Budgeting – Ethelo

7 Public Engagement Lessons from the Pandemic

blog — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:44:52 +0000

7 Public Engagement Lessons from the Pandemic

August 2022

The past two years have changed how local governments engage with their residents. From virtual open houses to online and hybrid engagement, we’ve all had to adapt to the “new reality”.

Our recent Community Engagement Opportunities in 2022 webinar brought together community engagement experts to reflect on what they have learned (and unlearned) over the past two years, and what still remains to be figured out.

What we’ve learned so far

1. We can get more (and more diverse) participants with online events

Online events and engagements have not only made it possible for a larger number of people to attend, but to also have a more diverse crowd. Going digital has made it easier for traditionally excluded groups – especially those from Indigenous and remote communities – to participate in decision-making forums.

“More Indigenous peoples are engaged in more things now than we’ve ever seen,” said Rose LeMay, CEO of the Indigenous Reconciliation Group. For example, whereas it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to get Inuit from communities across northern Canada together in the same room, they can now gather virtually for almost no cost.

And as the types of people participating in engagements changes, so has the decision-making.

“Now we have lots of people who are able to engage who are learning how to do so, but are also pushing all of us to do things differently,” LeMay said.

2. Our ability to directly engage with senior decision-makers is much higher

It’s also now possible to involve people from different parts of the world who previously would have been too far away to attend – without all the transportation costs and emissions.

When the pandemic hit, Am Johal, Director of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, was no longer able to interview guests in-person for the Office’s podcast. “All of a sudden, we were interviewing people from halfway around the world,” Johal said.

Digital events have also made it easier to connect more senior levels of decision-makers, such as federal ministers, with marginalized communities and lower levels of government.

Marnie McGregor, Global Urban Affairs Advisor for the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, has also found this to be the case at the international level. Going virtual has helped to level the playing field and provide access to decision-making forums that some may not have had before, especially with ongoing travel restrictions and vaccine equity issues.

3. Being confronted with the truth has demonstrated the need for action

2021 saw extreme weather events around the world and the discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools, which created powerful public momentum for climate action and Indigenous reconciliation.

“When the first communities started to search residential schools for lost children is when the conversation changed,” said Le May. “It is more difficult now to ignore the truth of genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis in this country.”

What we need to improve in 2022

1. Hybrid events are here to stay

As in-person events start back up again, there’s still an expectation going forward that there will be an online component. While this can ensure events stay accessible, it also has impacts on event attendance and complexity.

“Once you announce that the event is available online, you immediately lose half of your in-person audience,” Johal observed.

Hybrid events also often require additional staff, time and resources to do well.

“It might actually take twice as much time to ensure that people on both mediums have the information they need in order to engage,” LeMay said.

However, one idea was to conduct fewer, but higher quality, engagements.

2. Internet access needs to be more equitable

While the internet has made it possible for people to stay connected and engaged during the pandemic, good internet access is not universal. Many in rural and remote areas still do not have adequate or reliable broadband service.

“In so many ways, technology’s opened up a form of accessibility,” said Johal. “But being able to access it, and who gets to access it, remains an accessibility question.”

3. There isn’t enough sense-making in the digital realm

Technology has also accelerated the amount of change and information people have to deal with, and panelists agreed there isn’t enough collective sense-making – through conversation, public dialogue, shared experience – to help people understand it all.

Instead, there’s been a fire hose of disinformation and misinformation that people have to wade through online, without trusted people or organizations to arbitrate as we do for the press. How can we communicate who and what is credible, while still ensuring public spaces online remain democratic?

It’s also no longer clear who people represent when they say they are speaking for others.

“How do we do consultation and engagement when we no longer have those preconceived structures of who speaks for who?” asked LeMay.

4. We need better standards for online discourse

Although the internet has made it easier to communicate with different kinds of people, we don’t seem to be talking and building relationships with people we disagree with. By missing out on personal connections with others, there’s been a loss of trust. Instead, we’ve seen an increase in toxic and hateful speech online, especially on social media platforms.

Therefore, there’s a need to set higher standards for public discourse online and find ways to navigate our differences in a more respectful manner.

“There are opportunities to reach across the aisle in a way that we’re thinking about a common future, including with those that we have differences with,” Johal said.

This may be an area where engagement practitioners can lead, by setting and enforcing clear rights and responsibilities for participating in virtual discussions.

For example, LeMay called for incorporating “Indigenous knowledges around how to do conversations well [and] how to be with each other” into digital engagements to help ground participants.

You can find even more tips and valuable info in the recording of our Community Engagement Opportunities in 2022 webinar, along with further resources.

