At the risk of sounding like a broken record (“A broken what!?” the young person asked.), this business of working with the public is tough and getting tougher. As public meetings get uglier, officials are starting to realize that the solution doesn’t lie in reducing citizen comments from three minutes ...
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Many moons ago, and in a different life, I lived in Arkansas. For a born and bred upper Midwesterner, it was a little bit of culture shock. I remember fondly my first grit(s), my first glass of sweet-tea, and most of all, I learned that genteel way of insulting anyone ...
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I’ve thrown around the term “tribal” pretty liberally for a long time. You find it referenced all the time when someone is describing how groups of people tend to think, act and function alike – usually in less than flattering terms. We’ve used it a lot in descriptions of group ...
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I honestly don’t remember who told me, but I guess somehow I was smart enough to take it to heart and I’ve done this ever since. Back when I was just a mere public engagement tadpole, someone wiser and more experienced than I gave me one of the golden tickets ...
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Nothing happens in the work that you do with the public without being able to communicate well with people. Communication – the exchange of information. One big challenge that we frequently face is how difficult it is for some clients to realize what effective communication requires. I can’t count the ...
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Participatory budgeting may be one of the most obvious and straightforward ways of engaging the public in the affairs of government. It provides people with the opportunity of making very specific decisions about how their collective public money, or at least meaningful portions of it, will be spent. The origins ...
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As a transplanted westerner for 40 odd years, I’ve come to love the skies, the vistas and the stubborn individualism that runs deep in the culture of so many of the wide open places west of the Mississippi. That stubbornness sometimes goes a little overboard like it did with the ...
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As we are in that season of joy, here’s another neuroscientific look at the importance and components of trust and the benefits of having it. As you’ve often found in this newsletter, this particular piece is written from the perspective of trust from employees in businesses, but it’s pretty ...
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Two of the hardest things to deal with in public engagement are emotional, angry people and apathetic people. There’s no shortage of angry people who believe that they’re being mistreated or hurt by companies, government, or “the system” – the reactions of those people are on full display, they make ...
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Great answers to tough questions are kind of a holy grail for the public work that you do. The subjects that you deal with are almost always complex, hard to explain and often the details are pretty boring. The questions that you get from people are rarely easy to answer ...
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