Citizen Engagement Part 4: accessible & inclusive engagement
Lancaster, PA partners with CitizenLab to boost inclusivity in engagement on city projects and more.
Summary
Today, local democracies are facing two main issues: a lack of trust from citizens, and difficulties reaching these same citizens. When trying to reach out to citizens through town halls or paper consultations, local governments hit barriers: these consultation methods are costly, time-consuming, and not representative of their population.
CitizenLab solves these issues by providing governments with a digital platform to easily consult their citizens. By implicating citizens in the decision-making process, local governments can improve efficiency, shape better policies and increase trust.
In part 4 of this series, I chat with Milzy Carrasco from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Ben Gordon from CitizenLab. We talk about what made Lancaster choose CitizenLab to deliver more digital community friendly tools for engagement and analytics and what you may want to consider as well in your search for a strong community engagement partner.
In this short series, we’re talking all about Citizen Engagement. I’ll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve.
Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available to help by efficiently providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We’d love it if you could spend less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. Stay tuned for more episodes on leading citizen engagement tools and the innovators in local government putting their products to use.
You can listen to the full episode or learn more about innovative strategies local governments around the world are taking to navigate new digital tools, better engage with the breadth of their constituency and more on the $ Govlaunch Podcast$ .