Organize Online Through Ideas and Civil Deliberation
Your Priorities is an online idea generation and deliberation platform that connects governments & nonprofits with citizens. Your Priorities has been used to improve decision-making in thousands of projects in 45 countries by over 2 million people since 2008.
How does it work?
Users add ideas, view other people’s ideas, and take part in a civil deliberation about each idea. Your Priorities can both be used in public projects in the context of including large numbers of citizens in decision-making, and also in private projects where smaller groups of people can work together remotely on ideas, deliberation and decisions.
Examples of Your Priorities project types
- Government policy crowdsourcing and decision-making
- Schools engaging with students and academics co-creating a masters program
- Nonprofits engaging with their stakeholders working remotely on ideas, deliberation, and decision making
- Political parties engaging citizens and doing internal private work
Check out our Case Studies page for more.
Step 1: Define your project
The first step is to decide what sort of feedback you want from citizens and what the audience for your project is.
Step 2: Choose a hosting server & create your engagement community
Click below to create your own Your Priorities project
Europe
America
Iceland
If your organization is not located in America or Europe then choose a server cluster that is closest to you.
You can setup your project on one of our domains but you can also contact us for setting up Your Priorities on your own custom domain.
If you are in Europe make sure to create a Your Priorities help page with your GDPR terms and select this page to show at new user registration.
In this video I will show you how to setup a new community on Your Priorities and how to create groups with different settings in about 6 minutes.
In this video I will explain all the community and group settings for Your Priorities communities.
Step 3: Promote your project
If citizens do not know about your project they will not participate. It is a fundamental right for citizens to know about opportunities to participate in democratic processes. It does not need to be hard or expensive to make the best effort to let as many citizens know as possible.
More citizens participating will increase the legitimacy of your project.
For some projects it can be important to use many marketing channels but as the citizen engagement happens online then those channels are the most important. And usually the best performing online marketing channels are other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – this is due to the fact that people on social media are already in an engagement mode and therefore more likely to participate. You could think of Your Priorities as an extension of social media.
Create a marketing plan that defines how you are going to reach the audience that you identified in step 1.
Possible channels
- Facebook/Instagram
- Twitter
- Google ads
- TV ads
- Radio ads
- Direct mail
- Face to face meetings
Promoting your project on Facebook and Instagram is easy. You can either boost your post or use the Facebook advertising system. Here is a recent tutorial, not made by the Citizens Foundation, on how to promote posts on Facebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07zr_ZBZ-zk
Geographical advertisement targeting is a powerful tool to ensure that all areas are represented in a consultation.
Promoting a Tweet using the Twitter advertising system is also a good way to reach a large audience on Twitter.
Step 4: Monitor your project with Google Analytics
With Google analytics you can see how many people visit your project and a wealth of demographic information and statistics.
Step 5: Export, use the results and notify citizens
It is easy to export data in Excel format directly from Your Priorities. You can also send users updates on the status of projects from the edit menu on each post but you can also do Bulk Status Updates for updating the status of thousands of ideas using templates.
Service Level Agreements & Startup Packages
The Citizens Foundation offers Service Level Agreements that start at $0, and Startup Packages. The Your Priorities platform software is also free and open source on GitHub.
About Citizens Foundation
The nonprofit Citizens Foundation was founded in 2008 in Iceland and now has offices in Iceland and the United States. It’s mission is to help connect governments and nonprofits with citizens by creating open online engagement platforms and offering consultation on how to best plan & execute successful citizen engagement projects.
We believe in non-partisan futurist solutions to the problems currently facing our democracies. We have recently seen technology undermine our faith in debate in the public arena; we believe that innovations in technology can instead be used to restore faith in democratic debate and institutions.
If you have any questions do not hesitate to email us at [email protected] 🙂
