PublicInput Blog
Read best practices on everything related to community engagement.
How Durham NC is shifting perceptions about affordable housing
Cities across the country are wrestling with housing affordability. Durham's planning team realized there might be misconceptions among residents, especially for 'missing middle' formats like duplexes and triplexes. Using the platform, Durham engaged over 1,200 residents in a highly-visual interactive experience that educated and gathered input on potential solutions. Turns out only 18% of residents could identify the duplex in a lineup:
Building trust with Geodata: How Austin, TX scored a Major League Soccer team
Last October, the owners of Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew announced that they were contemplating relocation. Austin was at the top of their list. But could the city handle the responsibilities that would come with it? Would taxpayers be willing to give up city-owned land for a new stadium? Here’s how the city’s communication team used data to build stakeholder confidence in online engagement.
The case of Citi Bike: Capturing public engagement data to prevent setbacks
This past week, I found myself unable to put down a book by New York City's former transportation director, Janette Sadik-Khan. In Street Fight, she outlines her experiences of making big transportation changes in a city where change is notoriously hard.One story in particular caught my attention. When working on the citywide roll-out of Citi Bike, New York's bike share system, Sadik-Khan did something unusual with the public engagement process. She used data in a surprising, effective way.
Using Design Sprints to Solve Problems, Fast
When working with our partner agencies, we often help them iterate their engagement processes from where they're at to help them develop flexible public involvement strategies that can work for all situations and require minimal training or adjustment of existing processes.
Raleigh Dog Parks: Community Engagement Software Combines Offline and Online Efforts
The City of Raleigh Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department is undergoing a dog park study to determine the public's interest in dog facilities in the park system. As part of that process they have created a set of questions for the community and created an engagement portal on PublicInput.com.
Introducing Google ‘Perspective’ integrations, and better sleep for communicators
Despite the proliferation of online discussion forums and social media, many agencies have struggled to embrace online dialog as a functional part of the public process. Their hesitation is simple - curating these spaces has historically meant significant investments of time and worry over what might be posted.New tools are giving organizations the power to more efficiently manage public discourse within their comfort level.
Do More Without Doing More: A Better Community Engagement Process
Sometimes government agencies want “the next big thing” to solve their public involvement challenges. It's understandable: leadership pushes hard to engage the public, and historically efforts have been disappointing. This may lead us into thinking that we need a shiny new piece of technology, an off-the-shelf solution that acts as a community engagement magic wand. However, this is a bit backwards…
Should I setup a Facebook page for my public project?
Many times, early in project planning, teams find themselves wanting to expand public involvement in projects. The promise of social media looms large in increasing participation which leads many teams to ask: should this project have a Facebook page? The answer...
NCDOT’s innovative use of PublicInput.com highlighted at TRB conference
Last week we had the privilege of presenting on our partnership with the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) at the annual Transportation Research Board (TRB) meeting in Washington, DC.
PublicInput.com Again Named to the GovTech 100
For the second year in a row, PublicInput.com was excited to be named to the GovTech 100, a listing of the top tech companies that serve government. A full listing of the GovTech 100 is available here
Online surveys are empowering your loudest residents. Here’s how data management can change that
Today, while much has changed, some hasn't. Democracy, at its best, conveys the voice of the people to the institutions built to serve the people. But the tools, channels, and means of conveying that voice have multiplied.As those channels have multiplied, complexity has reared its ugly head, making the simple act of listening into something much more involved than once encountered.
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....