Cultivating community capital through your capital improvement program
BY SUSANNE BANKHEAD
Launching a large infrastructure project in a community is a huge undertaking, often the result of decades in the planning process. After spending nearly 20 years working on CIP projects in public works, aviation, and parks and recreation, I’ve learned (perhaps the hard way!) proactive planning and clear communication with stakeholders and community are critical to the success of any project. Teams tend to focus on project designs, engineering and permits, but forget about building relationships and trust with the community before breaking ground. This important step can make the difference between a successful project the community embraces and a PR nightmare. Here are a few tips to consider as you roll out its next infrastructure project.
Build relationships with the community ahead of projects
One value public agencies and their constituents share is a desire to improve their community. There are a few simple ways to connect with your community before you start construction or planning for a large project. Social media is an easy way to: stay connected and highlight small wins or projects that went well in the past, share the long-term benefits a project has had on a community or feature members of the community who have helped make it a special place.
Community meetings, both formal and informal, are excellent ways to encourage two-way dialogue about a project. A great example of this is the “We Are One” campaign that Team JPW worked on in Denver, Colorado, with District One Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval. She hosts community meetings with staff from different city departments for a question and answer session with the community about city initiatives and projects.
Team JPW has also used this approach with the San Marcos Creek Project, launching a series of community presentations called “AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Creek Project Manager.”
Become a known commodity to the community
Another way to build relationships with the community is to attend events, not related to your upcoming project, so your project planners and engineers become familiar faces in the community. This allows you to listen to the community when you don’t need something from them. Find neighborhood festivals, community group meetings, coffee with community leaders and other opportunities to hear what is important to them, which will help your team make better decisions about upcoming projects. Little things can be big wins. Show them the smaller investments you’re making in their neighborhoods. Park clean-ups, sidewalk installs, pipeline replacements, new streetlights, stop signs or speed bumps are small but important demonstration projects showing you’re investing in the community and helping build trust.
Bring community in as a partner
I’ve found most communities just want to be heard and included as part of the process. It is imperative to involve the community from the beginning on any large-scale project, as opposed to the end once all the decisions have been made or the work has already started. Ask them what their values are when it comes to any given project. What do they hope to get out of the investment? Help them learn about what they don’t know. Teaching the community about the why in a project helps them to get on board and the more two-way communication you have the better.
When working on the Great Hall project at Denver International Airport (DEN), a $780 million overhaul of the main terminal at the nation’s 3rd largest airport, the team was looking for a way to reframe the narrative about why this was important for Denver residents and hear community concerns and questions. We launched the “Great Hall Road Show,” a series of meetings with the executive team hosted by the Denver City Council or Registered Neighborhood Organizations. We shared important facts about the airport and the economic impact has on both the city and the region and heard directly from the community a few misconceptions about both the project and DEN as an agency that we were able to correct. These meetings were a huge success. So much so that our leadership asked us to plan more community meetings in the future.
Finally, I’m a believer in the power of “feedback loops” in any community engagement. If community members take the time and energy to give you feedback, it’s important to close the loop and show them how their input mattered. That will build trust in you, the process and encourage them to participate again.
Not all communities are alike
When considering a community engagement strategy for public projects, keep in mind that there is no single tool or tactic to reach all audiences, particularly the harder-to-reach audiences within our communities and you may have to do some tailoring to fit their needs. Consider language and cultural differences, socioeconomic situations which could impact meeting times and how you communicate with different audiences. Do they have computers at home, or do they mostly use smartphones? Do they need childcare, food provided or other resources in order to attend a public meeting?
When supporting communications on the redesign of the I-70 and Two Basin drainage project, I designed a creative outreach approach that tailored to engaging the local disenfranchised community in a meaningful way. We deployed text messaging, telephone town halls, door-to-door outreach and public meetings to bring everyone to the table in a conversation about the project redesign. We had engineers, who lived outside of Denver, referring to the neighborhood as “the Northside,” which was offensive to them and did not resonate with the community who prefers to use their individual neighborhood names. This could have been avoided through additional research to understand the unique qualities and values of the project.
Continue communication throughout the life of the project
Denver International Airport (DEN) - Great Hall Project Dashboard
One of the best ways to show a community they are important is through consistent and transparent communication throughout the life of a project. I’ve seen tremendous value in my career in providing the community access to project information they care about most: project schedule, budget and outreach efforts. At DEN, we created a Great Hall communications project dashboard that provided full transparency on how much budget was spent to date, project status and project timelines. It also shared information on Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) and Minority/Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) utilization rates and employment rates for communities of color, veterans and women.
At JPW, we measure both outreach outputs and outcomes often to satisfy state and federal funding requirements for big CIP projects. We track everything from our public outreach contacts to date, overall awareness for the project, public sentiment of the questions/information received from the public. By tracking this data, we’re able to quickly create a visual dashboard for these metrics that can be shared with leadership, councils, boards and the public.
This work is not only fun but doing it well can truly transform communities. I encourage you to think about the positive impact that cultivating your community capital can have on your capital improvement program.
Government agencies often consider themselves as the only subject matter experts on large projects like these. I’m an expert in communications and our project team members are experts in engineering and planning. Our project stakeholders are experts too: in living and working in a specific neighborhood or community each and every day.
Just like any relationship, it takes work and time to cultivate trust and learn each other’s communication style, but once built, the relationship will give you a lot more than just feedback. It can build bridges, literally and figuratively, and help build a community you are proud to call home.