Why Care About Content Engagement?

As professionals who serve the public interest, we do a good job of inviting people to the party, but not always the best job of entertaining our guests after they arrive. Once we have engaged people enough to get them to our house, whether that’s visiting a community meeting or project website, we must put equal effort into engaging them with the content of the party. We want our guests to stick around a while, enjoy themselves, have a few meaningful interactions, and feel like their valuable time was spent well (as well as be more likely to come to the next one).

Content engagement can be thought of as a metric for how a user engages with your content, such as options for a new bike lane, design alternatives for a new park, or draft policies for an updated comprehensive plan. This can be online via your website or social media, or in-person via presentations or poster boards. How you share content is just as important as the information you are sharing. Not only do you want to make sure your content is relevant to your audience, you want to make sure it is easy to access, easy to understand, easy to respond to, and also maintains interest and attention.

Content engagement is a concept for fostering understanding and collecting informed feedback

Content engagement fosters understanding and collecting informed feedback with its own set of strategies and tactics. It is especially useful for long-form documents, such as comprehensive plans, zoning codes, and other reports and policy documents. Most of these end up in PDF form but then are not user-friendly or enjoyable to interact with. They take a long time to download, are difficult to navigate, and the reader must sometimes scroll through hundreds of pages to find what they are looking for.

For example, if you wanted to find what uses you are allowed to develop on a property, would you rather navigate a 500-page PDF or a user-friendly interactive form? Konveio worked with the City of Albuquerque to turn their complicated Zoning Code into an interactive, valuable land use and development tool. We added custom landing pages, summaries, and quick links to create the Integrated Development Ordinance which is easier to navigate and reduces staff time spent answering questions about a complex PDF.

If you ever owned an Atari or know what a floppy disk is, you may be old enough to remember the fun of operating a computer using DOS. Windows provided an alternative called a graphical user interface which enabled users to click on icons instead of typing lines of code. Konveio does for PDFs what Windows did for computers. For example, Konveio helped the City of Madison update its comprehensive plan and enabled citizens to better understand complex issues by adding interactive content such as zoomable maps, Google street view, and virtual reality. This added a level of understanding that a simple PDF cannot.

In the consumer goods world, content engagement usually refers to social media promotions, blogging, and sales conversion rates. In the public service world, you are not trying to sell anything. Instead, you are trying to inform people about complex topics, and the stakes are often much higher than selling a widget. You want to ensure people have complete and correct information so they can ask relevant questions, provide applicable comments, and make informed decisions.

Effective content engagement is necessary across all of your communication channels, from your organization’s main website and project-specific websites, to your blogs and social media accounts. Your organization must be seen as the go-to resource for information. It’s imperative to push out accurate information early and often, in a format that’s easy to use and understand. This will help you establish and maintain credibility and trust, and prevent your constituents from creating their own information campaign on social media. Content engagement is key to ensuring that your work has an impact and results in successful implementation. Achieving buy-in from your stakeholders is essential and requires that their input is considered during the drafting stages of any initiative.

Content engagement is key to ensuring that your work has an impact and results in successful implementation.

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A unique feature of Konveio that makes long-form documents more user-friendly is that comments can be placed directly within the document, providing a great way to collect relevant, context-specific feedback or serve as a simple way to provide broad feedback. We found that adding comments directly into the document produces more informed feedback. Shared on the same platform, comments or annotations can then turn into a dialogue with other readers adding responses, supporting comments via upvotes or responding to questions by the author. This approach also significantly cuts down the time to manage and facilitate feedback versus receiving tons of phone calls, emails, or letters.

Konveio worked with the Open Government Partnership to synthesize feedback received on their Independent Reporting Mechanism. The team was able to download comment reports in three different formats in order to easily analyze the most pertinent information. Konveio also provided the opportunity for the commenting process to be more inclusive, particularly due to language selection and the option to comment anywhere on the report.

As you can see, content engagement is an important component of your overall communication and community engagement strategy. Subsequent articles will cover the nuts and bolts of content engagement and teach you how to use it effectively in your organization.

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Let us know what questions you have and what specific topics you are interested in as we build a community of practice around content engagement.  

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