2024 in numbers
Insights from our client survey
Insights from our resident survey
Vision for 2025
About Go Vocal
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To better understand their priorities, we explored governments' top objectives for community engagement and what they’re looking to achieve by leveraging our platform.
Across regions, governments of all sizes share common goals:
Only 4 out of 10 people believe their government balances the interests of different groups or uses the best available evidence in decision-making
Whether serving major cities or small communities, Go Vocal is fundamentally changing how governments connect with their communities. Our clients across regions and sizes echoed a common sentiment: our platform is helping them engage more people in participation processes, earning an 8.6 out of 10.
Additionally, the governments we partner with rate our platform 8.2 out of 10 for streamlining engagement processes, making participation more accessible and efficient for governments and residents alike. They also confirmed we’re helping them collect richer, more meaningful feedback from their communities, scoring us 8 out of 10 for the quality and analysis of input.
We're thrilled to see these scores – they validate our approach and signal that we're delivering on our promise to make participation more meaningful, efficient, and inclusive.
In the American state of Missouri, the city of St. Louis took the rare opportunity of a major settlement fund to hand decision-making power on how the funds should be spent to locals, for resident-driven change.
The community has grabbed this one with both hands, with over 14,000 residents raising their voices. Together, they’ve contributed nearly 1,000 ideas, participated in a prioritization exercise, and stayed actively involved by providing feedback on spending plans.
This engagement progressed in 2024 from ideation to policymaking, with officials co-authoring legislation with residents on our platform based on the 6 spending priorities identified by the community, including fixes to water infrastructure, boosting wages for city workers, and more pedestrian-friendly streets.
Our platform’s wide array of engagement tools is making a real difference in communities like Benicia, California. When tasked with developing a contentious industrial safety ordinance affecting their local oil refinery, the city leveraged our platform to transform a historically divisive issue into an opportunity for constructive dialogue.
By removing participation barriers and enabling anonymous feedback, they reached beyond the usual vocal minority to engage parents, college students, and seniors who typically couldn't attend evening council meetings. The platform's diverse engagement tools helped make complex policy discussions more accessible and relatable to everyday residents.
Our platform also shines behind the scenes, as demonstrated by the municipality of Amstelveen's journey in the Netherlands. Their team transformed engagement processes by creating a digital 'participation garage' - a central hub on the engagement platform where staff can learn about features, find training resources, and discover successful project examples.
This streamlined approach to project management helps teams clearly define roles, monitor progress, and maintain consistent engagement practices across departments.
When Falkirk Council needed to analyze feedback from over 800 residents on their Housing Allocations Policy, the engagement team did a great job levering our platform's analytics tools to turn community input into clear insights.
With our AI-driven input analysis tool Sensemaking, they were able to summarize all submissions in seconds and identify key patterns, while the Report Builder helped them turn the data into compelling visualizations. Through seamless integration with the platform's final phase, these insights were automatically shared with all participants and project followers - showing them exactly how their input influences housing policy decisions.
Beyond these top client priorities, our Theory of Change framework includes more foundational elements that enhance the depth and quality of community engagement initiatives.
While fewer clients identified these as their priorities in 2024, the following objectives represent essential building blocks for creating lasting, meaningful impact.
It’s surprising to see these goals ranked lower in priority, as they are critical to unlocking the full potential of community engagement. We’re committed to working closely with governments to address these challenges and ensure participation leads to meaningful, inclusive outcomes.”
69% of respondents who feel they can influence government actions say they trust their government, compared to just 22% of those who feel they do not.
Our government survey shines a light on both our strengths and some opportunities for further enhancement, particularly in addressing these critical objectives.
While the average score measuring impact on the political agenda only saw a slight increase from 5.5 to 6.0 since our last impact survey, governments report moderate to good results when it comes to decision-makers valuing community input gathered through Go Vocal’s platform. This is reflected in an average score of 7.4.
Additionally, governments we partner with across all regions consistently agree – scoring an average of 8 – that our platform helps make their processes higher-quality. While centralization might not always be a top priority for these governments, it often becomes a natural outcome of using our platform and leveraging our guidance to strengthen every aspect of effective community engagement.
This comprehensive approach not only improves workflows but also increases decision-makers' recognition of the importance and value of community input in shaping policies.
“Our survey findings indicate that while there is room to grow, our platform and the work of our Government Success Managers are steadily fostering a culture of engagement within governments.
To build on these results, we recognize the importance of maximizing platform adoption and ensuring engagement projects have a tangible influence on the policy agenda.”
While governments share a strong commitment to improving community engagement, many face challenges in cultivating the strong culture of engagement needed for successful participation initiatives.
Drawing on our experience with over 500 governments and organizations, we’ve identified the following pillars as crucial for building an engagement culture:
So, what challenges are governments in the Go Vocal community facing? While some of the issues are common across the board, others vary significantly by country:
As a team, these insights reaffirm the importance of our role in supporting governments, not just with innovative tools but with the resources, strategies, and guidance needed to overcome these challenges. By addressing these barriers collaboratively, we can help unlock the full potential of participatory democracy.”
At Go Vocal, we’re proud to be a trusted partner for governments, consistently earning high satisfaction scores across key areas:
These scores reflect our dedication to helping governments achieve their engagement goals through innovative tools, personalized support, and strategic guidance.
It’s one thing to provide an intuitive and user-friendly digital engagement platform, but it’s another to ensure clients feel enabled to run truly meaningful engagement projects. It’s fantastic to see our Government Success and Product teams recognized as committed partners, dedicated to helping our clients achieve impactful results.”
