Featured January 24, 2024 Building trust in government: A data-driven imperative Back to Blog Understanding public participation and community engagement initiatives Date December 4, 2024 Authors Emily Kalnicky Tags Government Effectiveness This past summer, the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration issued a challenge: Create a toolkit of effective approaches to increase public participation and community engagement in government. The Partnership rose to the challenge and finished in the top three. The goal of the challenge was to understand which strategies are most successful at increasing public involvement, inclusivity and trust in federal decision-making. And entrants were also asked to propose methods for evaluating the effectiveness of those strategies. The Partnership’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team developed a toolkit with a variety of resources, including a comprehensive planning document the government and other organizations can use to engage the public—such as hosting town halls, posting requests for information in the federal register, convening focus groups, forming advisory boards, sending mass texts and more. Are those methods effective? Agencies can use the toolkit’s resources to better understand how productive the methods they chose were. Why public participation and community engagement is important Public participation is any process that involves the public in government decision-making, such as voting and attending town halls. Community engagement involves agency actions to build long-term, two-way relationships with communities, based on trust. Both are critical to an effective government. Agencies successful at public participation and community engagement, referred to by those in the field as PPCE, are also better at meeting the public’s needs. Agencies that thoughtfully design policies and activities to engage the individuals most affected by them, through a transparent process, can increase trust among disenfranchised groups and improve program delivery. A poorly designed approach, however, can lead to protests and public discontent, and erode trust in government. Many current federal systems and structures lead to persistent inequities in representation and participation in federal programs. The Partnership’s work explored how agencies could work to improve trust, suggesting that agencies effectively evaluate their engagement activities and design them with inclusion at the forefront. Evaluating results and continually learning Evaluations are crucial for improving public engagement. The first phase should include defining the goal of the participation and engagement, and what it means to be effective. These evaluations should include measures for participation and engagement activities as well as for the organization and the staff involved. Embedding evaluation into activities from the start is an efficient and cost-effective choice. Organizations could collect data from social media posts or web-based discussions, integrate AI, conduct online polls, analyze public sentiment at town halls and more. Thoughtfully planning and evaluating participation doesn’t have to be time-consuming or costly. And findings from evaluations can help organizations continue to improve, fostering greater public trust and engagement all while better meeting the needs of the public or their customers. Be creative! Then share with others your successes, and what you learned during the process. Emily Kalnicky oversees and advances efforts at the Partnership to understand and improve overall program effectiveness and impact through monitoring and evaluation data.
