up just slightly, we're gonna see, oh the other way I wanna see that question. We're gonna see that, that is the first question. So I'm gonna go ahead and text one as my response. I think one, I think tree cover is, is important and again, you could text more than one if we would like and then it asks us our, the next question there. So fantastic, we've got that rolling and if I go below you can see, well we don't have to go all the way down there, but you can actually see my response to that question right there. So fantastic. This I take, I took another survey. So because I'm a frequent user, you guys see my past one but in our results will only be my response to that. Perfect.
Back up. Hey, hey, you can see it's pulling up the CRM data too next to it. We don't need to go down there, but if, if you have participated in the past you will see that, that it's gonna pull that data. So while I participated, cuz my phone is already registered to public input or I've participated in another project, you can see all of that information. So excellent, great job. So, and I'll pause for a moment, see if we're catching up. I know that Amy is kind of hanging out with us. Let's see if Amy has anything that we need to know about before we get into anything else. Looking for our chat here.
Excellent. Looks like things are good so far so good. Again, if you have any questions go ahead and tag them and she'll be, Amy will be communicating with us behind the scenes just to keep things rolling. Lastly, let's go ahead and flip over to phone. Ch phone tab. Someone's asking about data charges. There are some different rates for for text messaging and just so plan for that for your projects. But I'll be honest, pretty low cost a way to engage the public. So yeah, definitely there is some direct expense and you can actually buy credits if you're a public input user you can actually hop into the backend and just buy the credits you need with a credit card or a P card or something. Super easy to be able to do that and have what you need. Excellent. Let's roll over to phone tab.
Thank you. Let's enable phone and then already has enable voicemail comments on it. Let's go ahead and customize, go ahead and hit the settings button and we're gonna customize our voicemail intro. So let's say you wanted to add a little bit of more context about this Sophie's Perfect Parks program and in this case should say please leave your feedback, but you can always add, add additional information. Like just a reminder, we've got a public meeting coming up, you could do something like that and you can put that in there. Perfect. Let's limit to 60 seconds. And this is useful, especially if you've got public meetings and let's say they only have three minutes, we can go ahead and limit them using the platform here. So that one thing our platform can do is you can accept comments, we actually get the sound bite and you can replay those into live meetings like you're attending here today.
Awesome. Yeah, thanks. Thanks Michael. Yeah, yeah that's important. But if you have the address or if you're, you know, if you're seeing it in this way, then you can can grab up there, run up to the top, let's go back here and let's paste that in there and then we can change the source as well. So maybe this is an Instagram post or a Twitter post or even next door. You can all associate posts from all of those different social media sources
And let's say analyze post text as comments. I love this feature because what that's gonna do is it's going to pull in comments that are from the, that social on that social medium and at least on Facebook and be able to drop that into and be able to pull those comments in so that we can analyze them within our, you know, sentiment analysis and things like this. So, and then, yeah, last step is go ahead and click capture post and thanks for walking us through that. And you know, that's been done because you can kind of see this associated posts associated social posts. So that one there is the Facebook one and then the one below it is the YouTube video that I embedded on that first welcome page if you guys have, you know, gone over and checked it out. It's, it's a pretty funny video from Parks and Rec so it's hilarious. Let me go ahead, there's a couple comments before we move on to the next one. I wanna make sure that we, we take a look at those. And Amy, if you're in here you can go ahead and if you wanna hop in don't hesitate to interrupt.
She yeah, what, sorry, I have too many screens open. Sarah was talking about how she missed how to click the sample default questions. She said she couldn't see any samples, save any sample options to save or delete. Perfect. And hoping that we can look through that again if that's okay.
Thank you. That's excellent Sophie, if you mind hopping over there to text and we can go look at that again. Also for Nextdoor we don't automatically capture nextdoor comments, but you can associate a post just for your records. So when you're finding, when you want to export records or information about your project, you can associate different stuff there so that at least you have the link where you can go find the information that was said, but it does not automatically pull comments like it does for YouTube and Facebook. And if there's additional questions then we can add some additional color, but I did want to mention that. Perfect. So let's scroll up slightly and the particular user said that they didn't see any default questions. If you have already made questions in your page and survey, which we did in session one, when you go up and you enable text message there, that little toggle that's gonna automatically populate those little bubbles. So if you toggle that on, you'll see those bubbles populate below and then you'll get all these additional options. If you're not seeing that and that didn't work out for you, go ahead and, and let Amy know and we can make sure that we get some additional assistance for you if there's something going on there. But usually that's just what you need to do to be able to see that. Perfect. Thanks Amy. You're awesome. Perfect. Thanks for popping in there.
