Before Question 1:

Why communications is part of engagement design

There is a debate happening in public participation right now about where Sharing Information belongs on the IAP2 Spectrum.

I realize that sentence may not exactly scream controversy. But I think the debate matters far beyond what goes where on a diagram.

IAP2 is considering repositioning Sharing Information from a degree of public influence to a foundation that extends across every degree of influence. The reasoning is straightforward: people cannot participate effectively or exercise influence without information, but providing information alone does not give them influence over a decision. The proposed change is intended, in part, to address a long-standing problem in public participation: organizations saying they have "engaged the public" when what they have actually done is tell the public something.

In other words, telling people something isn't the same as engaging them. But you can't meaningfully engage people without telling them some things first.

And that's where this gets interesting.

If information is foundational to engagement, how should communications change when their purpose is to support engagement?

That question matters because communications doesn't simply prepare people to participate. It helps construct the context in which participation occurs. Once we're asking people to contribute, the communications surrounding that request become part of the conditions under which we collect their input.

And when we use that input to inform a decision, we're collecting data. Survey responses are data, but so are the priorities identified in a workshop, comments made at a public meeting, preferences expressed through an interactive exercise, and themes gathered through interviews or focus groups. We may call the process engagement rather than research, but many of the same methodological questions still apply: Who participated? What were they asked? What information did they receive first? How might the design of the process have shaped what we heard?

And conditions matter.

The engagement process begins before we think it does

Survey researchers can be, admittedly and justifiably, a little obsessive about context. We'll debate question order, whether one word biases an entire question, whether an earlier question might prime a later response, or whether a response scale is nudging people in one direction. We do this because we know something important: the answer someone gives us is affected by more than just the question we ask.

Yet in public engagement, we often draw an artificial boundary around the engagement instrument. We scrutinize the wording of Question 1 while treating the project website, social media posts, invitation, presentation, or survey introduction as communications products.

Participants experience no such boundary.

Imagine that a city is considering changes to allow more accessory dwelling units. Before asking residents for input, it communicates that ADUs can create affordable housing options, help people age in place, provide additional income to homeowners, and help address a housing shortage. All of those statements may be accurate and supported by evidence.

Residents then click a survey link and are asked whether they support allowing ADUs in more residential neighborhoods. What exactly have we measured?

We haven't simply measured residents' attitudes toward ADUs. We've measured their attitudes after presenting a particular set of reasons they might support them. Had the preceding information focused instead on neighborhood density, parking, infrastructure, or concerns about short-term rentals, we might have created a different context for the exact same survey question.

That doesn't mean the first set of information shouldn't have been provided. It means we need to understand that accurate information can still frame a decision.

Accuracy isn't the only question. We also need to know what happened before people gave us the answer. What had they already been told? Which benefits had been emphasized? Which tradeoffs had been introduced? What did the organization communicate about the decision before asking the public to weigh in?

If communications helped establish those conditions, they don't suddenly become irrelevant to the methodology because they appeared before the survey, workshop, or public meeting began.

The same issue can appear in something as mundane as the introductory screen of an online survey. Consider what happens when a respondent clicks a link and reads:

"The City is excited to hear your thoughts about our innovative Downtown Revitalization Initiative, which will create a safer, more vibrant downtown with new public spaces and improved transportation options."

Then Question 1 asks how supportive they are of the proposed initiative.

We could spend hours perfecting the wording of that question and its response scale. But by the time the respondent reaches it, we've already described the initiative as innovative, safer, and more vibrant. The measurement process didn't begin at Question 1.

It began on the screen before it.

And the survey introduction is only one example. Think about everything else someone might encounter before we ask for their input. They may have read about the project on a website, seen a social media post, received an invitation, or sat through a presentation. All of those interactions give people information about the project, but they can also tell people something about what is up for debate, what the organization already believes, and even whose input seems to be wanted.

Take the invitation itself. Imagine a transit agency asks people to “Help us advocate for better public transit.” 

Someone who already supports transit investment may immediately think, this is for me. Someone who has concerns about the proposed investment may just as reasonably think it isn't.

We haven't influenced how that second person answers our questions. We may have influenced whether they answer them at all.

In each case, what we might ordinarily classify as "communications" is helping structure the participation that follows. It may shape not only what people tell us, but who decides to tell us anything at all.

This isn't an argument for less information

So should we strip out anything that might influence participants? Not quite. That creates a different problem.

Imagine asking residents which of four stormwater management alternatives they prefer without explaining their costs, environmental effects, implementation timelines, or tradeoffs. We might have avoided influencing them with information, but we also haven't given them enough information to make a meaningful judgment.

That isn't neutral engagement. It's uninformed engagement.

And there's the tension. People need information to participate meaningfully, but the information we provide inevitably helps establish the context in which they participate. There is no informational vacuum in which we can simply discover what "the public thinks."

So the goal can't be to communicate without influencing anyone. I'm not even sure that's possible. The better question is what information people need to participate meaningfully, how we should present it, and what that presentation might do to the input we eventually collect.

When thorough communications and meaningful engagement require different things

Thorough communications might mean giving people context, explaining why a project matters, simplifying a complicated issue, and giving them a reason to pay attention. Meaningful engagement needs some of those same things.

But it may also require us to hold back our own conclusions, present competing tradeoffs, avoid defining the problem for participants, and be very clear about what is actually open for influence.

We need both. And sometimes, doing one well makes the other harder.

Take something as innocuous as: "Help us build a safer, more vibrant downtown."

That's good copy. It's positive. It's accessible. It gives people a reason to care.

It's also a sentence that makes the researcher in me start asking questions.

Have we established that downtown is unsafe? Who gets to define "vibrant"? Are we asking people what downtown needs, or have we already decided what it needs and we're asking them how to get there?

Those aren't reasons to ban the phrase. They're reasons for the people designing the engagement to be involved in the communications that surround it. When communications is supporting an engagement process, its job isn't only to communicate clearly. We can't design the communications without thinking about what those communications might do to the engagement that follows.

That is why I think the IAP2 conversation about Sharing Information matters beyond where it ultimately lands on the Spectrum. If information truly is foundational to every degree of public influence, then we should treat the design of that information as part of the design of participation itself.

The project announcement, invitation, website, presentation before the workshop, and survey landing page aren't simply things we do before the "real" engagement begins. They help create the environment in which engagement happens.

And if we're going to use what people tell us to make decisions, we should care deeply about how that environment was constructed.

In Practice

Before your next engagement effort launches, review the experience from the participant's perspective rather than your organization's workflow. Put everything a participant might encounter in chronological order: the announcement, social posts, invitation, project website, background materials, presentation, survey landing page, and finally the questions you're asking them to answer.

Then read the whole thing as though you know nothing about the project. Don't just ask whether the information is clear, accurate, timely, and accessible. Those standards matter.

Ask one more question:

What have we already told people to think before we've asked them what they think?