Speed Round: Tools for Effective Virtual Public Engagement

In this hour-long, rapid-fire session, watch as seven industry experts share five different public engagement tools for effective virtual engagements.

Finn Vigeland, Transportation Planner at Foursquare ITP, shares a series of lightly animated cartoon videos that break down complex pieces of the Regional Multi-Modal Mobility Program (RM3P), an integrated corridor management project in Northern Virginia. Using only PowerPoint, some Google skills, and a colleague with a nice speaking voice, the videos quickly and simply allow RM3P leaders to introduce stakeholders to the technical elements of the program and have become go-to tools for the team.

Christine Edwards, Owner and Chief Innovator at Amplify Consulting, demonstrates how to use equity-based objectives to obtain qualitative information and lived experiences related to transportation and mobility habits in your local community. The team optimized capacity for the local Department of Transportation to identify needs and priorities for the Charlotte Strategic Mobility Plan, providing virtual opportunities for those who are historically excluded from the transportation planning process.

Molly Hollister, Communications and Public Involvement Manager at WSP, covers the importance of developing multi-language options for public opinion surveys. For a Regional Transportation Plan in New York, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) offered several engagement options including virtual workshops, an online MetroQuest survey, and social media. Due to the variety of languages spoken in the region, the MetroQuest survey and advertisement flyers were translated from English into Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Maggie Moore and Lexie Abrahamian share some of the strategies they developed to engage youth for the Puget Sound Regional Council’s 2050 Regional Transportation plan, including working with maps, Legos, and emoji icons to youth councils across the central Puget Sound region to facilitate conversations. In 2021 these groups were all meeting remotely on Zoom, so the team had to identify new technologies and conceptualize new conversation topics to continue hearing from this important population in a meaningful way. 

Kimberly Sims and Nicole Franklin showcase best practices in Digital Community Engagement, Equity & Diversity and Data Analysis and Actionable Insights, as used for the Link21 Program, a long-range transportation program serving passenger rail network of the 21-county Northern California Megaregion. Through the establishment of a single source-of-truth for all stakeholder interactions, overlaid with Google Analytics for program web traffic, the Link21 engagement team will share in this session tactics to help your team visualize the most comprehensive picture of virtual engagement.