Annex IV: Timeline, Budget and Team Composition

Budget

Consider your municipality’s budgeting process, as well as the funds and approvals you will need to form a team and implement the feedback loop. Do you need specific approvals to allocate your time and those of your team members to the project? Will you need to work with procurement and finance staff to purchase supplies, hire consultants or rent space?

Timeline

The feedback loop process is political, as you are consulting the public in a meaningful way on local decisions that matter. Therefore, it makes sense to consider your timeline alongside the political calendar. The first event may be an election, especially if it brings a team into office for the first time and they are hoping to “do governance differently.” In some ways, the final test of your success in engaging the public is the following election’s results – have you earned public trust in the intervening years or lost it?

From the outset, the feedback loop process should be seen as an integral part of the governing team’s agenda. Information will be collected to set priorities, which are then acted upon. Therefore, the data collection and outreach process must align with the municipality’s calendar, accounting for the fiscal year, various financial and strategic documents and reports that must be or are traditionally created, legislative sessions of the local council, and, of course, elections. Below are actual timelines from four countries where NDI has worked with local authorities to implement a Listen, Respond, Report cycle. The shortest processes were eight months, with the longest taking up to 11 months or more. This is because the cycle must, by its nature, include time for the local government to implement the response – to provide an update on progress, you must have made some progress. Data collection design and outreach may be time-consuming, and teams may encounter unexpected obstacles, but it still only accounts for the initial few months of the process. 

Note that it is important to move at a steady pace, but this is conditional on the methods you deploy and the context in which they are deployed. In a municipality of 700 households, it is not unreasonable to expect to hand out surveys in person to 10 percent or 70 households in one week and return to each one a week later; in a city of 10,000 residents, however, that math becomes more difficult. The overarching goal should be to consistently communicate in a regular, scheduled way and not leave residents guessing about whether their response matters or what is happening in response. 

Examples

Moldova

In the experience of Moldovan municipalities, the following is an example timeline: 

The process often takes between 10 and 14 months for a full cycle. Note that in Moldova, municipalities are often quite small (fewer than 1,000 households), and the process is implemented by teams of at least four elected officials and staff: 

• Month 1
  • Step 1 – Kickoff meeting and identification of core team
  • Step 2 – Development of the questionnaire on local priorities
• Month 2
  • Step 3 – Distribution of the questionnaire on local priorities through a door-to-door canvassing method, reaching at least 10 percent of households in the community
• One week later
  • Step 4 – Questionnaire collection (going door to door again)
• Months 3 to 4
  • Step 5 – Analysis of survey results and development of the results report and local strategy
  • Step 6 – Distribution of the results report and local strategy, this time reaching as many households as possible via door-to-door or mailing publications
• Months 6, 7 or 8
  • Step 7 – Verification of the strategy’s progress (Two to four months later, the team should convene to discuss tangible results and progress.)
  • Step 8 – Development of the publication on intermediate/final results
• Month 8
  • Step 9 – Distribution of the report on intermediate/final results
• Month 10 or later
  • Step 10 – Development and distribution of final publications, outlining additional progress to date and future plans on priorities identified in the survey (and other issues as relevant) (This publication may coincide with an annual report or other large occasion.) 

Slovakia

In the experience of Slovakian municipalities, the following is an example timeline: 

• March – Kickoff meeting of the feedback loop team, door-to-door questionnaire and strategy created
• April – Survey questionnaires finalized and printed
• May and June – Questionnaires distributed via door-to-door canvassing
• August and September – Questionnaires collected and returned, data analysis begins
  • (September – National elections held, leading teams to delay results publication)
• September – Data analysis, and publication on the results of the survey created
• November to January – Reporting back to the public on priorities identified through a public communication online and in the municipal newspaper, through meetings with citizens, and through a leaflet (distributed via the municipal newspaper) that describes the survey’s outcome

Mexico

In the experience of Mexican municipalities, the following is an example timeline: 

• October to November – Over the course of five meetings, city government staff and city council members created a plan to integrate public feedback into the three-year municipal action plan, deciding which outreach methods to use and then planning how to report back their findings to the public.
• February – The core team prepared to host a social forum based on the “world cafe” methodology. This involved training staff to engage with the public and hosting the event, where input from residents on the key issues within the municipal plan was collected.
• March – The data was analyzed and incorporated into the draft municipal plan.
• April – The municipal plan text is made publicly available for comment.
• May – The municipal plan is adopted.

