Why the annual budget is your biggest trust-building opportunity
For public servants, budget season is a marathon of spreadsheets, trade-offs, and late nights. But for many community members, the annual budget can be a source of stress and anxiety.
They don’t see the weeks of careful balancing you did; they only see the headline: "Taxes Rising" or "Services Cut." When your community doesn’t understand the trade-offs, they fill the silence with cynicism and distrust.
According to the OECD Survey on Drivers for Trust in Public Institutions (2024 results), just 41% of community members across 30 OECD countries believe that their government uses the “best available evidence” to make decisions. So, there’s a trust gap, and clearly a common sentiment that governments aren’t listening to their communities.
This stat could be perplexing to most officials, who, of course, work to serve and listen to the demands of their respective publics. The problem, however, doesn’t lie within the listening; it lies within the output.
For example, budgets are deeply technical documents that are either uninviting or a challenging read for the average member who isn’t versed in deciphering reams of data.
That’s why budget engagement matters: to bridge the gap between ‘what the city does’ and ‘what the residents experience’. Done well, it strengthens financial transparency and builds trust.
Engaging community members in the municipal budget process can prove to be a good reality check and when you show your members the math, they’ll stop being passive critics and start being active problem-solvers.
Moving beyond the town hall
Now, to organize meaningful engagement, let's avoid the classic trap: the traditional town hall.
You know the format: a long presentation, a packed room, and three minutes at a microphone for whoever's brave (or angry) enough to speak up. This model quite clearly outdated and falls short on a number of key areas.
Namely, it tends to privilege only the loudest voices in the room, while offering little opportunity to convey context and constraints, and fails to bridge knowledge gaps on trade-offs.
Effective engagement looks different. It's a two-way conversation that builds budget literacy, helping residents understand that approving funding for a new park might require delaying road repairs.
By pairing participation with education, you shift the noise of competing demands into a constructive dialogue about sharing limited resources.
To build this dialogue, you need three key elements: accessible information, strategies adapted to your fiscal reality, and a closed feedback loop.
Step 1: Radical accessibility: the ‘Budget in brief’
Firstly, you cannot have a conversation if you don’t make sense, so it’s imperative that your budget is comprehensible to all the stakeholders in your community.
This is where a clear ‘Budget in Brief’ becomes essential: a simplified summary that strips away financial jargon (or pairs it with jargon-busting explainers) and translates a complex budget into an accessible, high-level overview.
By highlighting major spending areas, revenue sources, and policy priorities – without overwhelming detail – you give members an entry point into the conversation. Breaking dense figures into digestible, easy-to-follow formats turns the budget into a communication tool, not just a technical document, and lays the groundwork for more informed and meaningful engagement.
A way of contextualizing figures for impact is by making them relevant to the community’s needs. For example, instead of just saying $50,000 – which could mean different amounts to different people – couple it with a real-life example that it represents, like the cost of a playground.
You could also create a taxpayer receipt, showing that for, say, $2,000 paid in taxes that year, they got: 12 months of trash pickup ($400), police protection ($800), and park maintenance ($100).
Creative methods like these will help remove some of the barriers members have to participating in the budget and boost your transparency, showing them that their voices matter and that they’re an integral part of the conversation.
Step 2: Choosing the right engagement model
Scenario A: Allocating new resources (Participatory Budgeting)
When you have flexible funds – whether from a surplus, a grant, or a settlement – you have a unique opportunity to build trust through co-creation. Instead of asking residents to react to a plan, you ask them to help build it.
This approach transforms the budget from a dry document into a tool for community vision. It builds "civic muscle," teaching residents how to weigh costs and benefits in a positive environment.
Case study 1: City of St. Louis, USA
When St. Louis received a historic $250 million settlement after the Rams NFL team departed, the city faced a major test: how to spend a "once-in-a-generation" windfall transparently.
Instead of deciding behind closed doors, they used Go Vocal to launch a massive, open call for ideas. The city opened the floor to residents, who submitted over 3,000 specific proposals for how to invest the funds – ranging from street repairs to new youth programs.
Managing that volume of open text could have been a bureaucratic nightmare. Instead, the platform helped staff distill those thousands of raw comments into actionable ballot items.
