Treat residents as stakeholders, not customers by “channeling” community engagement
The challenge for successful communication and information-sharing
Most public and private organizations have a communication and information-sharing (CIS) strategy for their audiences. Businesses interact with prospective and existing customers. Public institutions interact with constituents and residents.
While both sectors’ methods for connecting, informing, and engaging can be similar, how those methods are used and for what purpose should differ greatly.
This article is about CIS between public institutions, notably local governments with their audiences. It will draw comparisons with the private sector and their CIS strategies with consumers. The article also focuses on a specific area of government-resident communication pertaining to governing and democratic processes, e.g., deliberations, public comment, and decision-making, or engagement-for-input.
As the use of information technology continues to drive many of today’s conversations, public institutions have followed examples set by the private sector replicating solutions and strategies in governments’ outreach to residents. There are major differences, however. While the challenges are similar –connect and engage– the intentions, methods, and solutions are, or should be, quite distinct.
Due to local governments’ attempts to emulate their private sector counterparts, many local jurisdictions’ public engagement strategies and communication methods are less effective and fall short of their intended goal. This usually relates to the lack of financial and human resources in the public sector along with legal and political limitations on methodology and on the use of technology. The result can create a disorderly situation of excessive and disjointed coordination between local government and residents.
This dilemma can be exemplified through three communication models used by businesses and by local governments that dominate today’s digital environment: Multichannel, Omnichannel, and Social Media.
Multichannel versus Omnichannel
In response to consumer demand and the many CIS options available in today’s digital world, most companies provide multiple communication channels to serve prospective and existing customers. This is known as multi-channel support –communicating with customers via multiple channels such as print, SMS/text, e-mail, websites, and mobile applications. Due primarily to its historical bureaucratic structure, most local governments have adopted this approach by using and offering multiple channels as options to connect with residents.
Image source: Quadient
There is growing criticism in both the private and public sectors that multi-channel communication is not as efficient or effective as other forms of communication. Since multi-channel communication involves sending information through multiple channels, the result is a lack of internal coordination and consistency in what is being sent.
For example, a communique may look different in an email than on a website or mobile device. For private companies, this can be a major problem. Communicating their brands is about consistency in imagery and in the message –two features whose value is debated for the public sector (though there is merit in their use for government branding in community trust building).
Another criticism of multi-channel communications is that each communication channel is managed within a separate platform or system. This means the channels are administered in silos a/k/a “smokestacks” in the public sector resulting in separate communiqués that do not support bi-directional or interactive communications with customers or constituents.
What has emerged is an alternative form of communication and information sharing to connect multiple communication channels and merge them into one for greater effectiveness and experience. Enter Omnichannel. An omnichannel communications strategy enables organizations to bridge or centralize multiple channels to send consistent information and messages across all channels. Customers or residents can connect with organizations through any and all forms of communication used.
Omnichannel communication is highly touted in the private sector for improving company response to customers. Unlike multichannel communications where the platform used is the primary platform limited for that exchange, in omnichannel communications, business customers or community residents can begin their experience on one channel and continue it on another. Examples are a customer who receives a credit card offer via email but responds by printing and completing the application on paper and mailing it or a resident who receives a flier in the mail about a public meeting for a downtown revitalization project but goes online to learn more or to leave a comment. In omnichannel, moving across channels is invisible.
Image source: Quadient
Brand versus Bond
For private companies, controlling the conversation is less important than providing more communication options to consumers. It’s not up to the brand to determine how it communicates to the customer — it’s up to the customer to choose how they interact with the brand. This improves a company’s ability to make itself more accessible to consumers and distinguish itself from competitors.
But what if the organization has no competitors? Such is the case for a local government. Its communication methods must operate within legal and political “guardrails” and be accessible to all its members, not just those who pursue its programs or services.
In the private sector, similar product and service brands compete for attention and ultimately sales. Using multiple communication platforms and strategies are options that provide the customer control over how they wish to connect and communicate with the brand. The ultimate goal is to secure a sale and a returning customer.
