CASE STUDY

Public Engagement

Mission:

Generate awareness and public engagement in the design and approval process for a multi-stage, multi-million dollar development project.

Stakeholders:

We worked with the city’s elected and appointed leaders, residents and local advocacy and civic organizations.

Strategy:

Our strategy was to make the problem bigger. The city had requested proposals for development on a large and underutilized site. Given the city’s past challenges in getting public buy-in for big projects, we advised the developers to propose a process rather than a plan. The city selected this proposal and the developer spent over six months seeking and incorporating public input into the development’s design and mission, ensuring that the plan reflected the community’s priorities while mitigating their concerns.

Lessons Learned/Results:

Through a series of virtual town halls, stakeholder meetings, and paid and earned media, we built community support for the project which (hopefully!!) provided the city council the political support they needed to approve the project.