Special District Facility Campaign

A special district planned to alert the public about operational realignments for a public facility that may require closure in order to support other facilities with full staffing and stretch district resources. Fearing public outcry over the potential closure of the building, Galvanized Strategies was contracted to devise a community outreach strategy to communicate the changes in the most accurate and timely manner possible.

With just three months of project time, the team was tasked with analyzing the district’s facilities and staffing data, establishing issue messaging, devising a direct mailing campaign, setting a monthly community meeting schedule and setting the media relations process.

We established a highly-aggressive timeline with the internal team to make sure the client’s short-term and long-term goals were met.

In three months, we successfully accomplished the following:

• Full data analysis around the facility challenges noting information gaps and potential messaging pitfalls
• Established key issue messaging that accurately depicted the effort as a study to spur public feedback
• Set a monthly schedule of community informational meetings at various district facilities for a more personalized community outreach
• Writing, designing and overseeing of a direct mailing of two separate meeting invitations
• Writing and distribution of monthly meeting notices and informational news releases about the district realignment
• Tracking of meeting attendees to begin the citizen’s oversight committee recruitment process
• Issue tracking and news media monitoring to manage the issue and reputational concerns

With an aggressive and proactive community outreach approach, the special district achieved a high level of community engagement and raised the level of issue transparency from the outset. Though a few concerns were raised, the district leadership quickly and easily managed the issues with the messaging established. As a secondary positive outcome, the special district realized that many years had passed without inviting in the community to view facilities and that personalized community outreach led to much easier conversations about the challenges. The client expressed great satisfaction at the conclusion of our campaign saying, ” I couldn’t be more pleased with your counsel and assistance!”

Learn more about our community outreach campaign services by contacting Erica: erica@galvanizedstrategies.com