500+ local governments and organizations trust Go Vocal with their community engagement. Explore our case studies to discover insights and best practices from successful initiatives leveraging our digital platform. Enhance your participation projects by learning from the experiences of fellow engagement practitioners.
.webp)
In its first eight weeks, Neckarsulm resolved more than 60 of the first 100 issues submitted through its Go Vocal-powered reporting tool. Residents can report a problem in minutes, follow its status, and receive an update when it is resolved. What may look like a simple service tool has become a practical way to make participation part of everyday life.
By 2023, Salt Lake City's engagement efforts had become fragmented. Teams were duplicating work, residents were being over-surveyed, and projects often followed different processes and standards across departments. Instead of immediately searching for a new platform, the city took a step back and looked inward first. What followed was a citywide effort to build shared standards, stronger collaboration, and a more connected approach to participation.
.jpeg)
Getting thousands of residents involved in policy? For many local governments, that's still a challenge. Not for Goeree-Overflakkee. With one central participation platform, it now reaches a broad audience, on major policy decisions and local projects alike. What used to be fragmented and ad hoc has grown into a structured approach that makes participation visible, accessible, and scalable.
11,500+ participants. 100+ projects. Amstelveen and Aalsmeer transformed the way they work—from fragmented town hall meetings and scattered tools to one central platform where residents share ideas, feel involved, and help shape policy. With Go Vocal, they built a strong, scalable participation culture.
Innsbruck launched a new digital participation platform and smart engagement strategy that finally brought young residents into the center of decision-making. Within weeks, over 1,000 residents registered, with youth now overrepresented thanks to Proposals that they can easily submit, share with friends, and support. This “gamified” dynamic motivates young people to take part and stay engaged.
When Toronto Centre embarked on its participatory budgeting initiative, it faced a fundamental challenge that many government agencies encounter: how do you meaningfully engage diverse communities in complex decision-making while maintaining administrative efficiency? The solution – a structured, technology-supported approach using Go Vocal – has now successfully allocated over CA$2.25 million across 14 neighborhoods over multiple cycles, creating a replicable model for large-scale community engagement.
Facing an important comprehensive plan update, the City of Allen, TX wanted to hear from more people while improving efficiency. By building a hybrid strategy around the Go Vocal platform, the team increased participation, streamlined its process, and gave leaders the confidence to act on near-representative community input.
Linz (204,846 inhabitants), Austria’s third-biggest city, is known for its baroque architecture, its museums, its centre for electronic arts… and its actions in digital democracy. In 2019, the city launched a new participation platform to widen the scope of public engagement, allowing citizens to participate on any topic, from anywhere, at any time.
The South Holland city of Waddinxveen is the fastest-growing city in the Netherlands and today counts nearly 35,000 residents. 30% of them are under 25, and by 2050 that share will reach 40%. This demographic trend raised a pressing question for the city: how do you involve even the youngest residents in decisions about the future? Esther van Ellinkhuizen, staff member for cabinet affairs and child participation, explains how she does it.
Amstelveen, a picturesque Dutch municipality neighboring Amsterdam, is a model for building a culture of engagement. The participation team’s focus on promoting engagement internally, clear roles, and successful deployment of their Go Vocal platform through training sessions and a “participation garage” have been instrumental in this process.
The City of Benicia faced a significant challenge in developing an industrial safety ordinance to regulate a local oil refinery. This was a highly polarizing issue, with conflicting concerns about public health and safety, and the economic impact on the community. Della Olm, Management Analyst & Fire PIO, discusses the city’s efforts to create a space for constructive dialogue, inclusive engagement, and transparency, and how Go Vocal’s engagement platform helped.
Faced with the daunting task of allocating $250 million as part of the Rams settlement fund, the City of St. Louis and the Board of Aldermen embarked on an ambitious digital community engagement strategy to involve residents in the fund allocation process from the start.
%20(1)%20(1).webp)
In August 2023, the City of Copenhagen took a bold step forward on their participatory democracy journey with a new community engagement initiative: encouraging residents to submit proposals for city improvement projects.
INJUV, Chile’s National Youth Institute, is a public institution that collaborates with the government in designing policies related to youth affairs. To give millennials across the country the chance to voice their ideas on local community development, INJUV launched an online platform in the winter of 2019.
With around 300,000 residents, Newham is one of the biggest and most diverse boroughs in London, so it should be no surprise that it’s not new to community engagement. In fact, Newham’s recent leadership has prioritized involving residents and creating a more participatory democracy, including via a dedicated Resident Engagement and Participation team.
