Have you ever heard about participatory budgeting? Most definitely one of the best things a local government can do for its citizens.
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget.
The process began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989. Today, there are more than 3,000 participatory budgeting processes worldwide, mostly at the municipality level.
Local governments that harness this process build trust, create visibility and boost their brand, but when trying to apply such a process, some unique challenges come up:
How do you communicate with so many people? How do you find out what they want? How do you facilitate such heavy communications? And after you identify their preferences, how do you manage such a process?
Coing enables local governments to configure, automate and analyze the PB process.
Communication and identifying needs
With over two decades of creating products, we know not to change user habits, if possible. Coing powers every community with a proactive personal assistant who engages with community members on their preferred communication channel (FB messenger, WhatsApp, Emails, SMS, etc.).
For the PB communication challenge, the personal assistant runs a 3 step communication process automatically:
The personal assistant reaches out to community members, providing them information on participatory budgeting, encouraging citizens to join, create, and vote on the platform.
Once the local government decides to proceed with a PB suggestion, the personal assistant reaches out to all members that have shown interest in that topic and provides them with the following:
A schedule for the upcoming meetings(online/offline)
Gathers them into group discussions
Sends out surveys to fill
Notifies on the progress and updates
3. Once the PB process is done, the personal assistant notifies all participants on the decisions made and posts on the PB community page for everyone in the community to see.
Wrapping things up
-The benefits local governments and citizens receive with such a fantastic process are enormous.
-The PB process with Coing simplifies this complicated process, creates visibility, scale, and cost-effectiveness.
-The contact us button is on the top right corner.