Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Milzy Carrasco from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to dive into their approach to community engagement. Ben Gordon from CitizenLab joins us as well. Together, we'll learn about what made Lancaster choose CitizenLab to deliver more digital community friendly tools for engagement and analytics and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor.
In this short series, we’re talking all about Citizen Engagement. I’ll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve.
Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available to help by efficiently providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We’d love it if you could spend less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. Stay tuned for more episodes on innovators in local government across the globe. Read the Guide.
More info:
Featured government: Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Government Guest: Milzy Carrasco. Director of Neighborhood Engagement
Featured Maker: CitizenLab
Maker Guest: Ben Gordon
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this short series, we're talking all about citizen engagement. I'll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve. Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available to help by effectively providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We'd love it if you could spend a little bit less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano co-founder of Govlaunch and your host.
Lindsay: (00:44)
Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Milzy Carrasco from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to dive into their approach to community engagement. Ben Gordon from CitizenLab joins us as well. Together, we'll learn about what made Lancaster choose CitizenLab to deliver more digital community friendly tools for engagement and analytics and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor.
Lindsay: (01:09)
Thank you both for joining me today. Can you quickly each introduce yourselves and share a bit about your roles? Milzy, I'll start with you.
Milzy: (01:15)
Thank you, Lindsay. First of all, I'm so excited to be here to talk about community engagement, digital communication, traditional engagement. Um, it's one of my passions. So my name is Milzy Carrasco. I'm the director of neighborhood engagement for the city of Lancaster and basically our department eats breathes and lives, um, engagement. So really excited to be here today to talk about it.
Lindsay: (01:37)
Awesome.
Ben: (01:39)
Hey Lindsay, uh, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having us on. Uh, my name is Ben Gordon, uh, and I work for CitizenLab and my job is to help bring the citizen up platform to new cities across the U S
Lindsay: (01:53)
Great. I want to start with a little history on Lancaster. You're a mid-size city, just over 60,000 with your greater Metro area home to about half a million people. Can you share with us what your approach has been to community engagement prior to working with CitizenLab and really what spurred the need for a better tool to engage your residents?
Milzy: (02:10)
Sure. So in 2018 we have a new mayor in town. It's a new administration. And prior to mayor Danene Sorace coming into her administration, she canvassed and spoke to a lot of residents and the priority many residents shared is neighborhood engagement. Wanting to have access to city, government understanding, making sure that it's a welcoming place as well as collaboration within city government and our neighborhoods and elevating opportunities within our neighborhood. So shortly after she came into office, she started our department, which is department of neighborhood engagement, and we quickly needed to understand the needs of our constituents. So we canvased traditional, very traditional engagement. We knocked on doors, we went to different schools and asked a series of just 10 simple questions. Like, what do you love about your neighborhood? What are areas that you need help with and what are opportunities for us to really start engaging with you?
Milzy: (03:12)
And so we took all that information back. The first year in our department here, we developed a series of programs in response to what residents were asking for. What's really interesting when we start thinking about the demographics, Lindsay is our population is 60,000, right? And so we're really talking about 60,000 residents within the city. And about 40% of our demographic is Hispanic and the city of Lancaster is the number one resettled per capita of refugees and immigrants in all of the United States. And so we're in this pocket of a larger County, as you mentioned of over a half a million individuals. And we're also known as an Amish country. So here we have Congolese families walking down the street. Um, and then we have a huge percentage of Amish property owners and you see horse and buggies coming down the street as well. So it's pretty exciting. It was really exciting canvassing and hearing the responses of all of these different nationalities that are here in the city and developing programming around that.
Lindsay: (04:16)
Well, we talk about the digital divide and how governments are really trying to bridge that digital divide. Um, I'm not sure what you do about the Amish community though, getting them to participate more digitally. So, uh, that's interesting.
Milzy: (04:28)
There's lots of letters.
Lindsay: (04:32)
So community engagement is a pretty broad term. Can you share more specifically what you're using CitizenLab for and how they're helping with your engagement efforts with the wider community?
Milzy: (04:44)
Absolutely. So as many cities, March 13th was the official shutdown here in Lancaster city related to the pandemic. And prior to March, we were actually already looking at different public participation platforms. We really wanted a centralized platform where we can launch all of our projects and meet with neighborhood groups and residents, just a platform where we can really engage a little bit more with our constituents. So as you can imagine, once all kinds of activities shut down for the city, we still had about 20 projects here in the city that really needed engagement. We had con consent degrees that legally binded us to making sure that we're communicating and working with residents. So if you work in local government or sometimes things like new processes, take a little bit of time. And I would say within a matter of three months, we interviewed about seven different public participation platforms. And we went with CitizenLab. And one of the reasons why we went with CitizenLab was the front end. So we wanted to have a product that we knew that it was going to be accessible, easy for residents to access. I mean, it's great to have this platform, but if it's too complicated, um, residents, aren't going to come and share some of their feedback. So ultimately we went with CitizenLab and we've been so happy ever since.
