7 Lessons I learned as a Digital Storyteller for the City of Pittsburgh
Utilizing digital communications to make meaningful connections
On February 12 Deray Mckesson — a high-profile activist and co-host of a podcast, Pod Save the People — spoke at Carnegie Lecture Hall. He talked about the importance of creating entrance points and on-ramps to community activism so that people can be involved in whatever capacity works for them. The more “on-ramps” we create, the more opportunities there are for people to connect with one another and see the overlapping nature of the work they’re doing.
During my time at the Department of Innovation and Performance, most of my work was centered around the Inclusive Innovation Summit. The Summit was a platform where organizations and individuals interested in a wide range of issues could come together, learn from one another and hopefully leave with a sense that their voice and presence in this city matters. The Summit was about creating points-of-contact for people. It was a big, three-day on-ramp.
But on-ramps come in many forms and I have learned from this job that some of the most important and effective points-of-contact can come from digital communication. These are some of the lessons I learned while working to develop connections with city residents through a number of online platforms.
1. Own Your Narrative
Medium gives us the unique ability to write our own stories from the perspective of city employees about the work being done in city government. It’s an opportunity to talk honestly about the accomplishments as well as the challenges of the work we’re doing.
Our Medium page, which was established in 2017, is filled with essays about the role of data in improving the city, process improvement practices being implemented in our own department, and some of the innovative programs city government has developed for entrepreneurs. These are important projects that might not be talked about in the news, but are a big part of the daily work of city employees.
If we didn’t publish our series about how community members are utilizing open data, it probably wouldn’t have been written about at all. Using our digital platforms to publicize the work we’re doing is an important way to help people re-evaluate the role they believe local government can play in their lives.
CityTalk is broadcast on our Cable News channel and uploaded to our YouTube Channel. It features interviews with city employees and gives them an opportunity to share with residents the work they’re doing. It’s another example of “owning our narrative.” Our ability to share information in more creative and engaging ways than a simple press release allows us to disseminate information directly to citizens in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without these platforms.
2. Engage, Don’t Just Broadcast
A tweet about road closings or job openings can be extremely helpful, providing valuable, real-time information to residents. But for us, social media has been about building real connections. On Instagram, we made a “Simple Guide to Alt Text.” Alt text, short for alternative text, is a description of an image read by screen readers for people who are visually impaired. We asked our followers if they would be interested in learning more about how to use alt text and then created a guide that walked them through the process of using it on Instagram.
We decided early on that we wanted our Instagram to reflect our values. We followed activists, entrepreneurs and artists from around the city to help us learn from our partners. Social media allowed us to build stronger connections with people that might not usually have a direct line of communication with city government.
3. Be Consistent
We’ve been sending emails through Mailchimp for over a year now and it’s been an effective platform to drive meaningful engagement. We have an average open rate of 36% and click rate of 4%, which is more than twice the average for government emails. We have always tried to keep our emails concise, sharing only the most necessary information and using the newsletter to link to different platforms when it makes sense.
Our Instagram account is relatively new, but since the beginning we’ve tried to be consistent in how often we post and what kind of posts we share. Every fifth post is a quote typed on a colorful background from a local or global thought leader. Posting these quotes was a way to remain true to the Inclusive Innovation brand, which is centered around highlighting the work of others. Being consistent means having clear goals, knowing our voice and executing regularly. Consistency has helped us stand out and has given followers an appreciation of what we’re offering that no one else is.
4. Stay Relevant
The Summit occurred at the end of March, following Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March). We kept this in mind to help us understand how the Summit fit into a long history as well as a current conversation of people fighting for equity and justice in this country.
We used our platform to remember inspirational people from our past, such as Alfred L. Cralle. For National Inventors Day, we discovered that Cralle was working at a hotel in Pittsburgh in 1896 when he got a patent for the ice cream scoop to help his coworkers in the kitchen. We felt it was significant to remember stories like this and look backwards to contextualize what we’re doing today.
5. Promote Your Community
The Inclusive Innovation Summit has never really been about us. It’s always been about our 300 partners and the work they do year-round to make Pittsburgh more inclusive and equitable. Much of the work we did on social media involved amplifying the voices of those partners. We used Twitter to do this, where retweeting has the capacity to broadcast one person’s message to so many new people. As I scrolled through our Twitter feed to write this article, I was struck by the many ways the platform has been used to promote important things happening around the city.
6. Try new things
We used a number of media forms to keep things interesting — photographs, artwork, videos. We made a sandwich board for Inclusive Innovation at Hack PGH and one of our talented and artistic interns put it to good use. He drew detailed pictures on the chalkboard to highlight the main events at the Summit and give a shout out to our sponsors. These were some of our most popular Instagram posts.
We also collaborated with Point Park University this year. In the weeks leading up to the Summit, we went around the city with Point Park students who were completing a practicum and interviewed partners, city officials and sponsors. We had never done anything like this before and it provided me and the students I worked with important exposure to the nonprofit ecosystem in Pittsburgh. It was a new way to make connections between different institutions in the city.
The idea was that the interviews would be posted to our digital platforms as a way to promote both the Summit and our partners. The thirty minute interviews were edited into thirty-second, digestible clips. The interviews were often candid, leading to real conversations about what inclusion means in the city and how we can get better.
7. Be Human & Remember to Listen
This year’s Summit came during a tumultuous time for the city of Pittsburgh. Five months after the Tree of Life shooting and just a week after the Antwon Rose case came to a close, the city was hurting. After the verdict was delivered, we took a break from marketing to recognize the pain that our team was feeling alongside people throughout the city. We reflected. We listened. We evaluated the role the Summit could play in helping our community heal.
The Summit occurred at a moment in time when people were looking for meaningful connections to one another. Inclusive Innovation is designed to facilitate those connections and when the Summit arrived, it felt like an important platform to have real conversations about the work we need to do to make Pittsburgh safer and more welcoming.
There is a lot of information out there about how to effectively use digital communication. There are tips and tricks to increasing your followers. There are statistics about the power of social media. And while I’ve learned a lot these past five months about how digital communication can make city government more effective, the real takeaways for me have less to do with communication strategies and more to do with how we can harness the power we already have to bring about change.
It’s been an eye-opening experience seeing what can happen when we utilize the resources we have to uplift one another. The Summit felt like a grassroots effort that came together because of generous donations of money and time from people and organizations in every part of the city. Progress only happens with an interconnected network of people working together and it’s been an honor to see how that network gets built, one on-ramp at a time.
Inclusive Innovation is a joint initiative between the City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Innovation & Performance and the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Stay in touch and learn more about the Inclusive Innovation Summit by signing up for our emails, joining our Meetup or following us on Instagram or Medium.
