#4: Gamified e-Participation: Refresh your audience's online experience
Galvanizing civic participation in public meetings is always a challenge in public engagement, but holding the attention of online audiences after more than a year of virtual interaction makes the challenge even higher. With many public sector initiatives and planning projects starting and restarting, attracting and keeping audiences engaged in collecting important public input pushes planning teams to search for new and better ideas in online meetings and workshops. Gamification—the application of game-playing components to online marketing—is making headway into civic public engagement projects, which are trending toward the use of game elements to engage with online audiences and increase participation in planning sessions. Gamification is an approach worth tucking into the public engagement toolbox to propel the e-participation that enables the co-creation of civic plans with communities.
How do you gamify engagement?
Sim City, Minecraft and Metropolis are among the highly developed games that simulate planning, construction and management in city-building mobile and video games. But elements of these games and others can be used for civic planning projects, increasing participatory opportunities to contribute ideas. Even simpler, teams can integrate word games and quizzes into presentations or introduce budget games to online breakout rooms where teams of participants allocate a budget for a new transit line, park or community solar project. Not only will audiences have the chance to share thinking, but they'll also learn how different community needs are considered as they allocate funds to environmental issues, vehicle mobility, truck delivery, bicycle commuting and more.
Here are a few platforms and tools for gamifying your event:
Cities: Skylines and Minecraft offer Lego-like tools to plan public spaces, cities and neighborhoods that can put people at the center of a collective planning process, enabling participatory engagement that involves audiences of all ages in the conversation.
Miro is a collaborative "virtual whiteboard" that can be leveraged into breakout rooms for collective brainstorms and problem-solving with add-on polls, quizzes and creative competitions. One of the biggest benefits of the Miro platform is the ability to archive completed boards as part of the public record of community participation.
Kahoot was developed to make online learning fun and is now also used to "fun-up" presentations, meetings and events to engage and energize audiences with true/false quizzes, puzzles and polls.
Mentimeter is an interactive presentation platform that supports puzzles, word clouds, and other tools to prompt and collect real-time feedback. It turns input into easy to understand word clouds that encourage meaningful audience participation.
How does gamification enhance public engagement?
Add interest to events. Virtual events can be passive for those attending, and that's not likely to build an audience or a following. Adding gamification components prompts e-participation, leaving audiences feeling informed, involved and heard.
Build community. Introducing games into meeting breakout rooms allows participants to work together to solve problems, collect ideas and generate new thinking, creating a sense of community among diverse participants.
Expand audiences. Gamification requires engagement, and participants who feel their time was well spent will be far more likely to return for another session and tell others about the experience. In addition, the engagement team can leverage the activities into social campaigns that draw new participants to future activities, growing an even larger community.
Game Time
Gamification can enhance engagement, but it also makes interaction with the public sector more personal, with participants feeling valued for their contributions. While integrating game components can add to e-participation, it can also transform community involvement in the online environment, improving the relationship between people and government. Next week, we'll look at what hybrid meetings may look like when virtual and in-person events merge.
Interested in seeing these trends in your outreach? Let’s get to work, give us a call and schedule a meeting today.
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