Has COVID changed community engagement …. for the better?

Clockwise from top left: Joe Blair, Megan Masson-Minock, Chris Atkin, Paul Montagno and Melissa Kalnasy

Managing Zoom meetings started as triage for our municipal clients to conduct daily business in April but it has changed our community engagement capabilities for the better in many ways. Attendance improved, new voices were heard in public comment and requiring residents to be physically present to have a voice is becoming a thing of the past. 

“Some communities say they’ve had more online or virtual participation than in live events,” said Megan Masson-Minock, who has hosted dozens of public meetings for CWA municipal clients on Zoom during the pandemic.

The modifications to the Michigan Open Meetings Act allows local units of government to meet remotely through March 2021. The amendments also enable counties or municipalities to continue remote meetings if there is declared a state of emergency, which is likely until a vaccine for COVID-19 is available.

On Carlise|Wortman’s Team Zoom you’ll find Megan, Joe Blair, Ben Carlisle, Melissa Kalnasy, Paul Montagno and Chris Atkin.

“We knew we had to act fast last spring,” said Partner John Enos. “Our clients had to keep their doors open and the lights on. Our team did an amazing job learning and deploying these technologies.”

We’re handling routine meetings for many clients: Township boards, city councils, planning commissions, zoning boards. CWA chose Zoom’s webinar service, which allows us to designate panelists, who are seen and speak onscreen, and audience members who are not visible but can speak when the moderator unmutes them. Through that experience, we’ve also discovered new tools and invented techniques to successfully conduct virtual public engagement for several master plans.

With city of Berkley staff, our consultants had planned two charrettes to present information and gather public comments for the city’s master plan.  When COVID shut everything down, we quickly pivoted to a digital survey using the SoGo online application. The city went beyond promoting the survey in social media and on its website  by sending a post card to every household and dropping off paper surveys on doorsteps by request.

To alleviate ballot box stuffing attempts, we used a SoGo option to track responses by IP addresses.  We quickly saw that residents of the city’s senior housing complex had a common IP address. We made sure that those individual opinions were heard while monitoring for repeated submissions of copycat survey response.  To replace the educational component of the webinars we created a series of eight webinars, starting with an explanation of master planning then touching on subjects like parking, gathering spaces, infrastructure and housing.   

The final Berkley webinar brought community members in to comment on the draft of the vision, goals and objectives for the master plan. We hope to use the lessons learned in Scio Township and Northville as the Berkley process continues into 2021.

Scio Township also began its process pre-COVID with a SoGo survey that got 150 responses. They used the township newsletter to notify people about the process. Over the summer, CWA Partner Doug Lewan provided information in a live webinar (later available online), seen by 70 people.  They used SoGo again, mid-process, to assemble public comments.

“We’ve learned a lot,” Doug said. “I’ve always relied on in-person, face-to-face design charettes but we found out that this new technology works well too.”

Facilitators used online gameboards to record participants' ideas for repurposing the Northville horse racing track

We’ve all seen design charrettes where participants mark up maps. For Northville, we moved that activity online to master plan the redevelopment of the area around the horse racing track. We held three virtual Zoom open houses with facilitators in breakout rooms sharing onscreen gameboards and “drawing” on maps. Participants used the polling feature in Zoom to provide input as to whether each group’s “design” met the Planning Commission’s goals for the area.

Perhaps, the greatest challenge in community engagement always is getting enough participation, in number and breadth, to represent a cross section of the community. We have found that online events are more accessible for those with limited time or transportation and for those who prefer to participate online.  However, we know that not all residents of our client communities have reliable internet and other options – by telephone or in person – need to be given equal access in a master plan process.

“I can see a real joining of these two – in person and online,” Doug said.  We will bring the lessons learned from our pandemic pivot of hosting Zoom meetings to our continued efforts for genuine and cross-cutting community engagement in our services and projects.