Newsletters For Community Engagement
The Challenge
Many of us understand and use the term community engagement. While we understand its importance it is not uncommon to practice community re-engagement instead by starting and stopping true engagement for every term-defined municipal project.
The key to consistent engagement is to avoid the start and stop approach and build off of the momentum of separate defined-term projects to effectively build community engagement capacity. We’ve helped various municipalities overcome this.
The Solution
Community engagement works best as an ongoing cumulative process enabling long-term
relationships and strengthening trust over time. Each engagement event needs to be planned and designed with this in mind to contribute to the overall longevity of the engagement process.
Inviting a community member to engage with the municipality is the first step in establishing an ongoing permanent relationship. It is useful to create subscriber lists based on immediate interest, but it is equally important to encourage subscribers to participate in other categories of interest. Otherwise, once a single project is over, your list will be lost. Residents are often interested in more than one category and appreciate the opportunity to learn more and contribute.
We typically add a dedicated segment to existing public consultation or general e-newsletter and use a subscription widget to identify subscribers related to each defined-term project or program. We grow a strong subscription base for existing e-newsletter categories by connecting residents to specific projects. By leveraging resident subscribers across multiple projects of interest we also grow the municipality’s community engagement capacity.
1000 to 5000 average growth rate for our public consultation newsletters over the past 5 years.