For governments, where there is limited if any organizational competition for their programs and services, their goal is to be accommodating and serve the needs of residents. This is more akin to managing stakeholder relations than to pursuing customer sales. This is a role requiring stewardship, not salesmanship.
Stewardship is about taking care of something, not selling it. For local government, it’s also about having a leadership role to maintain and administer a public institution whose primary purpose is to serve the residents who ultimately oversee it.
Effective care-taking requires structure, organization, order, and moderation to ensure successful democratic processes in today’s unrestrained digital world –processes that are of low or no concern in the private sector. And that brings us to social media.
The role of social media
While the private sector’s use of social media as part of its communication strategy is to fully embrace it, that formula is not the best or most effective way for local government and residents to collaborate.
Social media participation has become a modern default for all businesses. Most have invested heavily in hiring teams of social media managers to oversee these communication and marketing platforms. And that is one of the ironies that distinguishes private sector and public sector use of social media. Where private companies centralize social media around a brand –and invest heavily in managing it, local governments have scattered social media across the enterprise. Social network accounts of 40 or more for each agency or for multiple departments within agencies are not uncommon.
That dispersion makes managing social media traffic a major challenge for local governments. The problem is that many of these networks exist with little or no daily oversight due to limited staff or financial resources and poor planning. It’s also unknown to residents how to use these accounts whether as purely information sources or collaboration platforms. The risk for local government is the latter –residents use these accounts to initiate conversations and there is a lack of staff support to manage them. The result is like a ringing phone that doesn’t get answered.
The “channels” challenge for public engagement
As for the use of social media as an integral part of a communication and information-sharing strategy and platform, experts suggest organizations cannot take advantage of social media without an omnichannel approach. For the private sector, this is typically not a challenge. Due to their heavy reliance on social media for marketing their brand, private companies are willing to invest the necessary funds in technology and talent to succeed.
Local governments, however, find it difficult, and rightly so, to justify the ROI of staff and financial expenses to match the private sector’s investment when it comes to social networks. Public institutions require greater structure and controls surrounding their public outreach and communication practices –elements typically not found in social networks.
Still, an omnichannel approach can offer greater responsiveness, accountability, and efficiency for local governments in their communication strategies, particularly those that focus on community engagement. In these processes, taking a comprehensive and cost-effective approach to engaging residents means deploying a strategy and solution that integrates conventional and digital engagement platforms. For the tech solution, that means bringing together different communication channels that are found in an omnichannel environment that also integrates with their social media.
This requires centralization and unification of the public communication process. Such a platform would leverage smart technology to empower public deliberations with a comprehensive communication and data management platform. It would facilitate a concerted communication and engagement strategy to build awareness, collect and organize input and feedback, manage collaboration (virtual and in-person), and close the feedback loop with resident stakeholders.
Here is where the engagement-for-input challenge is most notably differentiated between private brands and public institutions. It’s about value. What provides the greatest value to residents and to local governments? An exchange of ideas, or an exchange of dollars?
The answer suggests the purpose and the method of how public and private organizations should approach and engage their members. Local governments and residents need greater structure and controls for meaningful, inclusive, and equitable participation and input –elements not necessarily sought after or practiced by the private sector whose main objective is sales.
Conclusion
Since the pandemic, local governments have been making positive, and at times, painful strides to meet the public’s preferences and expectations for greater digital communication and sharing of information. It has not only required a transformation of technology, but it has also required a transformation of institutional culture. It’s a balancing act that the private sector doesn’t concern itself with.
There’s a difference between a resident as a customer and as a stakeholder when it comes to community engagement (or civic engagement). In these exchanges, residents are not customers as traditionally defined in customer relationship management (CRM) or customer experience (CX) models. Instead, local governments should treat residents as the stakeholders that they are –financial and civic backers in their community and in their local government.
Building upon this recognition and relationship powered and supported by the appropriate engagement technology creates greater civic participation, building trust in government and a better quality of government which contributes to a better civic infrastructure and community.
