Our CAMA Educational Webinar - The Surprising Science of Public Input: What’s Helpful? What’s Useless? What’s Dangerous? And What to Do Differently Tomorrow

“We were incredibly impressed by your presentation and excited by the potential of it for the work we do.” --- "Thanks for this great information" --- "Very engaging" --- "So entertaining!"

If you want to watch or share our Canadian Association of Municipal Administrators webinar on data and community input, you're in the right place.

It's 90 minutes that "was very good at explaining complex issues in a straightforward way” but still "kept my attention!". Plus “The questions at the end about participant's experiences and potential solutions were really helpful/applicable.”

We hope you benefit like the attendee who "Learned lots and have a new perspective on data and surveys" or the one that "Will reframe how we seek public input."

Full Webinar (90 min)

Webinar Segments and PDF of Slides

We'll be breaking the webinar into parts and short excerpts you can watch in just 3 to 12 minutes each. In the meantime you can navigate using the timeline below.

Introduction (0:00 to 9:23) - meet the speaker, then learn how investing in knowledge ("working wiser") can pay you back 100x or more.

Part 1 (9:23 to 23:41) uses COVID-19 data to illustrate data challenges and give you a full story about the risks we face.

Part 2 (23:41 to 50:30)- is all about community input: what it is, why we need it and how it goes wrong.

Part 3 (50:30 to 1:16:08)- ties everything together into simple guidelines for getting input that's helpful and avoiding input that's not - including some quick and dirty ways to get input or defuse input.

Q & A (1:16:08 to 1:30:27) - addresses attendee questions and challenges.

You can get the accompanying Public Input Checklist PDF (8 pages) here.

Or you can download a full PDF of the slides here.

Enjoy!

About FlashVote: Fast and Affordable Scientific Survey Data (1 min)

We want every government to be able to have representative community input. So we've invested many years and millions of dollars to make scientific community surveys over 90% faster, cheaper and easier.

If you want to eliminate all the headaches that bad input is causing you now - and you want the joy and savings that come from having better data for better decisions, you can learn more from this one minute video. Or contact us today!

How do agencies like mine use FlashVote?

We typically help agencies solve these problems:

They want to overcome the noisy few. They have a small number of noisy voices at meetings or online that may influence decisions for the worse.
They need representative community input. They have individuals or groups claiming to speak for the whole community, but they strongly suspect they aren’t.
They want to stop using bad data. They have been using data from online surveys/engagement that they know isn’t representative enough for decisions.
They wish that good data was affordable. They would love scientific survey data, but they can’t spend $20,000 to $50,000 or more each time they need it.
They want to build trust and respect. They feel a lack of trust and respect from the community, usually because of past decisions based on unrepresentative public input.
They want to improve services and morale. They only hear complaints and squeaky wheels instead of measuring true community satisfaction and hearing from their happy majority.
They want to make great decisions. They believe that elected officials could make better choices on issues with nudges from compelling data.
They want to engage more residents. They want a way to connect with the busy majority and those that are harder to reach because of technology or language.

Do any of those sound good to you? If so, we can help you right away.

How much does FlashVote cost?

We've worked hard to give FlashVote all the features that make it a no-brainer for local governments of all sizes - including its cost.

You can get a whole year of FlashVote scientific surveys for much less than the cost of just one traditional scientific survey.