Town turns to text messaging to boost community engagement

Real-life town hall meetings don’t usually follow a Hollywood script. They don’t feature the character Leslie Knope in "Parks and Recreation" hearing “people caring loudly” at her while a delegation from Venezuela visits or while a citizen filibusters a meeting by describing the entire plot of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" in extemporaneous detail. 

They also aren’t typically the more romantic version as portrayed in "Gilmore Girls," where residents get together to discuss all manner of issues, from renaming every street in town to debating the location of its first-ever traffic light.

Watch any open town meeting on a public access television channel and the majority are sparsely attended—at least that’s generally the case outside of small New England towns. For those with larger populations, it’s a struggle to get people engaged and keep them informed, especially as the local news media has fewer resources to devote to covering municipal government.

Take Andover, Massachusetts, a town of 37,000 people and one of the largest to still operate under the town meeting system. There, meetings cover the nitty gritty of Andover's operating budget and new developments, as well as changes to local bylaws and zoning code.

Residents can also force a special town meeting on any subject they want if they collect a few hundred signatures. But that’s rare because turnout at town meetings is woeful. A recent column on the format cited a 1.3% participation rate.

In a bid to solve its poor attendance problem, the town launched the Andover Insider: Town Hall Text Line. Regular text messages offer updates on municipal government, road closures and other potential inconveniences, as well as glimpses into the lighter side of the town. Residents also can text and get answers to questions, and offer feedback to various proposals.

Phillip Geoffroy, director of communications in the Andover Town Manager’s Office, largely runs the operation alone, although another colleague monitors responses and Town Manager Andrew Flanagan helps on occasion. The service already has more than 1,500 subscribers.

Geoffroy sat down with Route Fifty recently to discuss Andover’s text line, its impact on community engagement and what other towns can learn from its experience.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Route Fifty: What was the genesis for this project? And what does it look like for the residents of Andover?

Phillip Geoffroy: In a really organic way, my boss here in the town manager's office subscribed to this news outlet that sends out text updates on the Boston Red Sox. It has this two-way communication line where you can ask questions to these reporters that they read out on their podcast. We asked ourselves, “Why couldn't we do something like this with our residents?” So we started looking into solutions. We researched a few different vendors and ended up going with Subtext. We were inspired by this baseball text service and applied it to municipal government. So far, it's gone well. We try to keep the subject matter a bit more light than some of the stuff we might throw out on other channels, but we also cover the serious work of town government.

We're always looking to innovate and find ways to reach residents where they are. People want to know what's going on, but they don't want to have to dig for the information.

Route Fifty: I'm interested in this mix of content that you have.

Geoffroy: Let me get into a few examples to give you a sense of the spectrum of things. 

We have a town seal in Andover that up until a couple of weeks ago was relatively problematic. It had a historically inaccurate depiction of a Native American. A committee in town had been working for about three years to come up with an alternative seal to be adopted by town meeting. It was a really drawn out, community-driven process. We were getting a ton of input at certain key milestones throughout the process. The committee produced a final concept of an alternative seal, and we wanted to be able to get feedback from the community quickly because we needed to know whether this was going to be the design that was presented at the town meeting, or if we had to make further revisions.

We put it on Subtext, and we were able to generate 100 responses quickly, which is something that we never before had the ability to do. We could, over the course of a couple of weeks or a month, get 100 responses to a survey, but the ability to instantaneously reach a high volume of people and get feedback, that's off the cuff and a real game changer for us.

Another example is that we have a participatory budget process, where a portion of our capital funds each year are set aside for projects that are based on ideas submitted by members of the community. We promote it every year starting in late fall, then we close the process in the early spring. We pull out all the stops. It's on all our other communications channels. Let's say we had the process open for four months or so, and we got maybe 10 submissions. 

So we put it on Andover Insider and said, “The applications close in three days, send us your ideas.” We got over two dozen submissions overnight. It speaks to the value of reaching people in this new way that they're not used to hearing from government. It can produce a response that the other, more traditional methods of communication aren't able to produce. 

The final example, in terms of lighter human interest stuff, is this new public art installation that we set up in a public gathering space in downtown Andover. It's a life size, 8-foot, 400-pound cow that we had painted bright yellow with scenes from throughout Andover. We installed it on a Friday, but it's kind of hidden unless you're looking for it. So we sent out to our subscribers a close up shot that didn't reveal the whole thing and said, “There's new public art downtown, see if you can find it and send us your photos.”

Route Fifty: Do you have a certain number of texts that you might send a day, so people aren't being bombarded?

Geoffroy: Once or twice a week. But we might have a scenario where there's some kind of emergency and we can envision sending several texts a day. Back in September, before we had the Insider program, most of the town was without power after this huge windstorm. In a situation like that, we'd probably send out up to five texts a day or more with updates on what's going on.

Route Fifty: It's interesting that it's by text, not social media. It's funny because SMS technology is relatively old, but it still seems to have endured.

Geoffroy: It’s the two-way aspect of it. People can send us messages on Facebook and comment on our posts, so it's not completely novel in that respect. But we get a few questions a day unprompted about all sorts of things, from what's going on with this project or is trash collection going to be impacted on a certain holiday. We might be also reaching people who would otherwise be reluctant to call because it's inconvenient, it takes up part of their day. That's the other side of things. It's a convenient way for them to reach us when they need to, and I think we have to do a little bit more conditioning among our audience for everyone to realize that's an opportunity that exists.

Route Fifty: How is the community taking to this? Do you feel like people are getting on board with this new way of doing things?

Geoffroy: It's not like we have universal adoption, but among the people who have subscribed and found out about it, it's incredibly well received. At an event, people stop us and say, “We really love the Andover Insider program. Great idea.” 

A lot of the subscriptions we generated in the early days were really garnered through word of mouth, just people talking to their neighbors about this new thing the town's trying to do, so I think that reflects a positive reaction as well. One thing I look at is the people unsubscribing from the service, which there are very few of. I think that it's an indicator to me that it's being well received. We're not inundating people, and we're using the service in a way that meets their expectations.

Route Fifty: What does the future hold for Andover Insider? Any fun plans?

Geoffroy: The priority is always growing the subscription base. What I hope to do is find ways to use Andover Insider to bring residents inside of the work of municipal government in ways they wouldn't otherwise be able to observe. Short succinct profiles about projects that different departments are doing or just day-to-day work that departments are doing. It might lead residents to think about the work that we do as a municipality in a different way.