One Page Summary

• Which need/challenge are you addressing with your solution?
The Historic Coventry Trust communication challenge is a common one: How to engage with a high number of stakeholders and parties while keeping them informed in an age of information overload. Traditional communication campaigns require a huge economic and human effort. And even though impact can be relevant initially, maintaining the momentum is challenging.
The latest advancements in challenged-based learning suggest that setting the right disposition of incentives for individuals and organisations to engage with communitarian activities is key in developing a sense of belonging that will last long after the start of any project. By correctly answering the question “what do I get in exchange for my attention?” we get the initial buy-in. And by turning that initial interest into a desire to be involved in future activities, we leverage continued support.
However, managing community engagement and facilitating on- and offline participation is a full-time job. Non-interactive websites and social networks can support our branding strategy, but won’t help us facilitate participation and measure and optimise the engagement of each individual or organization at any given time.
• How your solution aims to satisfy that need in practical terms?
Kuorum's multidisciplinary team of professionals has five years of experience helping organizations, businesses and governments to innovate through online engagement. Our technology allows our customers to build their own community engagement site in seconds. Their stakeholders engage in innovation challenges, debates, surveys, events or participatory budgets. And our powerful contact management dashboard - with audience segmentation features - enables our clients to easily measure and optimise individuals and organisations’ engagement, avoiding the excess of information.
In the case of Historic Coventry Trust we aim to leverage the initial buy-in and continued support from Coventry’s St. Michaels Ward and inner urban communities. And we will do it by asking them their opinion and involving them is selected decision making processes, using a combination of on- and offline activities. We will also train the staff of the client in community engagement techniques and in the use of our technology to easily manage and grow its community.
A secondary goal of the project will be to gain the credibility of the local council and local community groups by involving constituents in some decision making processes about the design of their natural environment, sustainable travel system and wellbeing.
• What are the implications of implementing your solution? Which actors need to be involved? Are there any competitors? If yes, why are you different?
The project will consist in a 6-month campaign with 2 decision making processes: A consultation and an open debate or participatory budget. Both processes will include an online action and an offline event. The provider will implement the project in close collaboration with the client, in case the client wants to learn how to continue carrying out this kind of activities successfully in the future without external support.
Initially, the community engagement site of the Historic Coventry Trust will be launched and the contact management dashboard will be fed with its current database of stakeholders. Then this database will be strategically segmented, identifying steering groups. The 2 decision making processes will be agreed with the client. And the provider will start the online campaign to acquire new users. At the closing events for every process, attendees will be involved in a creativity workshop to further refine the decisions made online. The provider will need access to the client’s own distribution channels and endorsement with offline promotion.
• The solution has been already tested and deployed in another context (geographical or sectorial)? If so, what are the strengths and weaknesses you identify that could help you in scaling it into a new context?
Kuorum was born in 2013 in Madrid. Two years later the European Commission trusted in us to lead a project to foster participation of disadvantage young people in the political life of their cities. And in that same year we opened our headquarters in Manchester. Since then we have worked with governments and businesses in six countries.
Currently we work, among others, with the government of Extremadura (1M inhabitants) to co-design with its citizens a new public information service, with the city council of Toledo (80k inhabitants) to foster community engagement through on- and offline district assemblies, and with the government of the Province of Zaragoza (1M inhabitants) to involve the citizenry in the co-design of solutions to depopulation. Our technology is mature enough to assist us in every project without major customizations. But it is not yet fully scalable.