How to build trust in public engagements

blog — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 14:56:53 +0000

How to build trust in public engagements

The challenge of building trust – especially online – is one that has come up very often in our conversations with public servants and engagement specialists. And partially as a result of the pandemic, trust has also become a big topic of discussion in our society at large. Suzanne Hawkes – an accomplished facilitator, leadership trainer and management consultant with Convergence Strategies – shared some of her expertise on the topic in our recent Building Trust Online webinar. While there are some key differences, there’s also a lot in common between online and offline engagements when it comes to trust – so much of this also applies to in-person engagements. “Many of the principles are the same,” Suzanne says.

The foundations of trust

No matter what kind of engagement you’re doing, there are some fundamental questions you need to clarify and answer first.

What is trust?

Suzanne (and the participants) identified at least three ways to define trust:

Accountability: Doing what you’re saying you’re going to do. However, you’re often not starting from a neutral place or blank slate. It’s important to take history and your organization’s track record into account. If groups have a legacy of historical distrust, it will take more than one engagement to shift that relationship.
Transparency: Being clear about your intentions and agenda, including the level of engagement and what influence (if any) participants have on the decision.
Vulnerability: Patrick Lencioni and others also define trust as people’s willingness to admit making mistakes and not knowing the answer. It may also include sharing feelings and emotions with the group.

Why are you engaging?

It may seem obvious, but what’s the purpose of your engagement? Is it to inform your residents, to get their feedback on a proposal, to consult them on a decision, or to collaborate on something? Is it a ‘token’ consultation, or one where real course correction is possible based on feedback? Take a step back and determine what the true intention of your engagement is. Different types of decisions require different levels of engagement. For example, for “highly technical decisions like engineering problems,” says Suzanne, “simply informing, or even telling, is really appropriate.” Other more complex decisions, or ones requiring deeper buy-in and alignment from people, almost always benefit from more meaningful consultation – which takes more time and more resources. The IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation may be helpful in determining what kind of engagement a decision requires.

Why are you engaging?

Make sure to determine what level of engagement you plan to do early in the process. Building trust takes time – the more power you share with participants, the longer your engagement timeline is.

Additionally, make sure you’re clear with residents about what kind of engagement they’re participating in.

Why are you engaging?

Determine who (and who isn’t) coming to your engagement – ideally beforehand. Some things you may want to know about your participants include their social locations (e.g., race, gender, class), power and rank, accommodation needs, and spoken languages.

“Can we do any research or do we have any information about who’s coming prior to the engagement?” asks Suzanne.

Suzanne also considers stylistic differences when planning dialogues or other engagements. One method for doing this is the Interpersonal Leadership Styles (Stratton Consulting Inc). The ILS outlines 27 specific style preferences, but they fall into four broad categories:

“There’s many more than these four, but these are four broad directions that we may see among a wide group of people in any engagement,” Suzanne says. “I want to make sure that whatever engagement we’re doing actually accounts for all of these style preferences and that we incorporate dimensions that all of these folks are going to need to really build trust.”

If you can’t find out this information before the engagement, you might be able to do so at the start with a quick check-in, or overtime by engaging and listening to how people show up and interact. Regardless, it can be helpful to design engagements with all four broad style preferences in mind, in addition to accounting for differences related to power, privilege and social locations.

How to build trust

Before we dive into what building trust looks like in an engagement, it’s important to note that a lot of that work takes place well beforehand. “The actual engagement is only one slice of the bigger ecosystem of what that rebuilding [of trust] may look like,” Suzanne says.

Earn it as a leader

It’s important for leaders to model authenticity and vulnerability for participants in an engagement, as well as to pause and make space to listen.

“We know how to listen effectively,” says Suzanne. “But we rarely practise it.”

As an engagement facilitator, redistributing power is essential to ensure you hear from all the voices in the room.

“It’s essential we hear from those quieter voices,” Suzanne says. “So we can hear from the wisdom of the group and across those different [interpersonal leadership] styles.”

Marginalized voices in the room can be amplified by repeating and sometimes paraphrasing (only if that’s appropriate) what they said, and giving space to people you haven’t heard from.

While this may lead to conflict with people who are used to taking space, it’s also important to show you can hold tension, manage power dynamics, and manage conflict, should it arise. Doing so will start building trust, especially over the course of multiple engagements.

“There may be strong norms to avoid conflict and seek harmony in a group,” Suzanne says. “We need to show and prove that we can handle it and we’re not going to fall apart, if things get hot in the group, if there’s strong divergence and strong disagreement.”

Use breakouts

“Whenever we remain in a large group, we tend to be giving preferential treatment inadvertently to people who have more social power, more positional power or stylistically tend to dominate in large groups,” says Suzanne. “The only way to break that up and hear from the wisdom of the group is to use breakouts.”

She recommends no more than five people for digital breakout groups and no more than eight for in-person ones. She also tends to allot about 2-5 minutes of speaking time per person in those groups. For example, a breakout group of 3 people, would be allotted 6-15 minutes to have a decent, though brief, discussion.