Over 16,000 residents then were involved in the prioritization of specific investments, ultimately channeling millions of dollars toward the community’s top choices: improving water infrastructure, increasing affordable housing, and expanding access to child care.
Case study 2: Toronto Centre, Canada
Toronto Centre, one of the Canadian capital's districts, capitalized on collective intelligence andinvolve its residents in how municipal budget is spent with a strategy that built momentum through structured, hybrid (on and offline) engagement.
The team used Go Vocal to create a zone-based approach, making the process feel relevant to each neighborhood, rather than overwhelming members with a city-wide project. They maintained sustained involvement, and included clear visual timelines and dashboards that helped communicate the successes along the way, engaging over 60,000 members across the 14 neighborhoods.
Their approach used positive engagement energy to make the public budgeting process understandable and relevant, which drove high numbers of participants across diverse groups.
Scenario B: Navigating trade-offs (Prioritization surveys)
It’s every public official’s worst nightmare: You’re in a deficit and need to raise revenue by cutting services, increasing taxes or with price hikes – maybe all three. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, and lose-lose situations like these place inevitable stress on government-community relations.
The ‘hard times’ strategy works to maintain, and even build, trust during periods of fiscal hardship.
Start on the right foot not by asking your community “what do you want?”, but “what would you protect?” Using structured prioritization surveys, local governments can present realistic scenarios that make the constraints explicit, limiting choices to feasible options, and mirroring the real decisions officials must make.
For example:
Question: We need to save money in the Sports and Recreation Department. Which option do you prefer?
- Option 1: Close the local pool one day per week (saving 10%)
- Option 2: Increase entry fees by $2.00 (revenue increase of 10%)
- Option 3: Reduce maintenance staff (saving 15%)
Each option is tied to a clear fiscal impact, and members are invited to help solve the problem in its real-life context, choosing between trade-offs in a closed and controlled scenario rather than generating idealistic or unrealistic ideas.
Why this works: Psychologically, you’re handing your community the calculator, not just the microphone.
When members are allowed to balance the deficit themselves, the decisions are placed in their hands, extreme positions soften, and abstract arguments calcify into solid choices.
This helps temper the potentially highly-charged and emotional responses with pragmatism. It treats the people like capable partners facing real constraints, building ownership and solidarity through the trying times, increasing collective knowledge, and reducing backlash.
Setting ‘guardrails’ to protect feasibility
Guardrails ensure that the community steers the public budgeting process – without driving it off a cliff. Without constraints, the fear is that residents might vote to cut essential services.
But the fix is simple: define the parameters of the road. Only put discretionary items on the agenda, making it absolutely clear that core services like the fire department or waste management are non-negotiable, while library Sunday hours or park amenities are on the table.
It’s also important to communicate the differences between capital and operating budgets, like not being able to use a new park building fund to hire librarians, so members understand the constraints and avoid frustration in the future.
The ‘trusted messenger’ strategy
Ironically, sometimes the best messenger for governance isn’t the government.
Not all community members tune into the official channels, such as websites or press releases, and no matter how strong your content game is, they can’t all be following you on X or Instagram.
This is where community groups, faith leaders and non-profits come in. Provide these organizations with engagement toolkits (slide decks, flyers, relevant data summaries, etc.), and allow them to run workshops, answer questions, and engage the locals in a way that resonates.
This approach leverages existing trust, boosting engagement on the community’s terms without the government having to be the loudest voice in the room.
Closing the loop
Finally (and befittingly), closing the feedback loop. Engagement fails and momentum stalls if members feel their input disappears into a black hole, so showing them the impact of their participation is crucial.
Not letting all the project’s hard work go to waste is as simple as making note of a public decision made, then communicating it when it comes into fruition.
To use our earlier example of the local pool: If the community voted to raise entry fees by $2.00 to save their pool, tell them when the pool opens for the summer: “This is because of your contribution in the spring. Thank you, and enjoy!”
The ROI of listening
Budget engagement isn’t just ‘nice to have.’ It’s the most effective way to quell anxieties, excite members to participate, and make decisions with public support rather than protest.
Your residents are ready to share the responsibility. Curious to see what this looks like in practice? Explore our platform to discover how you can use Go Vocal for meaningful budget engagement, or book a chat with one of our community engagement experts to see it in action.