Lindsay: (06:05)
CitizenLab is a fairly established company outside of the U S and it was just recently broken into the U S market. I know you're fairly new working with them Milsy, so we're excited to be talking to you, Ben. And one of your first US-based partners today that said we're a global community at Govlaunch with local authorities listening across the world. So Ben, I think it would be helpful if you quickly highlighted some of CitizenLab's work overseas as well, since this is going to be transferable to any governments listening, including the US. So maybe start with a little overview of what is CitizenLab and then how it's working for other local authorities across the world.
Ben: (06:42)
So CitizenLab, I think you can really break it down into three pieces. There's a front facing platform for residents, that allows them to participate in different ways so that can be polls, surveys and some of the more open-ended forms of the station. Um, so like idea walls or ideation or something like participatory budgeting. The second part is what we call the back office and that's for the government employees. And so the idea here is that once you collect all this data and feedback from this community, the backend is really what helps the employees actually make sense and manage this data because if you do your job well, you're going to get a ton of feedback. You get a ton of ideas. And so it's important be able to manage and actually pull different insights out from all this data. And, and then the third part, something that is not quite software, but we think is really equally important as this, the first two pieces is our onboarding and training support.
Ben: (07:41)
And so we really do think of ourselves as more than just a software. We assign a project manager to work with every city, every one of our city partners in the world and their role is to make sure that city employees are really comfortable and confident using the platform. And we do everything from actually training them how to set up a project, how to set up a pole, that kind of stuff, but also helping them think about comms plans. How do you engage communities who are not online? So it's wraparound services in concert with the platform. And we think that's really what makes everything work so well. In terms of kind of what we're doing. We started in Europe and we have really have a global presence. We're in over 200 cities at the moment and we're growing steadily across Europe, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the UK as well.
Ben: (08:32)
And in addition to that, we're also now working beyond Europe and we are expanding here in the U S as well as in Canada and a few others. So yes, we're working with all these different institutions around the world, and we're doing really a range of activities with those partners. So they could be simple polls and surveys. We could be doing something more exciting, like a city-wide participatory budget. And that's really what we, we love those kinds of projects because that's really what the platform does well. Those kind of more open ended deliberative forums with those patients. That's, that's where we excel.
Milzy: (09:11)
If it's okay with you, Lindsay, I do want to share on the onboarding and the project manager, I would say if you get a chance to go to engage.Lancaster.PA, that would be really great so that you can take a look at some of our projects, but the project manager, um, from CitizenLab is really what's helped us because you know, so many times in local government, there's this exciting product that comes out and everyone's really excited, but, um, not everyone or the, the correct stakeholders within local government are trained or informed of what the initiative is. And so I'm really thankful for the support that CitizenLab has provided because we have everyone engaged in every single department. And, um, it is an exciting tool. And I think the introduction of what CitizenLab is and its capabilities happen, we engage people, um, and authorizers. And decision-makers very early on in the process to make sure that this program is successful.
Lindsay: (10:14)
So if I'm getting this correctly, so you're using CitizenLab as a way of a publicly facing website, community members, residents can come in and they can engage with certain projects that are in the works. Is there functionality also, you mentioned stakeholders, internal, external stakeholders, not residents necessarily of the community. Can they come in and participate as well?
Milzy: (10:35)
Absolutely. So as you mentioned, we have, I think about seven projects launched right now on our site. And so those are really outward facing and they're the engagement for those projects are really focused on receiving feedback. And so analyzing some of that feedback, one of the things that we're launching next week is, um, I host bi-weekly meetings with all of our neighborhood group leaders. And so we share best practices what's going on in the neighborhood. So we're actually launching on the platform and it'll be a private group where folks can come in, there's workshops, very similar to zoom meetings. And so there's workshops that are there agendas that are there. So it'll be a one-stop shop where the history of what the working group is doing, the recordings of the meetings will be there, any information that we're sharing. And it'll be a portal that is strictly accessible to some of our neighborhood group leaders.
