2 Impactful Ways To Increase Transparency In Local Government

Before the internet, local governments weren’t held to the same level of accountability that they are today. Processes like requesting information about municipal budgets or filing a complaint about a burned-out street lamp were a pain for citizens.

Today, that has changed. You can hop on Google and find out anything you want about the private sector, and people now expect the same from the public sector. Citizens want to trust the municipality they live in. (Some city managers are leading the way by connecting with their citizens via Twitter.) Here are two ways to increase transparency in local government and build stronger relationships with residents.

1. Transparency With Strategic Management

Strategic performance management means defining your long-term goals and creating a clear plan to achieve them. For example, you might create projects that track quantitative progress toward one part of your citywide goal. Monitoring your strategic performance and tracking citywide progress is important for every municipality. If you don’t share the results with residents, though, the process holds far less value.

Current and prospective citizens and business owners want to understand:

• Is the city organized?
• Is the leadership capable of executing strategy?
• Is the city well-managed?
• Are members of the leadership fiscally responsible?

Some municipalities believe that publishing loads of data sheets online (i.e., “data dumping”) is useful. The Open Data Index defines open knowledge as “any content, information or data that people are free to use, reuse and redistribute—without any legal, technological or social restriction.” They stress that “open knowledge is what data becomes when it’s useful, useable and used” and explain that the data “must be available as a whole” for it to be considered open.

For the average citizen, that can be too much information to digest. Publishing data online in any format is a step in the right direction. Whether that data builds transparency and citizen trust is less certain.

We’ve found that transparency works best when citizens can read the information in an accessible format. Your citizens don’t all work in performance management or municipal government. They want to know where their tax dollars are going, how safe their city is, and, more generally, how well the city is performing. Wading through a pile of data to find out is frustrating and time-consuming.

When a strategic plan is online in plain sight, citizens feel more confident that their local government is on target for short- and long-term growth. They can see the numbers in context, follow trends over time, and understand the municipal strategy more easily. Performance management software helps here. Municipal leaders can create scorecards and dashboards and display the results right on their city’s website.

This ClearPoint software case study shows why strategic management matters:

Durham, North Carolina

Durham, North Carolina, went many years without a strategic plan. When the economy took a hit, city leaders knew a strategy would help. With performance management software, Durham officials built and published a dashboard that shows citizens their strategic performance measures in an easy-to-read format. That helped make local government more transparent:

“Since implementing the strategic plan, there’s been more of a collaborative effort. We’ve seen better communication between departments, a stronger partnership with the county, and more opportunities to engage with our residents.” Jay Reinstein, former Strategic Plan Project Manager (Durham, North Carolina)

2. Transparency With Citizen Interaction

One major part of transparency is strategic city management: how the municipal leadership shares information. The other is how the city responds to citizen interaction. Most often, that interaction is citizen feedback.

311 Software

Current and prospective citizens and business owners want to see what the municipality does when:

• The power is out in a neighborhood.
• There are potholes all over a particular street.
• There’s an abundance of garbage in a public park.
• There’s a crime spree in a neighborhood.

Many cities used to monitor a customer service (or “311”) phone line to take down citizen concerns. Today, people would rather go online or use an app than dial a phone number. In response, “311 software” has become very popular.

Citizens can write directly to their municipality to report a problem, like overgrowth at an abandoned lot. The municipality can then resolve the issue and reply to the person once it’s fixed. Both sides win: the city keeps up with issues around town, and citizens feel heard.

The top municipal customer service (or 311) software applications are:

• Open311
• SeeClickFix
• PublicStuff
• CitySourced
• FixMyStreet
• Kana

Social Media

Cities should use every available channel to connect with their citizens, and social media is one of the best. On social media, transparency and engagement go together: citizens can hear from the municipality and make their own voices heard.

When cities are engaged, citizens notice. They’ll quickly learn that your municipal Twitter account has the latest information on weather, road closures, citywide events, sign-up details, and more.

For examples, take a look at the nine municipalities in this article. They all do a great job of using social media to earn trust and build a strong relationship with citizens. We also spoke to three city managers and recorded their thoughts on how they’ve made social media work in their respective cities.

Open Forums

An updated web presence matters, but some citizens prefer to be involved in person. For them, hold public forums or town hall meetings. These meetings should offer a review of your strategic “big picture” and key initiatives, as well as a candid look at your shortfalls. Take a look at this article for specifics on what else you may want to cover.

Updated Websites

A lot of municipal websites are badly outdated. The branding looks behind the times, and the user interface is often poorly planned. If citizens spend a long time digging through their city’s website to find the data they want, they won’t see their city as open and transparent. Citizens need to see that you’re putting the information they want in a natural, easy-to-find place. A responsive website design that works in desktop, tablet, and smartphone browsers helps.

‍Remember, the more channels you use, and the more connected those channels are, the more likely your citizens are to see you as transparent.

In Review

Both methods can seem like big undertakings. If you want to drive local government transparency, though, you need both: a solution for municipal customer service and one for strategic performance management. With the tools listed above, becoming more transparent with your citizens can be pain-free.

For more examples of local government transparency, take a look through the website of Charlottesville, Virginia. You’ll likely walk away with a few ideas on how to connect with citizens and manage your municipal strategy.