Perfect. Let's look at the next section. There is going to be project settings and we're gonna do something that is like probably our most commonly used kind of enabling additional equity feature. And we're gonna be creating another link in an addition in a, in another language and we're gonna talk about why that's so important and even show a some a customer example. So go ahead Sophie and if you would please create a new custom link in another language or a language other than English, Spanish. Also, a lot of times, I'm not thrown Sophie under the bus here, but a lot of times you'll put like es, I've seen people put, I think it's s p for Espanol instead of Spanish so that people know that's, it's like in their language as well. We don't have to, you can add it to a custom segment and we know how important that is. So we know we can track how people are engaging with us. So if you want to go ahead and I don't know if there's a Spanish segment or something, you can create one or love it,
Let's do it specifically for this one. Oh no, no, perfect. Yeah, no, you got it. You got it. And let's create that link. Cool. Now what we just did there was created a a custom destination for people in Spanish so everyone knows or has, you know, in this space they know that there's usually the option where you can translate a page from English to another language using Google. Sometimes the context of what we're trying to communicate gets lost in translation. Quite literally. What we can do leveraging the public input platform is create additional language options with specific URL destinations at those destinations. We can edit the translation. So that is the, the context of what we're trying to communicate is actually received. And so Sophie, can you show how we can edit the translation on that page?
Yeah, absolutely. You're gonna wanna click the gear icon next to that new language link that you created and then it's gonna open up your page in the kind of how the resident would see it. And it's translated now to Spanish of course cuz we set the language at Spanish and if we want to, maybe we see something here that wasn't interpreted correctly or maybe there's a better word for it in Spanish than you know the English equivalent, we can actually use our click to translate button here and we can just highlight maybe this sentence right here doesn't make a whole lot of sense. We'll highlight that sentence, it'll open up our translation kind of form or editor here. We can make any changes we want to this and then save it from there.
Yeah, this is fantastic if, if you all have created additional pages or project pages or things like this, you know that this can be a big bear and it also can be quite expensive to manage, especially if you're putting hours into duplicating something you've already done. I go ahead and close out of this, I wanna show one additional thing and you all may not be able to see this because the way our, I think our, our image may be above it. Let me actually turn off my video that may help. What you can see here is a translator link. And so you can imagine you've got someone that you use for translation services and you want them to go through this instead of like passing them a Word document that you then need to copy and paste, you can actually just kick them this, this unique link.
You can kick 'em that link and they do not need to log in to public input to be able to make the same or get access to the same editor that Sophie just showed you. And so this is a fantastic tool. It can really lower translation costs and again, increase accessibility and equity for those that are, you know, maybe Lang English is a second language or just low English proficiency. This is a fantastic tool. Go ahead and close that. We do call this last mile language translation. And by the way, I'm totally off script. This part of it is not something that you need to go in and make any additional edits. The only thing we do require is for you to create that additional link. And Sophie, if you go back as long as when you look at your project, you've got two links there. One is English and one is Spanish. You've met the requirements for certification. Just wanted you to know all of the power that's behind that tiny little gear right next to Spanish. And then I believe, Sophie, do you have an example of a a client actually using this in practice?
Yeah, let me pull it up here. Sorry, it's hiding behind my zoom bar. I'll pull the screen back up. Yeah, so King County is one of our clients out in, they encompass Seattle, so very super diverse area. Here is a, one of their surveys, one of their projects here that they actually use this translation for. So we scroll down here, we can see they've created probably seven or you know, eight or so different language links to accommodate every single language that's spoken in their community. So I I just, we, we kinda like to brag about King County and their use of the translation feature here. So interesting. This is really, really great to see.
Yeah, certainly best practice for those that have diverse communities and really want to kind of take that additional step. This is one way that you can do it at literally no additional cost as long as you have the license level that allows this deeper level of translation. It is, you can have as many project pages as you need and that goes for consultants as well, for the consultants on the call. If you license public input for a, for a single project, you can create these additional links and there is not an extra charge on those. So just keep that in mind for those that are, are thinking about using some of this. I know that there are other platforms that they do, it can be quite costly to add additional languages and, and this public input makes it pretty simple. Excellent. All right, well we are pretty good on time, so I'm glad to see that we have one additional section that we're gonna be getting into together and this is our meetings and offline tab. What we're gonna do is the same thing that I did to create the environment that we are now participating in and that's creating a virtual meeting. So let's go ahead and click on that tab and then go add a new meeting or event. Perfect. We're gonna start from scratch. Let me go ahead and name it whatever you'd like.
And there's a couple things you should be aware of. There's a way that you can create your own meeting and then add in the links and some information about your meeting so that public input can call into it and create the meeting transcription and things. Now there's a much easier way to do that and that's to go ahead and said create a meeting automatically. And then all you need to do associate your Zoom account with public input and you don't need to do that, I just wanted you to be aware of it. Go ahead and click that one here. You can actually allow it to create the meeting. But then you can also, these are, I just connected mine and these are some meetings that I have coming up. And so you can actually say, oh this meeting is about this one. So call into this vo call into this meeting when it's happening.