Milzy: (11:26)
And what that's doing really is increasing engagement, not only from our local government, because these are our champions, our advocates in our community. And so we're providing them the tools that they need and a place where they can always go back and reference and find these tools so that they can share it. So that's one area of external engagement, but it's a more of a private group then internally, I know that our HR department's talking about having a series of trainings where launching with city staff and they can log on and have a private group related to, you know, leadership training or more information about, um, the D&I work that we're doing here in the city. And so, um, you can really set up the system where it's very public outward facing, or even a much smaller like, um, private group setting. So it's very versatile in that way.
Lindsay: (12:19)
Excellent. So, Ben, I know in addition for the ability for residents come in and up vote and comment on city projects, you obviously have the standard survey tool. Virtual town hall capabilities. This question has come up a lot in the wake of COVID. Can you share more about functionality CitizenLab has, as it relates to these virtual town halls, as this has become obviously a popular feature in the pandemic.
Ben: (12:44)
Yeah. So as you alluded to, when the pandemic broke out, many of our partners came to us and they said we can't host any in-person meetings anymore. No town halls, no individual workshops and events. And I may felt they were unable to connect with their residents at a time when connection has never been more important. And so in response, we built the first version of what we call our online workshops, which which really marries the the asynchronous engagement that we provide on the front end with the synchronous engagement that we're all used to doing. We built the first version of this at this feature. And what it does is it is it has the the live video chat.
Ben: (13:27)
You see, you get a brady bunch of screen with everyone looking on, but then on the other side of the screen, you have the different participation features. So you have Q and a live polls, and you have the ability to kind of ask open-ended questions that people respond and then vote on those answers. We can set up smaller breakout groups in which you can have separate series of questions running. And the whole idea is how do we capture the structure and the structure of in-person workshop with in-person town hall and bring that into it all. And so this is truly a unique product. This isn't some, uh, Jerry rig zoom chat it's new, and it doesn't really exist anywhere else in the market and it provides that structure and give additional control to facilitators and all with the goal of helping people in real time, reach consensus.
Lindsay: (14:21)
Milzy, There's a lot of products out there in the market for this community engagement, especially when you look internationally, how did you even stumble across CitizenLab in the first place? And is there a reason you went with them versus you mentioned you were looking at six other companies.
Milzy: (14:36)
Yeah, We have a really good research team. And as I mentioned, we were looking at public participation platforms for awhile. So we did come across CitizenLab and scheduled a call with them, with some of our staff here. Why decided to go with CitizenLab was ultimately was the ease of use. And so not only for our residents, but we also, we don't really have a technology department here in the city of Lancaster. So whatever product was coming in here, we had to make sure that everyone can also use it on the backend. And so CitizenLab has a really fantastic site where all of us can access the platforms. We can set up administrators for particular projects, even responding to like constituents questions that are on the platform or assigned to an administrator.
Milzy: (15:27)
So it gives us the flexibility where it could be very controlled kind of atmosphere where there's one person just kind of administering all their projects. So we really needed to make sure that their projects were assigned per department to a project manager and still have a centralized place where we can see the information coming.
Milzy: (15:46)
So it's an engagement tool, and now we're actually engaging across departments with other project managers, people are coming together, sharing their best practices on their projects. Within our department, we have a language access team. Actually the main coordinator, her name is Zyra Follow. She was really instrumental when we were making the decision to go with CitizenLab. As I mentioned, our demographics, we have 40% folks that are from Hispanic descent here. And so everything that we do has to be translated in Spanish. And so Zyra was part of the process to make sure that, um, there was accessibility when it came to languages on the platform and it was the platform that had the easiest accessibility tools for language.
Lindsay: (16:30)
Great. So you're relatively new customer to CitizenLab. And just getting, going with your first few projects, I'm eager to ask how onboarding is going. You mentioned it a bit earlier, but anything that has caught you by surprise, um, things you wish you knew from the get-go or even more generally, how long did it take to launch your engage Lancaster site?
Milzy: (16:52)
So we haven't officially had a launch, we've been working for the last four months on testing and piloting within each department and coming up with the internal processes. The first thing that is really important as cities or lists are listening in is developing that internal. Like who's the key authorizer who's developing the processes, even responding to questions is going to be something really important. Those processes are really important to establish those before you actually launch the project and are communicating. The second part of it, engage Lancaster is a wonderful tool, but if you're not communicating it and you're not getting that information out to your constituents or your partners, it's just sitting there. Right? And so I think developing a communications plan is equally important that you're communicating this out and it's not only through the digital platforms, you know, there's other ways, whether it's including information on engage Lancaster on the water bill that goes out quarterly, a public service announcements on your local radio station, you know, sending out flyers, meeting with partners and talking about the importance of what engage Lancaster is.
