Best Practices for Inclusive Digital Engagement During COVID-19 and Beyond
Written by Eri Furusawa and Carl Hooks
COVID-19 has forced planners to grapple with how to engage communities remotely. Shelter-in-place orders and bans on large gatherings have invalidated traditional means of outreach such as door-to-door surveys, in-person voting, and community forums. The U.S. Census, effectively the largest civic engagement exercise in the country, has been limited to online, phone, and mail responses. The pandemic has many planners turning to digital engagement tools and will likely accelerate their adoption beyond the immediate crisis — making inclusive engagement practices more important than ever.
We have seen significant shifts in community engagement in recent years as digital engagement tools supplement existing forms of outreach. These tools offer many advantages over traditional forms of engagement: they reach a larger number of people more quickly and at lower cost, and offer a wide array of engagement methods within one platform. Perhaps most promisingly, digital engagement tools lower barriers to participation by removing time and travel constraints.
However, digital engagement also has notable drawbacks. These include increasing challenges for engagement among essential workers, who are balancing more than ever and who are often already underrepresented in engagement efforts; disenfranchising those without access to the internet; further distancing populations who already distrust planning processes and will now have data privacy concerns; and potentially magnifying existing gaps in representation, including among low-income people of color and immigrants, by virtue of the sheer volume of responses that online tools can collect.
Drawing on HR&A’s experience in civic engagement in multiple American cities, we share these best practices for more inclusive digital engagement during this crisis and beyond:
Engagement efforts should consider access, ease of use, and ability to advance multiple objectives. In Baltimore, HR&A helped the Open Society Institute (OSI) and five community-based organizations design the Blueprint for Baltimore survey to identify resident priorities for the 2020 mayoral election. We distributed the survey both online and in person to address a significant digital divide, removed planning jargon to make survey questions user-friendly, provided the survey in four languages, and used the survey to go beyond data collection by providing civic education opportunities. Questions included short explanations of policy items, and canvassers were trained to offer more detail to interested respondents.
Achieving a robust and representative sample requires trust between those mounting the civic engagement effort and those responding to it. The messenger is key. Blueprint for Baltimore reached the largest, most diverse sample of the city’s population ever, and its success was mostly a function of co-sponsorship with five community organizations with strong networks across the city, whose members brought the survey directly to respondents. Beyond their ability to strategize where and how to canvass most effectively, these organizations were crucial in building trust and awareness among residents of the majority-minority city. Ensuring a representative sample requires monitoring who is responding by collecting demographic and/or geographic information. For Talking Transition: Washington, D.C., funded by OSI and designed to inform the agenda of then-incoming Mayor Muriel Bowser, we mapped incoming survey response data in real time to pivot canvassing strategy throughout the data collection period.
Using engagement data to inform policy requires careful analysis and close attention to which narratives are being elevated. In Baltimore, the Latinx population — which accounts for 5% of the population — was overrepresented in the respondent pool, accounting for about 25% of respondents. While that level of engagement was exciting for survey sponsors, careful weighting was required to provide an accurate portrait of citywide views. In general, the most interesting findings identify points of strong agreement and disagreement among cohorts. Talking Transition: NYC demonstrated that across geography, age, and length of tenure in the city (and, implicitly, race, gender, and income), residents were united in citing housing affordability as their top concern. This clear consensus provided a compelling basis for the incoming de Blasio Administration’s prioritization of housing policy as a signature initiative. In the Portland Insights Survey, a City-sponsored survey designed to inform municipal budget priorities, we found that Black and White residents held different views on how to improve policing. Given Portland’s majority-White demographic, this difference would have been buried had we only analyzed citywide results.
A well-crafted engagement effort makes findings public and provides a foundation for stronger civic involvement. Data collection should be followed by a transparent report-back of how inputs informed outcomes — something the Baltimore respondents emphasized on multiple occasions. Additionally, data should be made available for public use. In Baltimore, we engaged the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) from the beginning with the aim of publishing data and findings on its data portal. Throughout the process, we strategized with BNIA and partner organizations to make the data useful to policy advocates, community groups, and Baltimore residents, and to enable pivoting from data extraction to two-way communication in order to encourage more frequent and meaningful participation.
COVID-19 is radically changing community engagement as we know it, and the shift toward digital engagement is one aspect of this transformation. Planners must commit to inclusive engagement processes, both online and offline.