Tool: Insights for Civic Participation

At the April 13 all-teams meeting, Angela Hanson did a demonstration of Insights -- a civic participation tool for your OGP toolbox.

WHY AN INSIGHTS CAMPAIGN?

• Insights is a website that enables decision makers to ask a group of people one question and develop insights and decisions based on that input.
• Insights closes the feedback loop with participants so each person knows if and how their voice made a difference in the final decisions. Too often engagement efforts leave participants guessing what happened as a result of their involvement. If people sense nothing happened, they may consider future participation a waste of time.
• Insights is social--it allows people to interact with one another’s answers.
• Insights enables participation in several ways, including SMS, in-person meetings, website pop-ups, and others.
• Insights allows you to ask people for their individual “truth” or how they see the situation and it allows you to process that information in a meaningful way.
• Insights gets at the “why” behind the quantitative data you may already have so you can better understand your participants’ perspectives more deeply.

YOU ARE READY FOR AN INSIGHTS PROJECT IF...

• You have a problem but you don't know exactly how to begin solving it effectively without hearing from the perspectives of your customers, users, and/or residents.
• You are curious and think your community has valuable information that you want to access and understand.
• A decision-maker in charge of the problem is ready and willing to take action or respond based on what participants say.
• You have time, a champion, and a communication team ready to help you get the word out about your Insights project.
• You are trying to reach many people that are not normally all in the same place at one time.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

GETTING STARTED WITH YOUR OWN PROJECT

The City of Austin Innovation Office can get you started on your own Insights project. To begin, we need some information from you. Make a copy of this project template and complete for your proposed project. Then, email it to innovation@austintexas.gov. Feel free to reach out to us if you have questions or trouble with the template.