Including 17,000 Residents in a Discussion About Traffic Congestion

Traffic congestion is a well-known issue in Metro Vancouver, with nearly 90% of residents expressing frustration at delays and over 80% reporting lost time each week. In 2017, the Mobility Pricing Independent Commission was established to explore solutions, including mobility pricing. This approach, used in cities like London and Singapore, introduces charges to reduce congestion and encourage sustainable transportation.

Recognizing the sensitivity of paying for road use, the commission prioritized transparency and diverse input through the It’s Time project, a public education and engagement initiative. Argyle PR, tasked with delivering the program, selected Ethelo as the online platform to engage a broad cross-section of residents and commuters. The platform allowed over 17,000 participants to share 5,000 comments in four languages, ensuring inclusive and meaningful engagement.

Phased Engagement and Transparency

The It’s Time project had two phases. Phase One introduced the concept of mobility pricing, asking residents how traffic congestion affected them and what fairness should look like in such a system. Phase Two built on this input, seeking feedback on specific solutions, such as a distance-based charge or fuel tax adjustments.

Ethelo made the engagement process accessible with consultations available in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Punjabi. Paper surveys were also distributed to ensure representation from residents with limited internet access. All responses were integrated into Ethelo for analysis, ensuring every voice was counted.

“We were committed to democratic processes and wanted voices to be heard on decisions that impact them,” said Argyle Senior Consultant Miranda Eng. The team monitored comments for offensive language but otherwise allowed open dialogue, encouraging candid discussion from all perspectives.

Generation Squeeze is a Canadian advocacy organization supported by the Vancity Community Foundation, with a mandate to advance the interests of Millennials.  

The Millennial generation is on a tight budget: housing prices have skyrocketed, career opportunities are increasingly competitive, and healthy food is hard to find. In pursuit of its mandate, GenSqueeze needed to distill and then shortlist from among 36 initiatives popular amongst its constituents. These included such items as life insurance, car shares, child care, and health assistance.

Process

Following several focus groups where initial possibilities were identified, GenSqueeze used Ethelo to extend the conversation to its 25,000 members. During a two-week period, the platform was open to public voting, allowing more than 400 participants to have their say and propose additional suggestions. In this case, the response rate to invitations was 30%.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique opportunity for Canada: a chance to rebuild its economy in a way that is both equitable and sustainable. This “once-in-a-lifetime” budget offered a chance to reimagine the future, but the government’s initial consultation fell short of truly engaging citizens.

“The government’s survey lacked depth,” explains Sabrina Bowman, Campaign Director with the eDemocracy Network. “It didn’t provide a comprehensive framework for citizens to understand the trade-offs involved in different policy choices. It was like asking people what they wanted for dinner without showing them a menu.”

To address this shortcoming, the eDemocracy Network, in partnership with Corporate Knights and supported by the Trottier Family Foundation, launched an ambitious project: an independent citizen’s budget consultation. This initiative aimed to empower Canadians to directly shape the recovery by actively engaging them in the decision-making process to answer the question:

“What set of fiscal policies should Canada adopt to achieve the 10-year goal of creating one million jobs while hitting the 2030 Paris target of cutting our greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 209 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2e”

Unlike the federal government survey (whose results were never released) this digital budget process enabled citizens to:

• Explore a Wide Range of Options: Participants weren’t simply presented with a list of predetermined choices. Instead, they could distribute government investment across a range of policy options, from universal childcare and affordable housing to investments in renewable energy and green infrastructure.
• Prioritize and Balance: The platform facilitated active engagement, allowing participants to prioritize their preferred policies, allocate “budget points” to them, and consider the associated costs and potential impact on jobs and emissions.
• Understand the Trade-offs: Participants were not shielded from the complexities of budgeting. They were encouraged to consider how different policy choices would be funded, exploring options such as wealth taxes, corporate tax reforms, and adjustments to existing tax brackets.

In October 2019, the City of Prince George formed a Select Committee on Poverty Reduction, which was tasked with recommending how the City could address poverty based on the provincial government’s Together BC strategy. 

