Library: How-To Tips: Predicting costs and staffing needs

Mobilizing citizens is more difficult than it sometimes appears. Officials, activists, and other organizers often underestimate the time and effort it takes to recruit large numbers of people, recruit residents who haven't traditionally been involved in public life, structure the meetings, and ensure that the project leads to outcomes that are clear and verifiable.

Budgets for democratic governance efforts can vary dramatically. Some have been conducted entirely on an in-kind basis: that is, the organizing was accomplished by volunteers or by people who did the work as part of their existing jobs, and all of the other elements (food, supplies, meeting sites, etc.) were donated by various organizations.

Other projects had budgets that totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars. It all depends on the goals, available resources, and design of your program. But no matter what their budgets look like, the best projects rely on a substantial degree of work and commitment by local organizers, facilitators, and recruiters.

The single most critical cost to consider is the staff time of the coordinator. Because these projects involve many different groups and organizations, it is important to have one person — or depending on the size of your community, a team of people – who can serve as the ‘hub’ of the operation. The coordinator should be someone with “people skills”: the ability to make initial phone calls, forge partnerships, make requests without appearing greedy, nag without appearing rude, and operate comfortably in different cultural settings. You need someone with the capacity to develop recruitment messages, write clearly, and work with the media. The coordinator needs to understand the issues that citizens will want to address, and be sensitive to the fact that there are many different valid viewpoints on any topic. Good facilitation skills are critical to manage citizen discussions, to run steering committee meetings, and to train other facilitators. Finally, mobilizing large numbers of citizens can be such a circus that the staffer at the hub of the effort must be able to tend all the logistical details with meticulous care.

Here are some additional factors to consider:

Facilitators or moderators — Most of the formats for democratic governance employ facilitators or moderators of some kind. Sometimes another organization (i.e., a national organization, or a local or state mediation center) can provide this kind of technical assistance. It is important consider how you will handle this, and what the costs will be. How will you evaluate the trainers or facilitators, so that they can learn from the project and improve over time? How will you allow for participation by residents who do not speak English?

Research and writing — Most processes require written materials that inform the participants and help structure the sessions. Sometimes the organization supporting a particular process can provide guides; other processes require a locally produced guide. Even when the process uses an institutional generic guide, it probably will be helpful to provide participants with information their own community, including facts and statistics on the issue being examined. It is important to consider how you will meet this challenge, and how you will produce information that is clear, unbiased, and available in different languages.

[Adapted from Changing the Way We Govern: Building Democratic Governance in Your Community, National League of Cities Democratic Governance Panel, 2006.]