Sprinting to a Well-Managed City
By: What Works Cities
Tags: Local Government, Cities, Experiment, Criminal Justice Reform, Communication

An Email Trial in Cambridge, MA

Developed and facilitated by the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), a What Works Cities expert partner, the six-week-long Trial ‘in a Box’ Sprint was designed to provide cities with the methods and step-by-step information on how to run a randomized trial to test a re-designed email communication and to ensure that cities that successfully completed the Sprint would achieve three foundational data practices.

Dan Riviello, the City of Cambridge’s 311 Project Manager, and his team joined two other cities and BIT in this inaugural Sprint to address a challenge specific to their city. As a way to provide timely communication to its residents and keep them informed of important city matters, Cambridge had been emailing a newsletter to 3,800+ residents and city staff each week. With crucial information in each message, the city had long prioritized increasing recipient engagement with the newsletter email, but continued to struggle with low engagement rates with the embedded surveys in the newsletters. The Cambridge team also wanted feedback from their residents to know if the content they were presenting in the emails were useful and if there was additional information they could include that residents would like to see.

Cambridge’s weekly email newsletter for residents

Through the Trial ‘in a Box’ Sprint, Cambridge worked with BIT to design, implement, and analyze results for an email trial focused on increasing open rates for the email and completion rates for the embedded survey. They sent their redesigned emails and found that compared with the standard “CityView Weekly” with the date in the subject line, emails with a behaviorally informed call to action in the subject line, “What Would YOU Like to See from CityView Weekly?” doubled the survey completion rate on average — a result that allowed Cambridge to gather valuable information and produce a weekly email that better served the needs of their residents.

Communicating Progress in Walnut Creek, CA

In the Comms for Cities Sprint, cities worked with communications experts at Results for America (RFA), another What Works Cities expert partner, over the course of four weeks to build their local government’s capacity to use data and evidence to publicly communicate the impact of their city’s programs. The specific goal of this Sprint was for participants to begin using communications as a tool to build trust between the city and its residents, including taking concrete steps to communicate ongoing progress, as well as a city’s successes.

After joining Comms for Cities, Jessica Cole, Head of Innovation and Economic Development for the City of Walnut Creek, began exploring ways to communicate with Walnut Creek residents about the city’s data-driven decisions. She found a compelling example in a particular piece of work that the city was already doing to collect data and track progress for a homeless outreach program that the city had been piloting in coordination with the Walnut Creek Police Department.

Walnut Creek, like many cities across the country, had been seeing an increase in the number of people in their community experiencing homelessness over the past few years. As one of the many ways that the city worked to better serve their homeless population, they began the Homeless Outreach Program (HOP) in June 2019 as a three-month pilot program where calls made to the police regarding issues related to homelessness were directed to two officers, instead of distributing the responses broadly across the police department.

HOP’s intention was for these two officers to proactively develop relationships with individuals who were homeless or transient, as well as with the community members calling in concerns and those providing services to the homeless. The city believed these efforts would allow them to better connect members of their homeless community with the response, support, and services needed.

Over time, the city expects that these efforts will lead to a difference in either the volume of calls for service or the total number of people in need of homeless services locally. To that end, the city has been working with multiple city agencies and tracking data from various sources to develop a more accurate and complete picture of HOP’s efforts and progress, and has decided to extend the pilot from the initial three months through the end of 2019.

The Comms for Cities Sprint taught participants the importance of publicly communicating progress towards the strategic goals that the city has set, along with specific ways of doing so. With that in mind, Cole brought HOP’s work to the city’s Communications team’s attention, and Walnut Creek has since worked toward communicating with residents how this pilot program is progressing by actively sharing their story through local media and communicating directly from city hall about the work and the impact the pilot has made thus far — for example, through public presentations made at City Council and Public Safety Committee meetings, as well as social media posts from Walnut Creek’s accounts that were in turn picked up by local online and news outlets. The city is now communicating how the city plans to extend this pilot program through next year based on its success.