City of Madison turns Comprehensive Plan into Living Document

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Imagine Madison was a unique public outreach campaign that collected feedback from all across the City to plan for the Madison of tomorrow—and beyond. 

Feedback for the drafting stages of the Imagine Madison process, collected using Konveio, was used to update the City of Madison’s Comprehensive Plan. 

After plan adoption in 2018, the City launched an interactive version of the Comprehensive Plan powered by Konveio which is still actively being used for progress updates on their comprehensive plan.

To present a seamless experience, Madison is using Konveio to embed their interactive plan directly to their official City website.

Problem

First, the project team at the City of Madison needed to present and collect feedback on their draft Comprehensive Plan. From past experience, they wanted to do so in a way that made submitting and managing comments easy for both the project team and participants. 

Second, the long-term vision of the Comprehensive Planning project was to create a living document that didn’t collect dust on the shelf after adoption, but is fun to explore and can be updated to report progress throughout the implementation process. 

Solution

Madison’s Planning department leveraged Konveio throughout each major phase of their comprehensive plan’s lifecycle from draft through implementation tracking. 

Before plan adoption in 2018, the team used Konveio to facilitate public review of their comprehensive plan drafts to capture meaningful insights that were intuitive for citizens to share yet easy for staff to manage, track, and incorporate changes into their final draft. 

Facilitating public review of their drafted comprehensive plan on Konveio led to: 

• More participation and high-quality feedback collected
• Enhanced learning
• Increased trust through transparency
• More residents being exposed to the ideas of others, similar to a public workshops
• Decreases in the volume of redundant questions and observations
• A tighter and more rapid feedback loop with the community and plan revisions by reducing the amount of staff time spent on analysis and reporting and more time implementing changes

Following adoption by the city council, Madison’s final plan was hosted using Konveio’s interactive format where residents can return to view annual progress updates on the goals and objectives of the adopted plan.  

Madison curated the elements of their comprehensive plan using a landing page to allow visitors to quickly access specific elements of the plan instead of opening one long PDF and becoming overwhelmed.

Madison’s implementation of Konveio’s document summary feature made it easy for stakeholders to traverse between high-level introductions and detailed information based on their interests. 

Hosting their final plan as a Living Document on Konveio led to… 

• A comprehensive plan that is more approachable and easier to understand using features like Konveio’s automated glossary, start reading while document loads, seamless map integrations, video explanations or text commentary, and other interactive features. 
• More residents reading and interacting with the final plan to answer their own questions.
• Residents having a single source of information to bookmark and refer back to over time. 
• Staff providing updates on specific action items in the planning materials, including photos, timelines, and more.
• Tracking implementation in one space.

Impact

Konveio’s unique features helped the project team at the City of Madison to save time during the analysis of the feedback they received. 

The interactive plan format enables them to post annual updates regarding metrics and indicators outlined in the plan, creating a living document.  

In the four years since its adoption, Konveio has helped to save staff time and delivered an enriched experience to its residents that they trust to deliver up-to-date information anytime they visit the city website.

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