“The people are listening.” Creating a city’s inaugural comprehensive plan is a daunting task. Comprehensive planning requires the collaboration of a wide variety of community stakeholders, and affects every resident in a community. Seeking to craft a vision for a revitalized Struthers, local officials in the city’s planning department and their partner Samantha Yannucci (Director of Planning and Community Development of KO Consulting of Ombud) have been working hard to ensure that this plan is inclusive and representative of their entire community by going directly to their residents with a range of innovative methods.
Ghent, known for its beautiful market squares and stunning medieval city center, is the capital of the Belgian province of East-Flanders. With more than 260,000 inhabitants, Ghent charmingly combines the hustle and bustle of a bigger city with a small town’s cozy atmosphere.
From urgent calls for racial justice in public spaces to the recovery of small businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s obvious that urban main streets face unique economic and social challenges. Against this backdrop, cities across the country have been piloting new approaches to people-centered main streets.
Here at Go Vocal, we love to celebrate the successes of our clients. With so many incredible community development and engagement projects taking place on our platform across the world, we hope to record some best practices and share them with local governments to encourage peer learning and inspiration.
Participatory budgeting is one of the most popular forms of citizen consultation. More than just a buzzword, the tool is used by elected officials who want to make public governance more accessible and transparent. Far from applying a generic formula, each community creates its own process based on its own reality.
Looking to create a more official and consolidated platform that allowed for additional oversight and increased transparency in government operations, such as the redesign of public spaces, the Carlisle team began looking at community engagement platforms. In mid-2021, they launched a CitizenLab platform and set out to generate ideas about how to use their new public spaces and what they should look like.
Do you have a small team dedicated to community engagement efforts? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. The City of Allen has demonstrated how a small team can achieve excellent results by fostering widespread support throughout the organization and crafting a robust engagement strategy, strongly facilitated by its online community engagement platform.
Localized flooding and poor stormwater drainage can significantly disrupt communities, causing problems from road and property damage to safety issues due to hydroplaning. In a city like Lancaster, stormwater management is particularly important as they run on a combined sewer system, meaning it collects and transports both domestic sewage and rainwater from the City’s storm drains into a single system of pipes – meaning, these pipes have a lot of work to do! As part of their collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on their larger Green Infrastructure project, the City of Lancaster is seeking to improve their community’s stormwater management quality.
Located just outside Amsterdam, Amstelveen is working with residents to create a greener, more welcoming, and more inclusive city. Through its online participation platform, residents can help shape long-term plans for the city, contribute to the design of new neighborhoods, and share ideas for smaller improvements that can make a visible difference in everyday life.
%2520copy.webp)
In Rijswijk, a municipality of around 57,000 residents in South Holland, lies a place with a remarkable history. At Hof van Sion, archaeologists discovered the remains of a monastery dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries. Today, Hof van Sion is part of RijswijkBuiten, a sustainable new neighborhood. When the municipality decided to create a new community meeting place there, it asked residents what they wanted to see. They shared their ideas online using an interactive map.
Newham recently evaluated their Community Assemblies initiative, now known as People Powered Places. This article outlines a summary of the report’s key insights and ideas for future improvement. Read on to kindle fresh ideas for invigorating engagement within your own community!
The climate crisis is forcing governments around the globe to reassess and change direction. Vienna, the capital of Austria, is no exception. The city – famous for its baroque streetscapes and imperial palaces – aims to be climate-neutral by 2040 and is therefore prioritizing climate and sustainability projects. Since 2022, the Vienna Climate Team has been actively engaging residents in a collaborative and inclusive effort to shape a sustainable climate future together. Let’s explore what their participation project has achieved to this day!
How do you cross the digital divide and blend online and offline (traditional) community engagement? What about during a pandemic? The City of Lancaster used online, offline, and blended approaches to ensure their diverse population was well represented in the City’s new engagement initiatives, which ranged from policing to mobility planning.
By definition, comprehensive plans are complex, long-range, and broad in scope. The planning and engagement processes for these plans often take over two years to complete. This can make it difficult to establish and maintain meaningful engagement with community members throughout the process. Using CitizenLab’s user-friendly and accessible online engagement platform, the City of Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) reached thousands of residents in their planning process over 2022, all while supporting their goal for inclusive and equitable engagement.
On the edge of Paris in Val-de-Marne, Charenton-le-Pont is a quiet city of 31,000 residents. Sitting where the Marne meets the Seine, right by the Bois de Vincennes, it has everything it needs to become a hub for cycling and other active mobility. And what better way to get there than consulting residents to co-build a well-oiled bike plan?
In 20 minutes, you’ll see how to reach the hard-to-reach residents, collect higher-quality input, and make better-informed decisions — all in one AI-supercharged platform.
.svg)
