Community engagement is the art of facilitating meaningful conversations between residents and cities-governments to generate insights and actions. These actions include making a decision & acting on issues facing the community, improving general services for the residents, and to plan for the future services to be delivered to the community. At a high-level, majority of the public ideally profess that ‘Community Engagement’ is caring about one and another, to create opportunities, and working together for the higher purpose to create something bigger-better together. Referencing the IAP2 (International Association for Public Participation) model,
Civy is focused on engaging residents with the city-government departments to help address a variety of questions such as:

Why is the city-government proposing a project or policy?
What decision is being made?
Has a decision already been made?
What input or type of input would be most appropriate?
What are the challenges expected to come up?
What is the best approach and compromises required to address the challenges?

Civy provides the online-platform through which shared interests will be maintained between residents and their city-government officials; to save the energy and time; and to keep the focus on these shared interests until insightful analysis and outcomes are agreed. Based on our previous experiences in US, Australia, Singapore and India, Civy has determined the level of involvement considering a few factors:

Type of projects or services introduced by the city-government and its impacts to the community;
Types of participants and stakeholders and; their readiness for change and level of interest;
Alternate options considered;
Are the decision-makers acting independently or biased towards some options over the others ; is project deemed truly transparent.
Different phases of a project and the changing needs along each phase of the various stakeholders; When initiating a project, the city may choose to inform the public that the project is beginning. In the next stage, the city may need input from the stakeholders and want feedback from them. This could involve consulting,,surveys, workshops, town-halls, focus groups. In this way, the project may use different levels of involvement at different stages.

Nowadays, everyone is aware about the impact of social media on day to day life and its driving force for all types of engagement (social, meaningful, negative, fake and many others). At Civy, we collaborated with cities, governments and community groups to understand what they describe as meaningful engagement, hence creating meaningful data for the cities. Civy is able to obtain buy-in from various stakeholders and inspire every individual to express their idea in a respectful and confidential manner, and exchange their thoughts through a medium which would help for the betterment of the community. Residents convey their concerns directly to the decision-makers in cities-government for the improvement of environment, sustainability, utilities, cleanliness, infrastructure and many other projects. Civy’s platform is designed to connect people. A separate login for the City-Government departments enables them to create and propose projects / policies / or services for residents , to solicit feedback from residents for betterment of the county, town, city, province infrastructure and services. Further, the feedback provided by residents directly to the city-government, can be disseminated back to the residents as education, to clarify and explain any misconception, to provide facts and stay ahead of fake news and rumors. As a resident (an individual), anyone can sign up with Civy to vote on a project, to provide feedback, to educate themselves on proposed projects. Civy’s platform will involve participants from across the community, few examples are:
Individual residents
Citizen interest groups
Political leaders and groups
Neighborhood group leaders
Individual businesses and associations
Community groups
Religious groups and associations
Other impacted government or social services agencies
Universities, Colleges and Schools
Public and non-profit interest groups

Civy will reach out the diverse audience to increase participation rates to above 86%, and at the same time, leverage existing platforms such as Facebook to help cities and governments extract meaningful feedback and data they need to improve their services. Our strategy to engagement is simple and follows the ‘back-to-basics’ principles of ‘asking people’:-Identify the under-represented areas, -Confirm participants, -Determine the criteria of outcome city is seeking and accordingly design the questionnaire or surveys, -Determine the level of involvement and the way forward to receive the feedback against the defined criteria, -Collate the input, analyze and draw insights into a Dashboard and Reports, -Enable decision-makers to use these reports to make the final decision or repeat the process until the target outcome is achieved.

For More Information about Civy
Visit : https://civy.co/