El Salvador

In the experience of El Salvadoran municipalities, the following is an example timeline: 

• February – Kickoff with core teams, planning for the feedback process
• March – Core team and municipal representatives meet to conduct political economy analysis and stakeholder mapping, decide to focus on key stakeholder inputs into municipal strategic plans
• April – Data collection instruments finalized, surveys distributed to key stakeholders in civil society, business and local professionals
• June – Surveys closed, data analyzed
• June and July – Strategic plan drafted, with presentation of survey results and draft plans at public meetings for feedback
• August and September – Local council receives plan and conducts additional public meetings; plans placed on the council agenda for adoption

Forming a team

This guide refers to the local authority as the primary unit responsible for implementing the feedback cycle process (ideally in cooperation with local civil society and the public). However, local authorities come in all shapes and sizes. The following offers guidance on forming the team responsible for overseeing the implementation of the feedback process. 

Team members can come from the government or be nongovernmental. 

Government team members can include: 

• Political leadership – These are usually elected officials such as mayors and local councilors but could include appointed officials with influence over local decision-making.
• Political staff – These are the professional staff who enter government with the elected official, serving as chiefs of staff, legislative aides, assistants and others. They tend to be partisan and support the agenda of the politicians for whom they work.
• Professional civil servants – These are the permanent professional staff who work for the local authority, potentially in one of the departments or agencies that make up the local government administration. They tend to be nonpartisan (to the extent that they do not rely on political patronage or connections for their employment) and often have deep technical knowledge of the issue area or bureaucracy in which they work. 

Nongovernmental team members can include: 

• Civil society, local activists and volunteers – These include the community organizers, members and staff of local civil society, or other international or multilateral organizations willing to work with you – either as equal team members or as a consultative body supporting the process. They may also be a source of volunteers. Volunteers are those willing to give up their time to support some or all of the process, including going door to door and handing out surveys. These individuals may not need compensation for their time, but offering some remuneration or at least recognition of their contributions may encourage people to volunteer and stay engaged in the future.
• Private consultants, subject matter experts and firms – This group includes the technical experts, especially in research and analysis, that you may hire if your team lacks the in-house expertise and has the funding.
• Others – This could include private business, interested members of the public, local media and more. This group is less likely to be a part of the team but will be important sources of information and messengers that – depending on your issue and context – you can try to work with to achieve shared goals. For example, for popular community projects that are beyond the scope of your municipality to fund, the private sector or residents may be a source of donations or investment. 

There are two ways to structure the engagement of elected leadership in the process: directly or as supervisors. In Moldova and Slovakia, mayors and elected councilors affiliated with the mayor (either as members of the same party or formal or informal governing coalition) formed the team, conducting outreach, analysis, and communication directly. In Mexico and El Salvador, elected officials supervised the process and received conclusions. These structures and the advantages and disadvantages of both are discussed below.  

1. Direct engagement – A team of elected officials

• This process is started, designed and led by elected officials (and potentially their staff). As these are political officials and positions, they can be referred to as political teams. At the local level, many politicians are independents, and polarizing debates between national political parties may be less important; the result is that party representatives can more easily work across partisan lines. The local majority or government team can invite the opposition to participate in the feedback cycle, but the opposition may decline if they do not want to support a shared agenda; further, the opposition or an individual council member (perhaps in a majoritarian system) may choose to run their own feedback cycle. 

2. Supervisory engagement – A team of public sector staff and civil society

• With a supervisory engagement, the process may be instigated by elected officials, civil servants or civil society. Elected officials – as the key decision-makers – will need to formally commit to the process, receive regular updates on the process and feedback results, and provide updates to the public on progress made, but they may take a less active role in outreach and data collection. This may be more suitable for large municipalities with larger civil servants and well-developed citizen engagement teams. 

Forming the core team

In all cases, the core team will need to fulfill the following roles and responsibilities.