This session was focused on providing local leaders, developers, and advocates with tools and examples for every stage of community engagement—outreach, research and education, involvement, collaboration, and long-term shared leadership—to keep our communities moving forward during times of COVID-19 and beyond. We also explored tools and techniques for virtual engagement and discuss some of the equity considerations that must fundamentally guide the community engagement process.

Agenda

• Welcome
• Case Study: KC Spirit Playbook team
• Breakout Discussions #1: Experiences
• Debrief
• Breakout Discussions #2: Tools & Resources
• Debrief
• Wrap-Up

Speakers

KC Spirit Playbook Team @ City Planning and Development, City of Kansas City, MO

• Morgan Pemberton, Planner
• Kyle Elliott, Division Manager
• Gerald Williams, Lead Planner
• Brian Jackson, Planner

Session Recap

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has increased local governments and organizations’ reliance on virtual channels and tools to move public projects forward, thus giving rise to a series of new challenges when it comes to community engagement. For the Virtual Community Engagement session of our Learning Journeys, we were joined by Morgan Pemberton, Gerald Williams, and Kyle Elliott from Kansas City (MO) Planning and Development, who shared insight on the KC Spirit Playbook, a diverse and inclusive engagement program designed to build from one phase to another based on community input submitted through the site’s interactive engagement tools. 

The session began with a 15-minute presentation by the KC Spirit Playbook team, including demographic trends and identified disparities, considerations of diversity in language for accessibility, and steps taken to prepare the community to engage through the platform. During the first breakout session, delegates discussed some of their most recent virtual community engagement approaches and compared them to the KC Spirit team’s experiences and lessons learned. 

Some takeaways:

• “As public servants, we have to make sure that this meeting is as open and accessible as possible to anyone who wants to participate.” Putting restrictions on who can join, who can participate, who can give their feedback during the meeting — those are things we have to be very careful of. In a typical Town Hall meeting, anything can happen and so we have to be prepared for that in a virtual format as well. 
• It can be tough to measure success as there aren’t many points of comparison yet. The KC Spirit Playbook team used Facebook and Google ads to advertise the platform and relied on their content engagement metrics to determine the success of the platform — and whether the financial investment was worth it. 
• They also shared the need to figure out how to go past the folks that are typically represented in Town Hall meetings and engage those communities whose voices have been historically excluded in the public policy realm. There is a delicate balance between collecting useful demographic data to identify which groups are being reached (and which aren’t) and discouraging community members from participating by requiring them to provide personal identifying information. The KC Spirit Playbook currently limits the ask to two items: email address and zip code. 

The second breakout activity consisted of discussing and exchanging specific tools and channels for virtual community outreach, engagement, and education. 

• The KC Spirit Playbook is hosted by Bang the Table, a community engagement platform that can be adapted to serve a few different public engagement purposes — you can find many innovative case studies here. 
• The KC Spirit team also shared Mentimeter, an interactive presentation software they’ve used for virtual community engagement.
• Bert Lynn told us about his experience using many Public Input features for Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation projects, including main info page, meeting registration, online surveys, and maps/plan comments. “Zoom has been the best meeting platform,” he added. “Used Zoom polling during those meetings easily.” 
• Conceptboard, a workspace for virtual collaboration, was also thrown in the mix. “Concept board is a good platform for reviewing plans and providing feedback. Very similar to Miro.” 
• Drive Into Charlotte’s Future: The City of Charlotte did a public screening of the movie Back to the Future at a drive-in community meeting where residents were invited to review the draft plan and provide feedback before the plan is presented to Charlotte City Council for adoption in April 2021. They also created the Future City-Building Game for residents to choose their objectives, what to build, and where to build it. 
• The SGA team also circulated the Learning Journeys Resources spreadsheet where delegates are encouraged to share any case studies, tools, articles, and other resources that might be useful to others in the cohort. 

Stay tuned for updates on the initiative! The Public Engagement Plan to be released in early 2021 will evaluate efforts made by the City so far, including strategies to engage hard-to-reach and underrepresented people in the community, increase student participation, overcome language barriers and other barriers to participation, and integrate art and other creative elements to the process. In the meantime, you can check out the recording of the session on the Public Realm Learning Journeys webpage. 

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