Enterprise Community Partners Asks For Input on Green Building Criteria for Affordable Housing

Enterprise Community Partners (ECP) is a nonprofit that brings together expertise, resources, community leaders, and investment to multiply the impact of local affordable housing development. They administer the country’s only national green building program designed explicitly for the affordable housing sector, called the Green Communities Criteria.

Problem

ECP was updating their green building program criteria from 2015 and needed a user-friendly tool to get feedback from a wide range of stakeholders, including builders, developers, and policymakers. They needed to get input on both the national criteria, and the New York City Overlay, which builds upon the National criteria with modifications for projects located in New York City. While the 2020 Criteria addresses the same eight categories stakeholders are already familiar with, this iteration advances the conversation of how affordable housing practitioners can advance health, resilience, and environmental responsibility through cost-effective, meaningful measures. ECP was curious to know if they were pushing the envelope too much or not enough with these new considerations, and also wanted to get general feedback. They were looking for a convenient way to share, manage, consolidate, and respond to a large number of comments.

Solution

ECP used Konveio to upload both a draft of the nationwide criteria and the New York City Overlay. With Konveio’s user-friendly features, stakeholders were able to easily read and respond to others’ feedback, and leave their own. Konveio enables users to click anywhere in the document to leave a comment specifically on that section, or leave general comments at the end. Both staff and users reported Konveio was very easy to use.

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Impact

ECP staff found the commenting feature the most helpful, and liked how users could see and respond to others’ comments. This allowed for conversation within a draft document/on specific elements of the draft that other platforms don’t offer. Staff also appreciated the reporting feature and the ability to pull reports of all 988 comments received and easily consolidate them in spreadsheet form. This both saved time and made it easy to respond to the comments. Being able to quickly collate the comments and respond to them made stakeholders feel like their input was valued. The 2020 Criteria can be viewed here.

“As a national nonprofit, we needed to gather feedback from partners across the country on a new program offering. Konveio fit the bill perfectly – it was easy for our staff to set up, intuitive for our constituents to engage with, and straightforward for our staff to collate and respond to the feedback we received. Really appreciated the feature that allows back-and-forth between commenters and really appreciated the quick and helpful customer service from Konveio staff. Have been recommending it to my colleagues, and we’ll certainly use the platform again.”

— Krista Eggers, Project Manager

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