After bringing together diverse stakeholders and perspectives from throughout the community, the committee produced 19 recommendations for reducing poverty in Prince George. The committee then needed to engage the broader community to create awareness of the initiatives and learn which ones were the most urgent and highest priorities for residents. 

Sarah Brown, who works in the City’s Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships Division, was the Staff Liaison for the Select Committee. She notes that the committee set out several lens groups through which to view the work, which included: children and youth, single-parent families, seniors, Indigenous people and people living in specific neighbourhoods that are disproportionately impacted by poverty. They also wanted to work with at least five community agencies. 

“They wanted to look at the difference between people who are experiencing absolute poverty and those who are considered the working poor,” Brown explains. “So that way, the recommendations would be all-encompassing, so when we look at poverty reduction in the community, it wasn’t just honed in on one group, but really looks at the broad spectrum of people who could be impacted by poverty.”

The City of Prince George has used Ethelo’s Citizen Budget platform for the past five years to include residents in its annual budget consultation process. So when the committee was planning its poverty reduction engagement, they thought of Ethelo as the best tool to include a representative sample of citizens in the process. 

“Ethelo turned out to be a really good fit because we wanted broad representation from the community, “ Brown says. “We used the engagement platform as the foundation and then we worked with our community partners so they could use the platform to get people to provide their feedback.”

Empowering residents to participate 

Questions in the City’s Ethelo engagement asked participants to rank each of the 19 recommendations based on two factors, urgency and importance. 

By using their social media and community networks, they included 814 people in the process and reached their goal of including a broad group of community members.

“It wasn’t just agencies who are supporting people who are experiencing poverty that had their say on this topic; it was across the community,” Brown says. “So to get that diversity of perspective was reassuring that voting on the recommendations was robust and sound. And we could have confidence that this is really reflective of our entire community.”

She adds that the Ethelo team was instrumental in helping set up a successful engagement that also helped educate people about the committee’s recommendations. 

“The Ethelo team was really flexible in helping us set up what our platform was going to look like,” Brown notes. “It was really engaging. The imagery was really appropriate, and it connected people to the topic. Each slide started with an appropriate image, and then there was some relevant background information on each topic. We used all of that information to provide a backdrop and context, and then we asked people to answer the question. Ethelo was also able to link to external websites and information, so if people wanted to learn more, then they could. So that was a really good feature.” 

“The education piece provided the preliminary context so people could make a decision on the urgency and importance.” 

Community Engagement Coordinator 

As the climate continues to change, water security is an issue that’s front of mind for governments everywhere. It’s a big topic in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia—where water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Hunter Water, the community’s state-owned water provider, has been working on a plan to ensure the region has sufficient water supplies for a sustainable future.

Community engagement has been a big part of creating that plan. Over the past three years, Hunter Water’s Community Engagement Coordinator Clare Hogue and her team have used various methods to consult with residents, including online surveys, forums, drop-in sessions and a community liaison group.

“It’s about how water is going to be supplied to our community in the future, and it’s important that people understand the various benefits and costs associated with each of the options we were considering,” Hogue explains. 

She adds that polarization amongst residents has been a big challenge during the consultations, as it is for many communities. 

After the COVID 19 pandemic struck in early 2020, in-person engagement became a challenge, and online surveys weren’t cutting it. So Hogue went looking for a way to engage and educate people online that also helped reduce polarization. She found Ethelo. 

“Ethelo is much more dynamic visually and allows much more complexity in how we’re approaching the community and getting their feedback than a straight online survey with Likert scale responses,” Hogue notes.

Participants were invited to participate by discussing the policy planks, scoring them to indicate support or opposition, and then weighing the relative importance of the 5 policy areas. Participants were able to see the Ethelo engine dynamically identify their personal “Top Choice” policy platform as they voted. Ethelo also allowed people to weigh how important the different policy areas were to them, and in calculating the group results, gave participants more influence on areas they felt were more important.

For example, a participant might wish more influence on environmental issues, giving up some influence on social issues.

Some of the policy planks were not consistent with each other, for example “Oppose Pipelines” and “Oil Industry Expansion”. Ethelo was configured to ignore possibilities which contained contradictions. Nevertheless, most policies were compatible, and even after inconsistencies were removed, there were more than 220,000 possible policy platforms.