So anyways, this makes it super easy. I'd urge any current client that's using it. This is kind of like the, the foolproof way to do it. It's pretty easy and you create the zoom meeting automatically, it's fantastic. Perfect. Now under videos provider, you can just pick one. Today we're using YouTube. And the thing like, the thing I like about YouTube is that you can go get your own YouTube livestream feed or if you go over to the other side, you can have YouTube create the speed, the it for me. And if you associate your YouTube account, you can actually select it from the dropdown menu and this will automatically go live on your YouTube account. We have a number of clients that are doing that, some folks still use ours. The downside of using public input is you actually can't edit the videos after you've done your meeting.
And I know some people like to put a splash page or maybe trim it or something like this, which if you use public input you're not able to do that. There may be a, I shouldn't say no because we do have some professional service options where we may have a team that could actually do some of that for you if it's required, but typically not, not part of our standard licensing. Perfect. Go ahead and click save. And that's all we needed to do on creating the meeting. Now what this is gonna do is create a meeting link there for us and not a link. Basically the creates a meeting event for us and then we could add it to our page if we wanted to. Like I have on the page that you're on right now. Perfect. Now we're gonna do something that we didn't do last time. We're gonna actually look at the kiosks. So what a kiosk is, is let's say we want to create an opportunity for an in-person for people to make a digital record, like a digital sign-in to a in-person meeting. We can still use public input. Again, it's a, it's a way to enable an in like a, an in-person event, create a digital record so that it's, you know, memorialized for ongoing purposes. Let's go ahead and create a new kiosk.
Having some data in there is gonna help us just kind of understand it a little bit deeper and actually see how some of this actually functions and works. If you did use social posts that have comments on 'em, either Facebook or YouTube, our platform will go, go gather some of those comments. So you may like ours, I think right now ours has like 50 comments and it came from a post, maybe a Facebook post or something that we had tagged. So anyways, a way to get comments you can kind of cheat a little bit and grab some comments from the public and put it in there also. But for sure share your meetings cuz you want fo or share this link cuz you want folks to participate so that you can see we're gonna create some different data sets and we create pie charts for multi, you know, multi-select questions and different things like this. So the more data you have, the more fun the next session's gonna be. So don't hesitate to share this with your colleagues and all. And with that I'm done, but I know that Amy was likely busy in the chat helping you all. Amy is there anything that we missed that we need to go back to, to make, make sure we add clarity?
I have too many screens up right now. No, I think the big thing that has come up was that when folks were going through their texting, they were testing out their own text project, which is what I always recommended. Always testing everything yourself to see what it feels like. They were running into the problem that when they hit a question or when they hit the answer one ever, it would bring them to a completely different survey.
Nice. Thanks. I appreciate that Amy. And thanks for letting folks know. Cause if anybody tried that and and had that trouble, you know what's happening. But we've got thousands of users and we've got an awesome support team, success team and product team and we'll make sure that we get that cleaned up for you all. So go ahead and test it so you know the experience, but if you do run into something, make sure you let us know and we can get some things cleaned up for you also. Yes, always test right Amy? Always test it before you go live to the public. Super important.
Now it's, yeah, it's right under there so you can need to toggle that one on for it to show up automatically. Now that's not the only way you can do it. We can go back to our page and survey editor and remember we added those milestones, so let's go ahead and go back to the sidebar and edit those. Edit that there and that's where we can, you could add something here where you wanted to embed it. So you'd add a milestone and then you would just create some additional information about your project, about the event. So maybe you have a, a link to it or something like this. But you can basically just create a new milestone and then edit the way that you wanted it to to edit it. Right now this one was created for me because I toggled it on. If you've already, if you haven't done that, then you can go ahead and add a new milestone and then edit the milestone to provide information about the project itself.
Well, beans, that's for Amy actually. I wanna make sure we're good to go. Amy's hustling over there responding to questions, but, but everybody, we are at time or about at time. We probably have room for maybe one if you do have one. But I want to just let everyone know we will have this replay, we'll keep recording here just for a couple more minutes. But if you need to drop off, cuz we've completed the session, just wanna remind everyone to make sure that you sign up for, or make sure you share your, your project. Also, if you are struggling with a couple things, we do have office hours that you can attend tomorrow. I think they're at 10 o'clock. Just check your participant packet. You have some information there about where you can hop into a Zoom meeting with one of us and just ask any questions and get some coaching.
And then again, on Friday we're meeting at the same time, two o'clock eastern time. That is a session like this one that is not required, but we would love your participation. And then Friday the 10th is right before everything is due at midnight that night. There is a required session at two o'clock next Friday. And that's because we're gonna be showing a bunch of things. I talked about that last week, but make sure that you've put that on your calendar cause we need you to be there for that one. We'll be showing some cool features that we're not able to get into together here. And so it should be a fun time and wanna make sure that we've got that on your calendar. Amy, I'm giving it to you to close us out. Anything else?
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