Discussing Content Engagement with Planning and Engagement professionals

Our topic of conversation on Tuesday, 3/10/20 was the concept of content engagement. Below are the key takeaways from the conversation.

Participants

• Larry Schooler is an award-winning mediator, facilitator and public engagement consultant. He is a senior fellow at the National Civic League and the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Mikaela Renz-Whitmore is the Long Range Planning Manager for the City of Albuquerque.
• Charlene Renee Meeker is a consultant specializing in content marketing, community economic development, and stakeholder engagement.
• Chris Haller and Kelly Hickler from Konveio.

Key Questions That Emerged

• When you hear the term content engagement, does a lightbulb go off? Do you understand what we mean? What associations do you have?
• How can we present information and alternatives in a way that is both easy and fun to interact with?
• How do we get more valuable, relevant, informed, and specific feedback?
• What are the best practices for collecting comments?
• How do we broaden who we are hearing from and who participates?

Group Discussion

• Content engagement is not a common phrase, but maybe that’s not a bad thing.
• The term “engagement” is a verb - it’s what we want people to do, whether with content, a place, community, or government, for example.
• Content engagement is about information accessibility, connection, providing an entrance, unlocking something that was previously indecipherable, almost a form of translation or cultivation, making a place at the table that was previously not inviting because you didn’t know what we were talking about.
• It provides a means of interactive education, learning, and understanding.
• It allows the learner to learn at their own pace and dig deeper where they want.
• We need a tool to get the public to wrestle with trade-offs associated with physical space. A lot of times the solicitation of input is divorced from reality of trade-offs the agency has to deal with.
• The questions asked are not always connected to real challenges, then the public is disappointed if not all their wants are realized.
• Many times we are asking for input that is too macro, too vision-oriented, and doesn’t deal with the hard realities.
• A better front door to the discussion might be neighborhood-level planning.
• There are no good existing tools to bring a layperson to understanding, allow them to see what happens in different scenarios - for example, the tradeoffs between multifamily and office space.

Interesting Ideas and Projects

Larry is working on ways to make participation the least inconvenient and least painful as possible, such as tapping into public access TV, and creating one interface to coordinate online meetings instead of having to use multiple services (such as Zoom, Poll Everywhere, etc.) He is also working on something called “Conversation Corps”, which is about multiplying forces for engagement by training and equipping more people to lead conversations.

Mikaela Renz-Whitmore, Long Range Planning Manager for the City of Albuquerque, was also on the call. The City is putting together a pilot training for staff on how to have conversations that matter - for example, how to calm yourself down when things get heated. They would like to eventually expand the training to the broader public. The City is also redesigning how they engage the public in long range planning, and looking into starting a Planning Van - an interactive pop-up that would have a presence at parks and community events.

We Want to Hear From You!

What do you think about the term content engagement? Does it resonate with you? What does it make you think of? Is there another term that you like better? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Konveio OpenLab was our bi-weekly web meeting during the start of the pandemic where we discussed the content engagement challenges of clients or followers. The goal was to explore solutions together, both with input from the Konveio team and other participants and learn from each other along the way.

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