Case Study: City of Minneapolis achieves community-driven planning and actionable indicators with IdeaScale

Planning for the Future with the Help of the Community

The City of Minneapolis, a major U.S. metropolitan government, launched a new four-year vision and set of strategic goals in 2014 and needed community input to develop the Community Indicators Project—benchmarks to track progress toward those goals. The challenge was to collect broad, representative qualitative feedback, with particular outreach to underrepresented groups, to ensure the measures reflected community priorities.

Minneapolis combined an IdeaScale online forum with targeted offline outreach (talking circles, events, social media, postcards, public lab displays and internal communications), organizing input into campaigns aligned with city goals. In one month the effort produced 199 unique ideas, more than 700 online participants and 8,000+ votes, and—together with in-person engagement—over 1,500 participants whose suggestions informed measures across every city goal.

City of Minneapolis

Kim Keller

Results Management Program Coordinator