Take temperature checks

Check-in with your engagement participants to get a sense of what the group wants and where the group is at. If you’re doing a virtual engagement, this can be done through chat, polls, word clouds – and even hand signals and drawings.

You can find even more tips and valuable info in the recording of our Building Trust Online webinar, along with further resources. Want to know how Ethelo’s team of engagement experts can help you build trust with your community? Schedule a free consultation with our team of engagement experts.

Uncapped Budget

solutions — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:54:50 +0000

Set a budget limit using sliders, and allocate funds across options using sliders

Service Design

solutions — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 02:10:51 +0000

Shortlist a set of programs that satisfy 3 overarching constraints; project cost, HR cost, and time.

Tax Assessment

solutions — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 02:07:43 +0000

Learn how your tax dollars are allocated across city budget

Special Project Budget

solutions — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 01:51:12 +0000

Allocate a fixed budget across a set of fixed-price options

City Budget (tax bill)

solutions — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 03:08:55 +0000

City

Carbon Budget

solutions — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 03:06:01 +0000

.https://event-planning.ethelo.net/

Budget Prioritization

solutions — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 03:04:46 +0000

.https://event-planning.ethelo.net/

Local Carbon Budgeting

case-studies — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:18:27 +0000

Gaming the system to fight climate change

How do you get community members to engage on an issue as complex and polarizing as climate change? Ethelo and the City of London, Ontario, came up with a simple but effective strategy: turn the engagement into a game.

106,057 people
reached

1 million tons
GHG reduction

Jamie Skimming

Manager of Community Energy Initiatives

When city staff at London, ON were directed by City Council to build a Climate Emergency Action Plan, they knew that public input would be key to creating something the community could get on board with.

However, convincing folks to engage around an issue as complex and polarizing as the climate emergency is not an easy task. To maximize participation, London and Ethelo came up with a simple strategy: turn the engagement into a game.

“What we found really attractive about Ethelo was the idea of using the platform as a climate plan simulator,” says Jamie Skimming, Manager of Community Energy Initiatives for the City of London. “Recognizing that some people like games and puzzles, we thought this would be a great opportunity to try that.”

Simulating a feasible plan using difficulty levels

The survey presented participants with twenty greenhouse gas reduction actions that the city could take, like energy efficiency upgrades, a green bin program, and new cycling infrastructure. Then, using a sliding scale, participants decided how much they personally thought the City should prioritize each action over the next 10 years.

The challenge was to design a plan that could reduce by at least one million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. So while car fans could gleefully downgrade bike lanes, for example, they would then have to slide other actions up in order to reach the target number – perhaps by increasing the number of electric vehicles or buses in the city.

The idea of simulating a climate action plan is not a new concept. Jamie has tried many different simulators in the past. What is missing from all of them, he says, is transparent information about the level of effort it would actually take to reduce those emissions.

“We didn’t want to tell people that anything was impossible,” he explains. “But we wanted to be open that there are reasons like cost and lack of resources that make it very tough to crank the dial to the maximum level on any given action.”

Each GHG reduction action displayed information about how difficult or easy it could be to implement. Participants then had to make trade-offs on each action to balance the ‘difficulty score’ with how effective it could be. This simple constraint gave participants a more realistic, transparent experience, and provided more valuable data to the city as a result.

“Through the algorithm, we have a clear understanding of which activities had a good level of consensus,” says Jamie. “People are saying they want to see home energy retrofits, so staff can now make sure that there are parts in the plan that speak to that desire.”

London also made use of Ethelo’s Outreach Services, which uses digital and community-based advertising techniques to raise awareness for the survey. Per special request, the final report included Ethelo’s takeaways about techniques and messaging, which London staff can now build off of for other city climate initiatives. “Getting a sense of which messages resonated or didn’t resonate with the community was definitely of value to us,” says Jamie.

He continues, “What we really appreciated was the willingness of the Ethelo staff to experiment and try some new things with us. The fact that they were willing to understand our needs and customize the process to fit those needs was appreciated.”

The groundwork for an actionable and community-approved climate plan

All of this feedback is instantly fed through Ethelo’s algorithm, which finds a suite of actions in real-time that is most likely to be broadly supported by the community. Participants can see how their answers compare to the larger community, a measure of transparency that keeps them from feeling like their feedback has gone into the void.

By the end of the engagement, over 1,000 Londoners had taken the climate simulator challenge. Thanks to them, the city now has the groundwork for an actionable and community-approved climate plan. London staff are currently working on a Climate Emergency Action Plan, and Ethelo’s detailed post-engagement report is a key supporting document.

“What we found really attractive about Ethelo was the idea of using the platform as a climate plan simulator. Recognizing that some people like games and puzzles, we thought this would be a great opportunity to try that.”

Jamie Skimming