The great divide: How Boulder Bridged the Distance and Energized its Community
City of Boulder, CO
Population: 103,000
Time: Thursday April 19 - 10:30-11:45am
Let’s face it. Governments aren’t the best at reaching the communities they serve, especially when it comes to highly charged and complex topics. To some cities, social media, public outreach and creative engagement strategies represent an uncharted – and fraught with peril – frontier. Boulder, Colorado, wasn’t much different until an issue came along that was so momentous it called for a whole new approach.
In November 2011, the city asked voters if they wished to sever ties with Xcel Energy, the investor-owned utility that has provided electricity to residents and businesses for decades, and create a new city-owned utility that might achieve the community’s environmental and economic goals more effectively. While the formal parts of the public process remained – council meetings, ballot language decisions, Election Day itself -- the city embarked on an unprecedented effort that involved collaborating with outside-the-box strategists, talking with (and listening to) the public in places they were naturally gathering and using strong visual images and contemporary technology to engage the community. During our presentation, we hope to share some of the lessons we learned and provide ideas about how you can apply them to whatever city topics challenge you and your community the most.
Audience take-aways:
• The value of framing the discussion around community goals instead of a specific outcome or way of achieving them;
• The power of meeting people where they already are – both physically and in terms of their knowledge of an issue – before expecting them to come any farther;
• The importance of meeting the needs of different stakeholders and audiences;
• The unanticipated rewards of doing away with traditional organizational divisions between message crafters and messengers;
• Strategies for integrating creative consultants with a call-to-action outlook into a government communications initiative; and lastly,
• Techniques for backing off and letting the community hold its own conversation prior to an election.
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EF Reel from Just Rite Media on Vimeo.
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