Ingenuity Magazine Summer 2020

Pond Ingenuity Summer 2020 9 worked with City staff – including their Communications Department – to strategize on timing and messaging to get the word out about the interactive website and even created a brief how-to video on how to use the tool. City of Woodstock Project Manager Katie O’Connor has been delighted with the results saying “It has been easy to get people to visit the website when we tell them that they can leave a location- specific comment for us and vote on other people’s comments to help the good stuff rise to the top. This social aspect of the tool has given us a unique angle to advertise the survey and get the vital public engagement we need.” Woodstock SMART Corridor social pinpoint survey Roswell Comprehensive Plan Intercept Interview COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING IN THE CITY OF ROSWELL Pond was recently selected by the City of Roswell to facilitate the 2040 Comprehensive Plan with the project officially commencing with a Public Hearing on March 9, 2020 – just before local schools started to close due to COVID-19 and people began social distancing – with additional community events planned for late March through May that were subsequently cancelled. Immediately, the Pond team started to put our pre-planned contingency strategy into place, starting with the development of educational videos that will be available on the City’s website and shareable through social media that describe the planning process with future videos planned that will dive into more specific topics of interest. Pond is also putting plans in place to reschedule a planned stakeholder meeting as a virtual meeting that will include live polling and small breakout discussions. Similarly, the same Social Pinpoint tool that we are using in Woodstock will be re-configured to simulate many of the exercises we had planned for our first community open houses including a variety of specific mapping exercises that our team will use to develop ideas for the future of land uses and character areas in the community. NAVIGATING THE FEDERAL TRANSPORTATION PLANNING PROCESS FOR THE ROME-FLOYD COUNTY METROPOLITAN PLANNING ORGANIZATION Pond has been assisting the Rome- Floyd County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in preparing an update of its Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) which will identify transportation initiatives for the region that will utilize federal transportation funding through the year 2050. As a federally required planning process, a particular emphasis is placed on community input and involvement to help guide the decision making advocated by the plan. Similar to our efforts in Roswell, the community engagement was supposed to begin this Spring so our team has been developing strategies to keep the process moving despite the inability to conduct in-person meetings at this time. Using a combination of live- polling, interactive maps, and virtual breakout sessions, the Pond team is developing several mechanisms to engage with planning stakeholders and the general public. These tools will be used to map and understand locations where the community cites congestion The Pond team has taken a less-is-more approach focusing on a few select tools for video-conferencing, live polling, and interactive maps and applying them in multiple ways and in multiple settings.