Public Engagement

Ensuring Productive Dialogue

Alaskans care about having a voice in decisions that impact our future. It is critical to have clear and accessible channels of communication in any public process. This is not a one-size-fits-all method for every community. Public engagement must be tailored to reach a desired audience, and facilitated to ensure productive dialogue takes place.

Information Insights offers a full range of public engagement services. We facilitate in-person community meetings, support online community engagement, conduct stakeholder interviews, design and lead focus groups, and facilitate formal public input processes. We work frequently in both rural and urban Alaska, designing processes to engage the public and bring stakeholders together. We often combine traditional and new outreach tools, including public information websites, social media, information graphics, online surveys, and Instant Insights, an audience polling system.

The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t interrupt public engagement for Information Insights’ clients, because we were quickly able to pivot to utilizing creative remote engagement tools to reach audiences across Alaska. In an uncertain world adapting to the possibilities and options presented by remote work, we are still flexible to work with clients to find what works. In addition to in-person public process support, we are able to custom design extensive remote public engagement.

The Bristol Bay project was incredible both in scope and logistics. The fact that the Information Insights team was respected in that many rural Alaska communities, facilitated local community listening sessions, and then compiled the themes into a first-class regional report was quite an accomplishment. I was so proud of the work of these co-workers. (I also loved their logistics stories of traveling with facilitation gear by plane, boat, and snowmachine!)

Each of the issues that we wanted to address were discussed during the meeting. We reached a good resolution with buy-in from the whole team. Alli worked to keep all of the team members engaged, which helped to achieve a sound result.

Information Insights recently staffed a community planning exercise with 30 community stakeholders interested in addressing important Fairbanks North Star Borough Planning and Zoning issues. In an incredibly smooth team-effort, Jamie Hansen was able to capture, score and rank various group strategies on-the-fly, allowing a group of disparate community stakeholders to winnow roughly 20 suggestions into an agreed-upon 5-step action plan.

Examples of Public Engagement

“During the FNSB Air Quality Stakeholders Group meetings, we had the benefit of spending time with 60 people from across the community over a six month period. There were a lot of hard conversations, but at the end we had buy-in from over 90% of stakeholders.”

Jana Pierce

Advisor, Information Insights