Communicating about Citizens’ Assemblies
Lessons from the Citizens’ Assembly in Poznan, Poland
The role of communication
A question often posed about Citizens’ Assemblies is how to reach members of the wider local community beyond Assembly Members? Since Citizens’ Assemblies include a limited number of participants, there is a justified sense of obligation to reach as many members of the local community beyond Assembly Members as possible. A Citizens’ Assembly is a decision making process with real political outcomes. It demands that we pursue wide community engagement. This boosts legitimacy of the Assembly results, which is important for upholding, implementing, and sustaining them.
There is also a longer-term perspective. My hope as a practitioner it that the Citizens’ Assembly I am involved with will become part of a bigger picture. That it will contribute to future processes, shift the socio-political culture in a way that more assemblies can follow. From this perspective, proper communication serves an additional role. The better communicated an Assembly — the more inviting its public profile — the more support and trust it sprouts for Assemblies to follow. And if Citizens’ Assemblies are to become a regular, institutionalized part of our governance systems one day, the transition will come more easily to communities that are aware of and understand what these processes are and how they are contributing to putting everyday people at the heart of public decision making.
Communication methods
A fundamental piece of the communication puzzle is the Assembly’s website. In this digital age, it validates the assembly’s existence in the public’s eye, gives it a tangible trail, and serves a functional purpose as a communication platform. Without it, an Assembly would be taking place in a vacuum — the opposite of what we want for a democratic process.
In Poznań’s case, the Assembly was commissioned by the municipality, which meant that its website had to be a sub-page under the municipality’s domain. In this case, we did not have direct access to it and had little to say about its layout and functionalities. Our agency was limited to the creation of content itself. This solution has its pros and cons. The main advantage of it is that the municipal domain gave the Assembly’s page a sense of importance that otherwise would have taken extra effort to achieve. The obvious disadvantage was lack of creative freedom.
By virtue of the website’s pre-existing design, our content was divided into two categories: (1) fixed reference pages, such as “what is a citizen’s assembly”, “who are the stakeholders”, “the Assembly Rulebook”, etc., and (2) dynamic news tiles, used for posting continuous updates about the Assembly’s progress.
Both types of content are important, as they respond to different needs on citizens’ part. Much like a theatre play where the stage needs to be set and then the performance happens on it, so did our communication need to include foundational, stage-setting information, alongside timely articles on new developments. What we wanted was not only to announce to the public that the Assembly was taking place, but to bring them along on its journey, to the extent possible. Three ideas helped us achieve that.
1. Start early
Before the invitations were sent out, before the first posters were printed. We started publishing as soon as the process preparations begun, even the most preliminary ones. It was important to let the public know when and how the process would be taking place, why it mattered, who would be in charge of it, and how the community could get involved. Starting very early on extended the bracket of time we had for gathering audience around the event. It also gave the Assembly some substance, which may have influenced the invitees’ decision on whether to register to participate or not. The Poznań Assembly hit a national record in terms of registrations, and I strongly believe it had to do with its existing online profile at the time people were receiving invitations.
2. Go the extra mile to create content aimed at different types of learners
This is something that we tend to be sensitive to in the context of session design, but it very much applies to communication strategy, too. Out of all the people out there who are potentially interested in following an Assembly process, some are going to be verbal, others visual, and others auditory (these may not be all the learning styles out there, but they are the ones that can be realistically incorporated into online communication). That is why beyond writing articles we also published commissioned graphic recordings covering key educational content, power-point slides that were used by experts and stakeholders, a recording of an open info session, and video files of presentations and meetings. We also hired a small filmmaking studio to produce a series of short clips explaining key aspects of the process — these were shared on the Assembly’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. It was important for us to make the Assembly feel like it was truly an all-city event, not a membership-only gathering. Publishing abundant and diverse content was an attempt to do just that.
3. Be cool about it
We let the tone and style of our communication reflect the atmosphere we envisioned for the Assembly meetings themselves. In our case the Assembly was municipality-commissioned, so it had to fit into the pre-existing institutional culture, language included. We tried to make the most of it, and remain as human and as informal as possible. It shortened the distance between us as coordinators and our audience. You really can’t go too wrong if your communication remains genuine, open, and timely.
We mostly relied on online means of communication (i.e. the website, Facebook, and YouTube), but we also made some efforts to use traditional media, such as posters. A heavier investment into those (like radio or newspaper ads) did not make much financial and practical sense in our case, but it may be worth pursuing for other processes.
Communication strategies follow the same general principle as any other element of a Citizens’ Assembly: they are tailor-made on a case-by-case basis, with good practices from around the world serving as a source of inspiration and learning.
Zuzanna Nowak was part of the coordination team of the Citizens’ Assembly in Poznan, Poland. She specializes in deliberative democracy and environmental governance.
