Case Study: Hillsborough County expands inclusive community engagement with PublicInput

Inclusive Community Engagement that Reaches Rural & Urban Populations

Hillsborough County, a large and diverse jurisdiction in Florida, faced the challenge of conducting inclusive community engagement to inform its post-COVID reopening plan. The County needed to gather input from a mix of rural and urban populations, with a high priority on reaching the nearly 30% of residents who speak a language other than English at home. They partnered with the vendor PublicInput to deploy a solution to meet this challenge.

Using the PublicInput platform, the County implemented a multilingual online survey and SMS text outreach in English and Spanish, supported by auto-translation. The solution included PublicInput’s Comment Analysis, CRM, and Dynamic Reporting features. This effort yielded over 17,000 survey submissions and 30,000 comments, providing decision-makers with real-time, actionable data. PublicInput enabled the County to successfully execute an inclusive strategy, resulting in a large, diverse sample of feedback and a subscriber list of over 4,000 engaged residents for future outreach.

Hillsborough County