Resources For Democracy: Tools For Online Engagement

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ON THE AGENDA

The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda

Alison Kadlec
Feb 1, 2012

This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.

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You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Allison Rizzolo
Jan 24, 2012

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

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Resources For Democracy: Tools For Online Engagement

Public Agenda offers a range of online tools for public engagement - either as stand-alone approaches or in addition to larger projects with face-to-face community conversations - which we can tailor to your specific needs. Digital engagement and participation has continued to expand and today we can utilize a wide variety of methods to create a productive dialogue focused on problem-solving rather than ideological infighting.

On this page, we provide a menu of online strategies individuals and civic groups may wish to use for public engagement. For assistance or advice on any of these tools for online engagement, feel free to contact us at: publicengagement@publicagenda.org.

Online Dialogues

Online Dialogues can have concrete impact in various ways, from informing administration practices and government policies, to catalyzing collaborations across existing community organizations and programs and creating new citizen-led initiatives. They are valuable additions to projects on a larger geographical scale, where travel time and expense can restrict or eliminate participation in workshops for citizens and key stakeholders.

Online dialogues typically start with one of our Choicework Discussion Starter guides, either as background material or in the form of an interactive game, followed by a discussion phase and a collaborative summary, including participants in this final phase.

While face-to-face meetings are typically limited to several hours, online communication enables deeper and longer-lasting dialogue over the course of several days, weeks or an even longer time period. As in face-to-face Community Conversations, trained online facilitators (contact us for more information about facilitator training) ensure that discussions are fair, respectful and on topic. Facilitators also coordinate the dialogue phase, send discussion updates and invite inactive users and lurkers back into the conversation.

Asset Mapping

Community Asset Mapping is an exciting new technique of public engagement in which volunteers get together to identify local assets (for example, after school activities, counseling centers, job training centers – whatever might be helpful to address a particular project's goal) and list them in the form of an online map. We're using Asset Mapping now in an ongoing project on the Gulf Coast – click here to learn more about that effort and see whether it has lessons that might benefit your own community.

Asset Mapping, which energizes and involves citizens in the decisions and planning that affect their lives, is a strength-based approach used to avoid the pitfalls, at the beginning of a community development project, of focusing mainly on a community's needs and problems.

Identifying a community's assets in face-to-face workshops is a powerful way to engage the community in thinking about the assets in their community. But time constraints, location, or scheduling can all be barriers to participation for many community members. Accordingly, it can be even more powerful to do asset mapping both in person and online.

Web sites for online asset mapping (here's an example) can provide a lot more than a look at, and a chance to participate in the creation of, the map. They're also a place for continued discussion, updates and reports on the process, as well as a place to find background information and other resources.

Online Social Networks

Conversations started in face-to-face Community Conversations or workshops typically do not have a plan to continue in a physical space after the event. Online social networks provide a platform for participants to follow-up, discuss next steps and develop new ideas beyond the scope of the meeting.

Follow-up activities take less effort to organize with an online venue that provides a place to stay in touch, continue the conversation and organize next steps. The asynchronous nature of online communication and online networking allows organizers and participants to more effectively stay connected and turn discussion into action.

Participants create their own profiles, where they provide socio-demographic information about themselves and indicate topics that they are interested to get involved in. They are encouraged to build their own network by adding real-world connections as "friends" and this small-scale Social Graph helps to make social capital searchable and accessible. And groups and discussions help the organizing team and participants to brainstorm new ideas or organize follow-up activities. Social networks are just one of many online organizing tools for Community Conversations that Public Agenda offers.

Public Agenda also maintains numerous social networks for discussing public policy issues. On Twitter, you'll find us at @PublicAgenda, @TheEnergyBook, @FiscalFuture and @FacingUp. On Facebook, visit us at Public Agenda, Who Turned Out The Lights, Our Fiscal Future and Facing Up to the Nation's Finances. We're also on YouTube, where you'll find many videos on the subject of public engagement.

Deliberation In Virtual Worlds

Second Life, an online virtual world, is somewhat like a cross between a video game, a chat room and a web site. (Click here for an example of how Second Life can be used for online engagement.) All users have avatars - images which represent themselves online - and may participate in a wide range of activities from exploring faraway lands to immersive learning and roleplay.

Second Life enables real-time deliberation between people in different parts of the world while giving them a feeling of closeness that communication in conference calls, forums or chat rooms can't provide. Additionally, the three-dimensional nature of virtual worlds provides new opportunities in learning about and exploring issues.

In urban planning, for example, participants can explore different design alternatives in 3D as part of a discussion which could both continue in a virtual or physical space. Public Agenda has experience in using Second Life for stakeholder engagement and has access to in-world venues and resources through its partner organizations.

Multi-Channel Strategies For Online Engagement

The field of public engagement is rapidly changing, as it keeps pace with the rapidly changing communication practices in the world at large. A large variety of computers and mobile phones have become widely adopted communication devices, each supporting many different kinds of interwoven communication media. Meanwhile, the target groups that we are trying to reach in our engagement work have developed different patterns of communication (for more about this, see Promising Practices In Online Engagement, our video presentation on that topic, and other papers from our Center for Advances in Public Engagement). This leaves us with a growing need for civic engagement efforts to offer multiple channels of participation in order to be inclusive.

Over the last decade, online engagement methods have evolved and matured. And case studies and academic research shows us that the web is not replacing traditional ways of civic engagement - it's expanding the set of tools in the toolbox. Public Agenda can help you assess and identify the right mix of communication channels for your needs and to create a multi-channel engagement strategy that works.

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