GSA / participation-playbook

US Public Participation Playbook
https://participation.usa.gov/
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Establish goals

Play 1: Clearly define and communicate your objectives

Federal agencies understand the importance of meaningful public engagement. The type of engagement will differ for each organization, depending on resources, audience and mission. Every agency must set goals that align with its unique definition of success and empowers the public to engage with agencies in order to influence government priorities.

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Metrics: How Do You Know You Successfully Established Goals?

Metrics will vary according to the platform you use. Some broad examples include:

Understand the Playing Field

Play 2: Understand your participants and stakeholder groups

Community and stakeholder understanding is key to organizing a successful participatory effort. Once you determine who you're trying to reach, you can refine your outreach efforts to effectively communicate with participants and stakeholders.

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Play 3: Understand and communicate the benefit of participation

Participants must understand how they can contribute to a program and why it is important they participate. Clearly defined and communicated benefits help craft effective messages and inclusive engagement. Understanding what successful participation looks like is critical to knowing whether your program succeeds.

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Case Studies

Play 4: Empower participants through public/private partnership

Leveraging corporate and community partners is a powerful way of gaining support and participation for government campaigns and events. Partners and sponsors can help reach new audiences or reinforce messages within existing ones. Public/private partnerships also legitimize both what your agency is trying to accomplish and how that information or program is delivered.

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Case Studies

Metrics: How do you know you understand the playing field?

Measure:

Design Participation

Play 5: Select appropriate design format for public participation

Enable broad participation by offering responsive, accessible, intuitive, mobile-ready tools that can be rendered in multiple formats on a wide range of platforms.

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Play 6: Design for inclusiveness

Whenever you're running any sort of public engagement effort, make sure the design and setup are inclusive. Consider persons with disabilities who use screen readers, people with limited English proficiency or low literacy skills, and many others who may experience difficulty reading.

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Play 7: Provide multi-tiered paths to participation

Good government is responsive and engaging. To ensure broad participation and involve more citizens in the decision-making process use a variety of channels to communicate. It is important for agencies to be inclusive, and make maximum use of available resources to receive feedback from a wide audience.

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Play 8: Provide effective and timely notifications

Throughout the life of an engagement effort, effective communication with participants and stakeholders is key. This play offers tips and advice for letting your audience know about opportunities to participate, and how to keep them engaged and active for the duration of the event.

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Play 9: Encourage community building through responsive outreach

Community development and outreach involves communication amongst community stakeholders, partner organizations, research centers, and government agencies. Goals include communicating reliable information about federal programs and policies, including addressing complaints; obtaining public feedback about the impact of government activities; fostering conversations and incorporating feedback into the policymaking process; and strengthening the channels of communication between communities, the government, and public/ private sectors.

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Play 10: Protect citizen privacy

Public participation is crucial to our democracy, but federal agencies must engage in ways that protect privacy, while maintaining compliance with federal laws such as the Federal Records Act (FRA) and the Privacy Act.

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Metrics: How do you know you successfully design participation?

Facilitate Participation

Play 11: Use Data to Drive Decision Making

Use data to inform decisions about engagement efforts and public participation. Data can help you decide the best format for your engagement effort, the best tools to use, the most receptive audiences and more. Data will help you get the desired results and adapt your engagement effort along the way.

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Metrics: How do you know you're successfully facilitating participation?

Evaluate and Report

Play 12: Transparently report outcomes and performance of participation

Transparency builds and maintains trust and respect with participants. When government takes an active role in allowing public participation in the decision-making process, accountability is key to maintaining trust of participants, by transparently reporting outcomes and performance of participation on a regular basis. Transparency allows for equal assessment with internal agencies, stakeholders and the public.

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Case Studies

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Metrics: How do you know you're successfully evaluating and reporting outcomes?

Justin Herman
Federal-wide Social Media Program Lead
Office of Innovative Technologies: Department of DigitalGov
U.S. General Services Administration
Building the Government of the 21st Century

To join almost 900 digital managers across government in the #SocialGov Community, with training, resources and inter-agency collaborations led by feds across government for feds across government, please email Justin Herman (justin.herman@GSA.GOV) with "Subscribe to #SocialGov" in the subject.