Citizen Insights to Boost Your Community Engagement

By Madeline Weber
Marketing Specialist here at eSolutionsGroup/GHD 

Have you ever wondered how your municipality can keep up and continue to engage citizens in an increasingly digital world? With information abound, it’s hard to truly prioritize the right services your municipality should make available online, or even the mediums to use – from mobile apps to websites. To help, the team at GHD Digital partnered with Maru to survey citizens across Canada to learn about their preferences for accessing city services. With this information, we’ve uncovered how your organization can best increase citizen engagement with the right online approach for your city services.

Know your citizens needs inside and out

What city services do your citizens care about most? 

To find out, we got the intel from citizens across Canada. We found that 64% of citizens are most interested in reporting a problem or concern to their municipality. We also discovered that 57% of citizens were interested in permit and license applications and 56% of citizens were interested in programs and registration services.

What better way to increase your engagement then making these preferred services more accessible online. Because these services are top of mind, the more convenient you make these services to find and use, the more participation you will gain from your citizens. You’ll also maintain a lighter budget because you’re focusing on optimizing services that citizens truly need, while using your staff time and energy more wisely. 

Determine the most effective platform

How do you prefer to access city services and information about your city?

As the digital environment continues to expand, many organizations struggle to know which platform is best to deliver their services. When organizations try to tackle it all, they risk spreading their resources thin and confuse their communications to citizens. Certainly not a sustainable, nor effective solution. 

To narrow down your efforts, we found that 63% of Canadian citizens prefer to access city services on a website. This holds true when comparing citizens interest across Canadian regions. By focusing your efforts on your website, your organization will save the effort of managing multiple different platforms and build the websites foundation on what they care about most.

We have heard repeatedly that municipalities believe the mobile app is the secret to transforming their citizen engagement. However, the insight of citizens preferring websites challenges this theory and offers a more cost-effective option for your municipality.

Your website can wear many hats with its ability to integrate with all sorts of digital features that can help optimize each of your city services. To learn more about which city services you can leverage on your website to engage your users, read our in-depth whitepaper Citizen Insights: Measuring success for citizen engagement.

Explore new avenues for digital services

While a website is a powerful tool, we wanted to dive into some specific digital features that you can use to attract even more engagement from your citizens.

Will personalized dashboards be a hit?

Personalized technology is a popular trend to provide a self-serve way for users to engage with content that is most relevant to them. Is it worth exploring for municipalities? Results showed that 72% of Canadian citizens are interested in using a personalized online dashboard to access city services. This data shows how citizens are eager and excited to engage with their city online. This trend is only expected to increase – is your organization ready to invest in it?

Learn how the City of Kitchener is leading the way with their MyKitchener portal to provide residents a personalized experience to engage with their city services.

Citizens interest for direct notifications

In recent years, many municipalities have joined the bandwagon with direct notifications to support their communications and service updates, including email subscriptions. But do residents want to receive more pings and messages for city services? Results revealed that 84% of Canadian citizens would find direct notifications useful for staying updated with their city services. 

Before you start sending out notifications for all services, consider narrowing down what services would benefit most from direct notifications. As well, be sure that your notifications offer valuable and meaningful information that citizens can rely on to continue growing engagement with intention.

Summary

With this new wealth of insights, encourage your organization to take these statistics and turn them into actionable strategies to make your city services more engaging to citizens. 

Eager to learn more? Check out our in-depth report, Citizen Insights: Measuring success for citizen engagement, where we provide more valuable statistics and data to further support your research and strategies for citizen engagement.