Communicating Change to the Public

Empowering the opinions of your constituents can lead to not only more informed, but also more impactful, strategies for change and change management.

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Strategic Plan Development Annual Communications Planning Innovation Roadmaps

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Government

A state government agency

that brings safe and effective transportation infrastructure to Minnesota had a hunger to learn how to engage with the public earlier and incorporate their voices into the planning process for the future of a large section of a freeway corridor. To create a new model for engagement, it needed not only a process to follow, but also way to inspire a new kind of thinking – essentially to start the gears turning on transformative internal culture shifts. Rabbit was solicited to help them determine the best way to implement these changes inside and out.

Rabbit started by designing a multi-method listening program based on human-centered design principles and our L.I.V.E Intelligence™ approach – using everything from quantitative surveys on the phone and online to in-depth one-on-one conversations – with people who live, work and play along the corridor, and with key staff from the agency.

While speaking with people throughout the listening study, it became clear that they had multi-faceted expectations for the state agency. We heard themes in both how they expected the state agency to work with them as well as what they expected to be considered in designing and evaluating the actual construction and engineering work.

To jump-start a culture shift

toward meeting those expectations naturally, Rabbit worked with the agency to develop an engagement toolkit which provided staff (and anyone else working in the corridor or on similar projects) with a roadmap of what questions to ask – and how to find the answers to them from community members – when designing engagement for public projects.

thus creating an authentic feedback loop.

These resources included a landscape of the values and expectations of communities “impacted by” the work of the agency (residents and stakeholders) as well as the “users of” the particular technical assets in question (commuters and transit). Additionally, the toolkit established a process design with a focus on earlier, more inclusive and more transparent engagement,

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Communicating Change to the Public

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