Milzy: (18:01)
And then even though you have this tool, that's digital engagement, but you still need to incorporate some traditional engagement. And so just recently, so we're figuring out what those digital and traditional engagement and how to merge those, to make sure that they're really successful. So our first project, I think we got like 32 responses. Our second project, we changed it up where instead of doing communications, after we launched the project, we actually had a whole communications plan, emailed all the partners, talked to stakeholders, and then we had like a launch date. So what did that do from our 32 original on our first project, we had over 300 people registered for our second project. So now we have this communication process that we're like, all right, this is really successful and that's what we're going to be doing for all of our projects moving forward.
Lindsay: (18:48)
And Ben, I want to talk about reporting that CitizenLab helps enable. Obviously the governments are trying to make more data-driven decisions. How is CitizenLab really enabling local governments to make sense of all of this data you're now helping them collect?
Ben: (19:05)
Yeah, that's a great question and quite timely as were actually releasing some new features very soon on, on reporting, what we call our insights feature. And basically what we're doing is a lot of times, a lot of the governments we're working with, we're collecting hundreds and thousands of pieces of information they run into a new problem, which is what now, right? I don't have the time to look through all this data. I don't have the time, how many people care about the park versus the sidewalk versus a new program or policy in place. And so what we've built is using natural language processing tools. We can actually now pull all the textual data from the platform and analyze it in a way that's going to surface issues, trends, key words, sentiments, these kinds of things that are baked into the open-ended responses of users on the platform.
Um, and kind of provide it in a way that is going to help Milzy and her team, but also help them tell those stories to the broader community. So very soon we'll have the ability to create summaries. And so this is a really exciting part of the platform because it's a new challenge that has been created by our ability to successfully address the first challenge.
Lindsay: (20:22)
And Milzy, you mentioned the ease of use before, ease of use as a big reason, you all went with CitizenLab. Uh, but what are some takeaways you'd like local government to keep in mind when looking at vendors for community engagement tools and why you'd advocate using CitizenLab?
Milzy: (20:37)
Sure. So I think the one thing that we should have done differently is even though we had a really diverse group. We had senior leaders and end-users, it would have been great to include a resident advisory group that's was also actually helping us test some of the different, um, public participation platforms. Ultimately we made the right choice, but I think incorporating folks even early on, on that process of selecting a public participation platform would have helped us to even gain more advocates related to some of this work. So one of the things to keep in mind is making sure that there's a plan, right? It's so important at the beginning to make sure that there's a project manager and there is a plan that is developed to really incorporate this work within local government. So there's processes that are going to change now, right? Who's going to be the person that's assigned to that. Who's going to be reviewing the reporting and the questions that are coming in, who's going to be working on the communications of that.
Milzy: (21:41)
And I think, and the reason why we went with CitizenLab was because they provided a product and a team of folks to help us through that process. We're so focused on our day-to-day jobs here, and it's so much to know that there's a team that's there to help us and guide us through this process and to share best practices, knowing that, um, there's so many other cities that are doing the same work that we are, and that we have also access to that not only to their project management team, but, um, shared resources of what other cities are doing. It's expediting our work and it's improving our process every single time.
Lindsay: (22:17)
Well, you mentioned ou're mid mid-sized city and you don't really have an IT department so I also want to call out that the ease of use is not just for residents, uh, for right. It's, uh, it's pretty, self-explanatory from even an internal admin perspective. So that's really important for all of our small to mid-sized local governments, listening in who don't have a big, robust IT department to help them navigate some of these new tools. The shared resources piece. I'm curious to dig into that just a little bit more. Obviously Govlaunch, we're a resource sharing platform for local governments. How is CitizenLab helping you share resources with one another? Or is it more of their team relaying best practices that they've seen?
Milzy: (23:01)
Yeah, they're relaying best practices and I've shared, so there's a project management checklist prior to going on CitizenLab. So one, the things here within the city of Lancaster was really improving project management on any level. So it's just not only like a capital project, you know, we're talking about instituting a new language access plan, so any particular project. And so, um, one of the things that happens within your department, sometimes things are so siloed. And so not having a process on when to make sure that you're communicating to legal, who's actually working on the funding, is the executive leadership team, our mayor, does she even know about this project before press releases? Um, so we've been working on a project management checklist and it was one of the things that I shared with CitizenLab earlier on that we really needed a document and a process where it's like a sign off before the project even launched. Right. And so that everyone knew what the process was. And we shared this like word document and they came back with the project management blueprint. And so now that blueprint we've shared it here internally related to how to even launch a project on CitizenLab, but it's a tutorial on like how to get it started. It's very clear.
