Communications and Engagement System for the City of Austin

Research, Strategy, Design

 

Overview

The actions and decisions of a city government impact people’s lives every day. In a city growing as rapidly as Austin, residents feel desperate to know what’s going on and share their needs and opinions on issues that matter to them. From police reform, to accessing COVID testing, to demystifying housing permitting, and more, I worked on projects that matter deeply to Austin residents and businesses. In this project, I was able to step back and take a big-picture, systemic view to try to make information and engagement opportunities easier to find and access for the public.

One of the resulting interventions - a more visible, findable means of connecting users to engagement opportunities

Opportunity

The Communications & Public Information Office (CPIO) oversees and facilitates City communication with the public, advising and providing services to internal clients and communications and engagement opportunities to the public. There are several channels, services, and tools available for the public to engage with the City which were decentralized, scattered, and hard to find. I explored how we might marry these into a cohesive communication and engagement system to help residents get information about issues they care about, provide input, and receive feedback about how their input was used.

Outcomes

  1. A report outlining opportunities and recommended improvements spanning the five teams of my department, including the first end-to-end view connecting the services we each provide.

  2. This led to improvements on multiple touchpoints of our services, serving both internal clients and external customers. These improved awareness and alignment internally as well as visibility, findability, and awareness of our communication and engagement channels for the public.

 

Team

My role: For the report, I provided systems analysis, service design, and strategy. For improvements, I provided UX design, content strategy, and user research.

Collaborators: Internal stakeholders from across the department, visual designer, content strategists, copywriters, developers, web admins.

 

Highlights

System and Service Analyses

“Just like the actual bureaucratic divisions of City staff, the website is so uneven and not consolidated.”

  • CPIO Annual Public Survey respondent

The project started with extensive information gathering. I interviewed managers and team members across my department and reviewed all of the relevant audits, surveys, projects, and articles I could find related to communications and engagement tools in the City. 

Sample findings

I synthesized this information into maps, formulating new meaning out of my analysis. Maps got absorbed into new maps, the highest level of synthesis culminating into a modified service blueprint outlining the process of a communication and engagement initiative from inception through strategy, communication, and input gathering and displaying the players and tools involved.

From this, as well as from opportunities and journey mapping, I identified the top improvement opportunities based on impact and feasibility. This was no easy task, and included some hard truths. The needs spanned beyond communication and engagement channels to areas of our internal operations hindering our goals. I created strategic recommendations told through the story of Sandra, a user persona, and ideas to address them for several of our touchpoints - the internal Intranet, internal client services and trainings, the public facing website, and social media channels, and presented these to the department managers. The ideas were not only my own, but also incorporated related projects in the works that could address our needs. It was a special satisfaction highlighting the work of colleagues, raising the visibility of their efforts.

 

Translating Recommendations Into Solutions

Improving awareness and findability of engagement opportunities.

Some of the recommendations were incorporated by the relevant teams, some went on to inform department-wide strategic work, such as rewriting our success metrics and completing a racial equity analysis of our services. I was honored to hold a place on these strategic projects as a result of my work. A moment that felt especially celebratory was when one of the other teams in my department hung my different maps and profiles of their services in their office and incorporated my work into their annual strategic planning.

For the recommendations relating to my team, I worked on implementing UX and content improvements on our Intranet and public-facing website in collaboration with my design and content team members. Additionally, I provided technical requirements to our developers, such as improving the relevance of our search capability. View one of those projects.