PublicInput Blog
Read best practices on everything related to community engagement.
Isn’t it time public engagement tapped the power of local media?
Since the dawn of digital engagement tools, public engagement has suffered from an echo chamber effect where a small handful of people dominate both the online and offline public involvement process. This makes outreach a key piece of any public involvement effort....
Isn’t it time public engagement tapped the power of local media?
The failure of “if you build it they will come”
Since the dawn of digital engagement tools, public engagement has ...
A Data Dashboard for Civic Engagement
To simplify data reporting and sharing, PublicInput.com partnered with Reach to develop the all-new Data Dashboard tool. The dashboard is a central toolkit to find and share insights from the data collected through text messaging, embedded news surveys, EdNC.org, paper surveys, and offline events. It also makes it easier for our reporters and researchers to access the data and stories.The dashboard is designed to bring together the data collected through Reach along with related public datasets, such as US Census Data. The results are highly visual insights that can be shared on social media or embedded on the web.
Innovators Wanted: Now accepting beta partners for ‘Mayor Mode’
We’re keeping this beta so we can focus our effort and attention on a handful of users interested in developing a dashboard for their stakeholders — such as the mayor, council, or city manager...
Two things I learned at 3CMA
Though we were only in Anaheim for 3 days, and got a cumulative 12 hours of sleep, we met a ton of great people and were reminded of why PublicInput’s work matters...
What do I do with all these emails?!
We had provided the public with clean, low-friction input channels—a mobile friendly online survey, targeted social media posts, and live meeting voting. But somehow, residents felt compelled to email support@publicinput.comwith their comments...
Introducing PublicInput.com Kiosk Mode
Whether town hall meetings, petitions, hand-written letters, social media, online forums, and the dreaded paper form — conveying information from citizens to leaders is no simple task.At PublicInput.com, our focus has been tying together the many input channels into one dashboard to simplify the process for both citizens and agencies...
How to get the most out of your online surveys
We are all about public engagement at PublicInput.com, but more importantly effective public engagement. An important step of this is lowering the barrier to getting people’s input. So the question was posed, “are we getting the most out of our online surveys?”As the Lead Data Scientist at PublicInput…I got excited. We hit the data and here are some of the high level points we came up with....
Visualizing Demography to quantify public engagement success
We hear the question almost weekly from clients doing public outreach on on planning initiatives and public projects:“How do I know when I’ve heard from enough people?”For many years, the answer to that question has been “it depends”. How many people came to the meetings? What do you know about your area’s residents? Do you feel like you heard from more than the usual suspects...
Live broadcast your next public meeting, thanks to Australians
They’d successfully pulled off something we had only imagined a month earlier — improving ‘meeting mode’ to include the ability to live broadcast public meetings and collect responses and questions from online viewers....
Introducing Kevin Kamto, and machine learning
A few months ago, I got a call from a client about a bright student who was looking for an internship in the civic tech space. “Kevin is a high schooler, but he’s a bit of a prodigy. You should meet him.”So a few days later, I found myself sitting in with a 17-year-old showing off the video game he built for his classmates...
A New Public Square
Today we’re excited to share some great coverage of Cityzen’s new partnership with EducationNC as part of the Reach NC Voices project...
Always Make Sure to Let Participants Not Know
Often when pulling together a survey the responses can seem so understandable and clear. For many, particularly those who are new to municipal engagement, options lack context or clarity. Remembering to offer an unsure or don’t know option can increase participation and provides an entry for follow up campaigns...
UNC School of Government Highlights Raleigh Bike Plan Targeted Outreach
Using the Cityzen platform increased participation across the board. Groups that had to that point not been involved in the public process, notably Spanish speakers, were engaged by the online interface. The platform gathered a substantial amount of public feedback — hundreds of votes and over 200 comments — that helped planning staff determine the best approach...
Auto-sharing takes Historic Tax Credits Campaign Viral
In a partnership with the NC Metropolitan Mayors Association, Cityzen has launched a homepage for the campaign to restore historic preservation tax credits in North Carolina. The credits expired in 2014 when they were not renewed by the state’s legislature...
GovCups and Chapel Hill Invite Bright Ideas for Government
In a variation of the popular “1 Million Cups” events across the country, the Town of Chapel Hill is introducing GovCups. The focus of the event is on ideas and solutions to innovate how government interacts with people. Cityzen is presenting along with local startup Pix at the event, and here’s why...
This age group out-participated all others in Raleigh polls
So when the City of Raleigh looked to gather public feedback on its overhaul of the southern gateway to downtown, they chose to augment the traditional public hearing process with new approaches to online engagement. The city partnered with Cityzen to setup an interactive project home page that integrated directly with project social media posts...