Getting voters’ attention and keeping engagement high during an election is easy. But, once the votes are cast, and the hoopla dies down, constituents return to their everyday lives—and engagement falters. How can you get your constituents to engage with you long after the ballots are closed, and the votes are tallied? How can you figure out what they think so you can best serve them and tackle important issues?
Similar to how purchasing from a business requires trust, building better communities and government requires trust as well. And trust is built by connecting and interacting with constituents, understanding their needs and showing them you are available and working on their behalf. Here are some tips on how to get more engagement from constituents and figure out what is on their minds.
Get Accessible…And Social
Your constituents are watching you, and they want to be kept in the loop. They want to know that you understand their community’s needs and issues. What is the city working on? What improvements are in the works? Can they rely on you to start and finish city projects?
To find out what your constituents are thinking and become more engaged, let your constituents know you want to hear from them. Make yourself accessible via email and on social media. With the amount of work to juggle and people to address, it’s easy to understand why you may want to seclude yourself from taking on more work. But, to constituents who do not see or hear your voice regularly, they may feel like your office is a façade instead of a real, live active person.
Pop on social media occasionally and interact personally with constituents. The public is all over sites such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so use these as platforms to get closely connected with the people you service so they can hear from you directly, and let you know what is on their minds as well.
Use social media also to announce any meetings where you are engaging the public in dialogue so you can reach more people. In addition, create social media groups for each meeting, so people who cannot attend will be able to voice their opinion and vote on important matters.
Conduct Regular Surveys With IVR Software
One other way to discover what your constituents are thinking is to…ask them yourself! Conducting regular surveys is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get inside the minds of your constituents and increase engagement.
But, manually calling every constituent and recording their feedback is costly, time-consuming and resource-draining. This is where interactive voice response (IVR) software comes into play. IVR is a technology that allows your survey recipients to interact via automated voice tones and messages via the keypad or speech recognition. Survey participants can key in their answers to your questions, creating a seamless experience. With CallFire’s IVR software, you can also set it to call back participants and leave messages if they did not pick up. And you can call all of your constituents simultaneously, within seconds, saving you precious time and money.
Maryland’s Prince George’s County Young Democrats, an organization devoted to spreading political and social activism, uses mass messaging to communicate with constituents and get them more engaged with its cause. After implementing CallFire’s solutions, the organization doubled its contacts with volunteers and saw a 30% increase in volunteer event turnout.
If you are interested in learning more about CallFire’s IVR software or any other mass messaging solution, setup is quick and easy. Simply sign up here to create a free account today.