Pay people to attend public meetings

“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”
— Charlie Munger

I’ve spent my entire career either working in local government or working with local governments. I have a degree in urban planning. I own a home. I have kids. I vote in every election. And, as a part of my professional life, I regularly meet with city officials. On paper, I possess a near ideal set of attributes for the type of person cities would expect to provide feedback. Yet, I don’t attend public meetings and rarely, if ever, provide feedback online.

Statistically speaking, I’m not alone. We’ve all heard the dire stats around civic engagement — only 10% of people go to more than one public meeting a year. This general lack of engagement is a bit strange if you consider the resources dedicated to engaging local citizens. Every government agency has dozens (if not hundreds) of public meetings a year. Almost every agency provides an opportunity for digital engagement. Additionally, almost every agency hires consultants to help market and facilitate these events. If all of this time and money isn’t generating better results, aren’t we obligated to consider alternatives?

Community engagement has an incentive problem

Why do people get involved in local affairs? What incentive do they have to show up to that public meeting? In my experience, it generally boils down to three things:

1. The topic at hand is, or perceived to be, particularly impactful to their time, wallet, kids, or values.
2. The topic at hand is particularly controversial or marketed as such.
3. They have a lot of free time.

We like to think the mental calculus for getting involved in our local communities is different than everyday decisions, but, it’s really not. We make decisions based on expected benefits outweighing the expected cost. It doesn’t mean we act rationally (in the purest economic sense), but we do act in ways that we believe to be beneficial to us or our value set. This — understanding what drives behavior — is largely overlooked when it comes to community involvement.

How do we solve the incentive problem?

Tangible incentives. In other words, pay people. Stay with me here. Imagine for a second, the reasons people might get involved now looked like this:

1. The topic at hand is, or perceived to be, particularly impactful to their time, wallet, kids, or values.
2. The topic at hand is particularly controversial or marketed as such.
3. They have a lot of free time.
4. They get paid.

Paying people for their time and input isn’t a new concept. People get paid for doing consumer and market research all of the time. It’s widely accepted by both the companies conducting the research and the participants providing information. It’s done online. It’s done in-person. In fact, these things pay really well…up to $140 / hour.

For whatever reason, community engagement is shrouded in expectations of community altruism, otherwise known as “civic duty.”

The ole civic duty argument goes something like this; “We shouldn’t have to pay people to get involved in their own community…it’s their civic duty.” That’s a straw man argument. If we followed that logic through, we surely wouldn’t need to pay the local consultant to help plan and facilitate the meeting. We surely wouldn’t need to pay the product company providing digital engagement tools. But we do pay consultants and product companies for their time . We pay them well in fact.

Government agencies have rightly determined that doing engagement cost time and money. Today, that money flows to 3rd parties — consultants and products — who then provide some platform for the engagement to occur. To be clear, the payment is for a platform, either a physical meeting or digital tool, to help facilitate the engagement that occurs. Only a small percentage, if any, of the payment is applied to participant acquisition.

Show your citizens the money

What if, instead of paying a consultant or product company $100,000 for a single project(!), we just paid participants to show up and provide feedback? No different than a consumer marketing company, we could pay participants based on a variety of factors. We could pay based on time (hourly rate), expertise, or willingness to share additional personal information (demographic data). In effect, let’s take the resources already allocated for engagement and let them flow directly into participant pockets.

This kind of approach would need to be thoughtful, well planned, and adaptable. Not every project has the same engagement needs. Some projects require a high volume of participation, others require deep expertise, and others require a statistically significant sample. The pay-for-participation model allows us to tweak the incentives to ensure each project incentivizes the right kind of engagement. And of course, anyone that wants to invoke their civic duty can gladly refuse or donate their payment.

Still skeptical? What’s the worst that could happen? I suspect the worst isn’t actually worse than the current state of affairs; empty meeting rooms with well-paid consultants. I do believe a model like this has the potential to radically change the demographics of participation, provide feedback that is far more representative, and in the process, help a larger number of people become more informed about the cities in which they reside.

If you know of a pay-for-participation experiment that has been tried, please let me know.

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