Digital community engagement methods cut across boundaries of the traditional approach to getting people involved in the future development of their surroundings. Digitalizing engagement methods has made communication between residents, city administration, and urban planners much easier, but that’s not the only perk of digital engagement tools!
Read on to learn more about what advantages digital community engagement can bring to planners and local governments. But first, let’s get the terminology straight — here is a definition of community engagement.
What is Community Engagement?
Community engagement is the process of involving a community in decision-making about planning and city development. It is traditionally done with an array of online and offline participation methods, such as in-person workshops, town hall meetings, online surveys, and digital voting tools.
Community engagement can concern a small-scale neighborhood improvement project or embrace the whole city with one community engagement platform.
A big part of community engagement still takes place offline in public meetings. Obviously, face-to-face meetings are very important as the concept is very easy to understand and it feels reliable.
However, the same thing cannot be said about the data such events generate. Why? A bunch of post-it notes stuck to a wall will hardly make sense a few months after any meeting. So digitizing community engagement methods brings in benefits for both planners and citizens.
You don’t have to ditch in-person meetings completely. There are several fruitful ways of how you can combine digital community engagement methods with offline meetings.
1. Residents Engage In A Meaningful Way
At Maptionnaire we have created an approach with which residents can participate in building their cities in a way that is meaningful to them. As many of the questions that concern urban development are spatial in their nature, people need to visualize them before they answer. What can do better than a map?
That’s why Maptionnaire offers a lot of tools for designing visual and map-based surveys for urban planning that spark engagement. At the same time, they provide geolocated data that is highly usable for planners.
2. Results Make Sense to Urban Planners
Questionnaires designed with Maptionnaire allow adding quick briefings and visualizations, making them easily digestible for respondents. On top of that, the people-generated spatial data that you collect with Maptionnaire can be turned into insights about desired future developments.
This takes urban planners and developers one step closer to getting their job done. If you’re wondering which tool you could use for your future project, go ahead and give Maptionnaire a try. That’s the best way to figure out if it is what you need.
Check our webinar recordings for more tips about digitalizing your community participation.
3. Digital Community Participation Methods Have a Variety of Use Cases
Community participation enhances local democracy and residents’ wellbeing. Any sector — from arts&culture to urban planning can benefit from enhancing their community engagement toolbox with map-based surveys. For a city-wide solution, Maptionnaire Citizen Engagement Platform offers a comprehensive solution for all community participation activities.
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