Residents Aren't Engaging Because They Don't Feel Connected
BACKGROUND
Informed Residents Are Engaged Residents - A Key to Participation
For government agencies, ensuring equitable and accessible engagement is essential to building trust and fostering lasting relationships with residents. One of the biggest challenges in effective outreach is addressing the barriers that prevent residents from participating.
This year’s insights reveal that many residents refrain from engaging either due to a lack of connection to the issue or because they felt underinformed. Together, these factors highlight the need for more targeted communication that both informs and resonates with residents to drive meaningful engagement.
LACK OF CONNECTION AND INFORMATIONARE HINDERING ENGAGEMENT
Why aren’t more residents engaging? Many feel disconnected or simply don’t have enough information to get involved.
This year’s data shows that 29% of residents didn’t engage simply because they didn’t feel strongly about the issue, while 24% felt they lacked enough information to make an informed decision. These findings point to two key barriers: a sense of disconnection and insufficient information.
Too often, the current approach to engagement places the responsibility on residents to seek out the information themselves. Offering opportunities to participate, like a public comment section or an online survey, isn’t enough on its own. To truly boost participation, governments need to proactively provide relevant, easy-to-digest information to residents at the moment they’re invited to engage. By doing so, we can make it easier for busy residents to feel informed and motivated to get involved.
Unlike concerns rooted in apathy, the lack of information and connection is a gap that engagement practitioners can actively address. By making key details easy to access and understand, governments can bridge this gap, helping residents feel more connected and motivated to participate.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
Governments can increase resident engagement and input quality by providing clear, timely, and accessible communication alongside an invitation to provide input. Here are a few places to start:
PublicInput simplifies process and helps drive informed resident engagement by offering:
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We’ve heard about teams manually entering public comments into AI models using personal accounts, which, while helpful, can create significant data privacy risks. The GPT Comment Analysis tool solves this by:
- Engagement Hubs and Project Pages: Inform and engage with rich content and media organized in one place alongside public meetings, surveys, and important announcements.
- An Interactive Platform: Create spaces where residents can ask questions, voice concerns, and interact with multimedia content such as videos, maps, and images to gain a better understanding of local projects.
- Integrated Outreach Tools: Our unified system combines resident contact information with outreach methods like emails, surveys, and meeting invitations, making it easier for governments to connect with their communities.
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By adopting these strategies and tools, governments can ensure residents are connected and well-informed leading to stronger community relationships and better decision-making outcomes.
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT
Virginia Beach tackles disconnection to empower resident engagement.
When the City of Virginia Beach needed over $500 million to repair stormwater infrastructure after a devastating hurricane, it recognized the importance of raising awareness among residents. To ensure the success of an upcoming Flood Protection Program bond referendum, the City aimed to assess public understanding and address misconceptions about local flooding.
Using PublicInput, Virginia Beach launched a comprehensive outreach campaign to gather feedback and provide accurate information. The result? Residents were more informed, and the bond referendum passed with over 72% voter approval.
