Lessons Learned
Recommendations for Further Engagement Following the conclusion of our weeklong community engagement efforts, the team noted several lessons for future outreach and engagement.
SUCCESSES • Promoting the survey via a QR code on business cards and fliers supported outreach efforts and high engagement levels. • McKinley Park’s tight knit communities assisted in frequent informal outreach methods such as word of mouth from neighbor-to-neighbor. Many pop-up and open house visitors were willing to distribute our materials to their local friends and family. • At all of our events, both a Mandarin speaker and a Spanish speaker from our team provided interpretations for community members who prefer to speak those languages. Additionally, all of our materials and our survey were written in Mandarin, English, and Spanish which helped to lower the barriers for engagement for non-English speakers. • We recommend that future engagement continue to include multiple languages for activities and ensure the presence of interpreters at all events.
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CHALLENGES • The Asian population in the community was underrepresented across all of our methods. Additionally, our methods fell short of including a substantial share of McKinley Park’s youth/teenage population. Future engagement efforts should purposefully engage with these constituencies and/or partner with existing community organizations that are connected to these residents to understand the most successful outreach and engagement methods. • Our open house event was located in a low-trafficked area, leading to lower engagement levels than anticipated. We recommend selecting a location for open houses that is centrally located with high foot traffic to increase the number of participants. • While we hosted pop-ups in two locations, the lack of mobility of our pop-up activities (somewhat impacted by windy weather) prevented us from hosting them at more sites. • We recommend in the future to utilize more mobile activities (e.g. surveys) to reach businesses and ongoing events over Memorial Day weekend such as the parade on 35th street. We also recommend coordinating pop up events with ongoing classes at the McKinley Park Fieldhouse to reach Asian and youth populations. • We recommend developing a social media strategy in partnership with MPDC to better market and promote community engagement events and activities in realtime. • We had low survey/interview results in our small business owner outreach due to email being our only method of communication with them. We recommend any future small business owner outreach take place by visiting them in their place of business.