Milzy: (24:17)
And the content is really concise. So it's the language that they've even used is accessible for like someone that doesn't have a technology background, which is Milzy Carrasco. And so those are some of the things, um, that we share best practices with, right.
Ben: (24:34)
Milzy, I'm really happy to hear that that's working out well for you all, because that's something where we'll be investing in more and creating almost an internal community of practice, kind of similar to Govlaunch, but for the really specific questions, really only those, you know, in month three of setting up their engagement or running an engagement platform would need. And so the idea is to be able to provide those resources to all of our cities, because odds are you come to us with a problem. We've seen it somewhere else and we've solved it somewhere else. And so no need to reinvent the wheel. If we can kind of direct you to those resources quickly and efficiently, then, then that's what we want to do.
Lindsay: (25:13)
Well we love it. It's fantastic. Ben in closing, what are some takeaways you'd like to leave the local government who's looking for an engagement solution?
Ben: (25:23)
Yeah, I think there are a few things that really stand out. One definitely, definitely kind of addressed here. And so I'd say, you know, what is it that good engagement is, is constant and iterative. And I think a lot of cities see it as this kind of big, bold, new sweeping project or policy. And it can have some, some parts of that, but really it's, it's a lot of little things and really keeping residents in the loop in a hundred little ways. And so I think Milzy was talking about the importance of building context on the platform and helping tell stories and all these little things that kind of make residents feel like they are part of the community and make them feel like their voice is heard. Cities will come to us asking about a specific project and that's a good first step, but the risk there is that it can also feel a little transactional. And so now that we have the technology to bring residents into the day in and day out decision making processes of their governments. And so our platform really helps build habits and strengthen the community's civic muscles. And so when you think of it more as building a culture of engagement, and that's a long term investment as opposed to one specific project. So that's one big thing. Is that just the way that you can think about engagement? The second is, uh, you know, you don't need a big budget, especially for smaller cities, midsize cities you know communities like Lancaster make to be an ideal partner in this.
Ben: (26:56)
We don't need to be big and flashy. We just need to kind of do the little things right. And we can have a huge impact. And then the third thing is, you know, and I say this, knowing that a lot of cities are thinking about kind of reducing their budgets rather than spending some money, is that good engagement, especially when done in this kind of long-term iterative culture building approach, it's actually quite strategic because what you can ask you can, you know, you can ask them, you know, if we did have to cut the budget, what do you need? What do you not? Right. And I think a lot of cities when they're facing deficits and budget cuts, their instinct is to kind of retreat and kind of close the doors and make these decisions behind those doors. We really encouraging some of our cities who are facing those challenges to really open, open that process up to the community and ask them, because you're going to ensure that, that you have at least some level of buy-in with some of these cuts and you're going to make the community feel like been bottom line for the pocket. And of course it will inform future decision making and future prioritizing spending. So I think those three points that it's constantly, it doesn't mean big budgets. It can be strategic, are things that I would want to share.
Lindsay: (28:11)
Right. And I would certainly agree. And it sounds like CitizenLab would be a great partner in that with the resources you're helping provide. And, um, the wealth of knowledge you have in working with 200 plus local governments really across the world. Uh, I love the concept of these international companies because you're dealing with a variety of different engagement challenges, and for a community like Milzy's is where the site translation is going to be critical. So, Ben, thank you so much for being here on behalf of CitizenLab. We want to wish you the best of luck as you continue to expand in the U S and beyond. And Milzy for being here on behalf of Lancaster. Uh, we're excited to follow up after your big launch of engage Lancaster and, um, and hopefully chat more about of these projects.
Milzy: (28:56)
Thank you for the opportunity, Lindsay.
Ben: (28:58)
Yeah Lindsay, thank you so much.
Lindsay: (29:06)
The search for a platform to enable digital democracy can be overwhelming for local governments, especially small to medium sized ones. Being mindful of onboarding demands and costs is critical when selecting a partner. If you're looking for a partner that can deliver a flexible, easy to use platform and support from their team to develop best practices and resources, CitizenLab may be a good option for you. You can learn more about CitizenLab’s, community engagement tools, and their work with other local governments on Govlaunch. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano. And this podcast was produced by gov launch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.