Voice of the Citizen (VoCi)

Voice of the Citizen (VoCi), based on Converge VoCAl, is tailored to meet the needs of citizen engagement projects. Citizen engagement has its own special requirements, often encompassing conflicting interest groups, political positions and even moral/ethical values. These may lead to process hijacking, citizen disengagement and irrelevant conclusions. VoCi isn’t perfect, but no other process compares in delivering the essential first step in developing consensus, identifying what really matters to people.

Citizen Engagement

Identifying what really matters is crucial. When people take public positions, they tend to become anchored to those positions. Flexibility, a willingness to move, or see the other persons point of view is constrained by confirmation bias, anchoring & adjustment heuristics and cognitive dissonance effects. People can loose sight of what they really value for the sake of maintaining a position. VoCi helps move things along by getting the conversation back to what matters. That’s how it helped in:

  • Defining a system and funding model for Helping People Living with HIV/AIDS in Alberta,
  • Developing the successive Five-Year Housing the Homeless strategies in Calgary ultimately resulting in the creation of the Calgary Homeless Foundation,
  • Creating a tri-party Federal, Provincial and Municipal Strategy for Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

Citizen Research for Service Redesign

VoCi is also used to capture the voice of citizens in creating customer driven strategies. Our approach was recognized as a Global Best Practice by the editors of the peer-reviewed International Journal of Quality and Reliability Management. (See: Large-Scale System Redesign Using QFD). Applications have included:

  • Gathering citizens value-based preferences for the redesign of all Human Services Delivery in Wood Buffalo,
  • Identifying what really mattered to citizens in the comprehensive Recreation, Parks and Culture Services Organizational and Operational Review,
  • Understanding citizen requirements in the Policing and Crime Prevention Strategy for the City of Red Deer.

Net Promoter Metric

Yes, we can integrate the Net Promoter Metric (NPM) into public sector service, allowing government to compare their service levels with those of industry.