Imagine Mesa
City of Mesa, Arizona
Over the course of 2017 and 2018, the City of Mesa engaged over 67,000 participants on their strategic planning and capital improvement budgeting process. Imagine Mesa was led by Mayor John Giles, the Mesa City Council, and an Advisory Committee of local leaders. In November of 2018, voters approved $300 million in municipal bonds to bring these ideas to reality.
Grasstops + grassroots
The Mesa City Council challenged the project team to engage as broad an audience as possible, and to be as inclusive as possible in the process. The team created an engagement strategy focused around on-line, 24–7 feedback accessible from multiple devices and mediums and in the respondent’s native language. This included a Spanish only version of the website accommodating Mesa’s large Latino community. Realizing that some members of the community did not feel comfortable with online engagement, the campaign included traditional outreach intent on “meeting people where they are”. The team leveraged existing community events, meetings and workshops to solicit ideas. They also developed an efficient governance structure and process to analyze feedback. The team crafted a strong visual identity for the project and executed targeted marketing campaigns to drive engagement online. Mayor Giles and many council members provided strong leadership throughout the project, actively encouraging the people of Mesa to participate in the project at public events and through their personal social media channels.
Imagine Mesa exemplified a community-centered design approach to public engagement. Residents were encouraged to actively participate in the generation and prioritization of strategic and financial priorities for the city. The Imagine Mesa website encouraged visitors to share opportunities for the community’s future, vote on these ideas, and share solutions for how to make the ideas happen. Forums were organized by areas where the City had enough local control to make ideas a reality, like city parks and public safety.. Questions included “How do you imagine Mesa at home” and “How do you imagine Mesa at play”. The website also featured a dynamic stream of the most popular ideas across all forums. Here’s an archived version of the site, and a video recording of the committee’s final presentation to the Mayor and Council that demonstrates the team’s approach.
Meeting people where they are
To spread the word, the committee and staff attended over 50 civic events and presentations. Written data from each event was uploaded and shared on the website for residents who could not attend in person. The campaign resulted in over 250,000 minutes (5,000 hours) of participation, generating 465 ideas and 6,000 votes. Our automated email tool delivered over 30,000 email notifications to participants. Data from social media and website interaction was baselined to ensure that participation was both diverse and representative. The Imagine Mesa team also employed a digital strategy that encouraged participation through social media. The targeted online campaign involved 137 social media posts which appeared in 238,000 social media feeds. All of this engagement cost the city less than $1 per resident.
Outcomes
After a four month period of engagement, the advisory committee of community leaders evaluated the feasibility of the public’s ideas. Subcommittees divided into specific areas, including economic development, sustainability, neighborhoods, and parks and recreation. They evaluated opportunities by potential cost, impact, and public support and presented their research to the city council for recommended implementation.
The most popular idea on Imagine Mesa was to encourage Arizona State University to expand to downtown Mesa. Discussions about bringing ASU to Mesa were active for almost a year before the Imagine Mesa campaign. The campaign brought many new ideas to the attention of city leadership, but in situations like ASU where there was already community awareness, the availability of a public feedback mechanism helped leaders gauge public support at a crucial period in the deliberation process. The Mesa City Council approved a master plan to design and construct a 5 story building and 2–3 acre open plaza with the sale of excise tax bonds.
The City made the public’s ask for a farmer’s market downtown a reality, offering use of a city park, selecting a market operator and providing marketing assistance. The market is anticipated to open operations in January 2019. Additionally, the City is currently in negotiations with a respondent to an RFP to redevelop the historic Sirrine House into a farm-to-table restaurant and urban agricultural space.
The Mesa City Council crafted several ballot measures to respond to themes proposed by residents and the advisory committee, including parks, cultural facilities and public safety measures measures. Voters passed $111m in parks and cultural bods and $85m in public safety general obligation bonds in the 2018 elections, much of which will construct or implement ideas proposed through the Imagine Mesa campaign. This includes several police and fire facilities and new and renovated libraries.
Additional outcomes included:
- Passing a parks bond that will create many new softball, baseball, soccer, football fields and parks
- Passing a public safety sales tax
- Expanding bulk pickup service
- Museum improvements
- Bike and pedestrian canal paths
- The creation of over 20 community “little libraries” with more to come
- Hiring code officers for proactive enforcement
- Investing in programs for the homeless, including an innovative community court
- New City of Mesa branded signage at city entryways
To see a full evaluation of the project, view this presentation from the City of Mesa.
“We want Mesa to be a bottoms-up community. The seven of us [on the City Council] are not sitting here because we are the smartest people in the city or because we’re the ones who have the best ideas in the city. That’s not the case. We have a very capable community that has lots of talent and resources, and we want to draw on that. This approach helps us be better at what we’re doing.”
– Mayor John Giles, City of Mesa
