In this issue
🏛 Full-loop engagement
🌍 Citizen assemblies go local
🔄 The Amazon method for cities
🎙 Rosie Knight on listening first
📋 Your engagement loop checklist
Oh, hi!
Last year, 93,000 New Yorkers voted on how to spend $30 million of their city's budget. Some of those voters were 11 years old. And the process was designed so that every single one of them would find out exactly what happened with their vote.
That last part is the part most cities skip. And it is the part that matters most.
Three Things You Should Know
1. NYC just proved full-loop engagement works at scale
New York City's Participatory Budgeting Program has put real budget decisions in the hands of residents for over a decade, including voters of all ages. But the innovation is not who gets to vote. It is that every voter can track what happened with their vote afterward. The closed loop — reporting back — is what builds trust. Not the vote itself.
2. American cities are putting residents in the room where decisions get made
Montrose, Colorado ran a citizen assembly pilot where 64 randomly selected residents spent 12 weeks solving the city's child care shortage, producing 24 proposed actions. The National League of Cities highlighted citizen assemblies in Petaluma, CA and Bend, OR as models spreading across the country. And the Harvard Bloomberg Center published a civic engagement guide for city leaders laying out the model. Assemblies are the government equivalent of bringing the customer into the design room. They work because residents do not just give input, they see that input shape the outcome.
3. What Amazon's "Working Backwards" method teaches city communicators
Amazon's "Working Backwards" method starts every product by writing a mock press release from the customer's perspective before building anything. City comms teams should do the same thing. Before you design your next engagement process, write a mock resident testimonial. What would a resident say after participating? If you cannot write that sentence, you have not designed the process yet.
The Resource
I built a one-page checklist for this. Ten yes-or-no questions that tell you whether your next engagement effort is designed to close the loop or leave residents hanging.
This Part Really Matters
Engagement is a loop, not a funnel. NYC closes it with tracking. Assemblies close it with visible influence. Amazon closes it by starting with the outcome. Most cities design engagement as a funnel, when it should be a circle: show up, something changes, they hear about it, they show up again.
What You Can Do
- Audit one engagement process this week. Pick your most recent public meeting, survey, or feedback initiative. Ask: did residents who participated ever hear what happened as a result? If not, close that loop, even retroactively.
- Write the mock resident testimonial. Before your next engagement effort launches, write the sentence a resident should be able to say afterward. Design backward from there.
- Steal NYC's tracking model. You do not need a $30 million budget program. You need a follow-up email, a dashboard update, or a social media post that says: "You told us X. Here is what we did."
On the Oh, hi! Stories Podcast, Rosie Knight from Orlo put the whole philosophy in one line: So listen first, understand, then act.
If there is someone on your team who designs engagement processes, forward this to them. This is the kind of thing that changes how a team thinks about the work, not just how they execute it.
Talk soon,
—Dana
About Dana
Former Emmy-winning television producer and Chief Digital Officer. Built Gilbert, AZ's national award-wining Office of Digital Government. Now helping city communicators tell stories that build trust.
Oh, hi! Stories Podcast: Spotify | Apple Podcasts
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