Asking the Right Questions
Max Hardy is a longtime Aussie mate and colleague of ours who, in this Ted talk, does a nice job of explaining the power of the right question....
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Community Engagement
Internal Engagement
We help organizations overcome dysfunction, both with the customers/public that they serve and internally. People need control of their lives and jobs and if they don’t get it, they disengage....
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Keeping Your Chin Up
These are tough days to be working in public service, especially federal government. It’s hard for people who have been under constant fire and derision for years to stay motivated to serve the greater good, and it’s difficult to inspire younger people to want to do it for a living, ...
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Crisis Management Team: Tribes Save Lives
The thesis of this article is that the best, most effective crisis management team is You. And your neighbors and your community. Us. The Tribe.
About a year ago, I read Sebastian Junger’s wonderful book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What an ...
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Public Opinion is Difficult to Define, and the Wrong Tool to Make Public Policy
America seems to love polls, and the media loves to feed us poll results on a daily basis, but what do they really mean? And what is their true usefulness? If we take a poll on a specific question with a few hundred people out of a population of 300 ...
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Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere
At the risk of revealing a dirty little blogging secret, the phrase I’ve used as the title of this article has been included in our guiding list of ‘key words’ for quite some time. So, I know there’s at least one of you out there who thinks this is an ...
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Documenting Citizens Advisory Board Advice
Citizens Advisory Boards are convened by government agencies to seek advice over time. Members are typically selected from diverse perspectives. As a cross-section of the broader community, they commit to spending time together to develop agreement on the advice they will provide to the sponsoring agency they serve.
Documenting the ...
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The Ultimate Pitfall of Online Public Engagement
We have all been there. Our clients want the latest and greatest online participation tools—not to enhance their programs, but to replace the need to actually get out and meet with stakeholders. The risks with online public engagement are great.
Online tools are obviously great at many things: reaching a ...
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What Is a Town Hall Meeting?
The world has changed. Maybe you like it better now; maybe you don’t. In either case, most people are feeling a bit out of sorts as we observe how things have changed and consider how to recalibrate to interface with the new reality.
Of course, it’s not just about how ...
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Setting the stage for social facilitation
Social facilitation, or the audience effect, is defined as the tendency for people to act differently with an audience than when they’re alone. With social media, people always have an audience. Media and politics are giving us permission to act – online and in person — in ways that we ...
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