The People's Budget

The People’s Budget is an interactive, browser-based and mobile friendly website that asks residents to play mayor for a day by balancing their city budget.

Participants are given the opportunity to learn more about how departments work and how they spend their money, as well as to give additional feedback on specifically how they’d like to spend funds.

The responses are synthesized and reported back to the community and city leaders throughout the fiscal year. The site has been implemented in three U.S. cities so far, with hopes to expand into Western Africa and Latin American in 2019.

The inspiration for the People’s Budget came in the years following Hurricane Katrina. In a city where billions of dollars of aid had been flowing in for years, many still saw the house next door empty, the roads unpaved, and street lights burnt out.

We saw an opportunity to build a bridge between government and residents, while empowering community to learn and give input into a process that had previously been closed to them.

Though valuable as an input tool, the Big Easy Budget Game also offers what has long been lacking in the discussion of city spending: financial education. In a city where 71% of residents have a subprime credit score and 13% of residents are unbanked, CBNO feels it’s crucial to ensure residents understand their budget.

In the People’s Budget’s inaugural year, 80% of players told us that they don’t feel that their voice is heard in local government. 77% of players had never even participated in the city budget process before. Cities’ residents are more than their constituents-- they’re our family, our friends and our neighbors. They know what they need in their communities-- we just need to ask, and to be willing to listen.

New Orleans is a city of deep inequity. For many of our neighbors, access to technology, literacy, and language barriers mean even an easy-to-use site like the Big Easy Budget Game is out of reach. We have tried to address these problems the best way we know how-- together. The game is available in Spanish, and we host “game nights” at local community centers, churches, and classrooms. My staff and I work one-on-one with senior citizens who have never used a computer to ask them how they would spend tax dollars. For many of our life-long residents, this is the first time anyone has ever asked them what they need in their community. The People's Budget is also mobile friendly, and over 1/3 of our players participate via a smartphone or tablet.

In the past two years, we have also partnered with City Council, putting elected officials in the room to hear their residents’ concerns, answering questions, and showing both sides what constructive, informed civic engagement can look like.

In the People’s Budget, residents must balance the budget, choosing how to spend tax dollars based on previous year spending and personal priorities. Players are given the opportunity to learn more about how departments work and how they spend their money, as well as to give additional feedback on specifically how they’d like funds to be spent. What happens if you give a department less funding? What could they do with more?

We also ask quick polls to make encourage residents to think about new ways to spend money. For example: would you increase spending to the sanitation department if it meant our city could have curbside glass recycling? We know that budgets aren’t fun or easy-- but talking about your community is.

Roughly 1/3 of our players-- about 800 a year-- play in a group setting such as a senior center, adult learning classroom, or community college. Other players, typically younger and more tech savvy, play on their own. 

The report generated by the budget game data is shared with city leaders, advocacy groups, and communities, leveling the playing field for data on community needs and creating opportunities to hold government accountable when spending doesn't match our needs. In the past year, the city of New Orleans re-allocated $3 million to mental healthcare and early childhood services in line with the results of our site.

For most cities, public engagement around budgeting looks fairly traditional; residents may have the option for two minutes in front of a microphone at a town hall-style meeting or to chat with a city staffer at an open house. Typically these meetings have low attendance, except perhaps from a handful of residents who are already engaged at a high level. Additionally, existing methods of budget engagement offer very little education about how the budget works, what is in it, or what struggles a government may be facing. What hard decisions are being made this year that residents can help solve?  

The People's Budget addresses both issues by meeting residents where they are-- on a cell phone, in a library, or a senior center. It offers the most accessible and crucial pieces of civic education necessary to understand the city budget so residents can give informed input. For immigrants, the safety of distance and anonymity is crucial. The site offers the option to translate the city budget into as many languages as needed, giving a microphone to the voices least likely to be heard traditionally. Finally, the People’s Budget levels the playing field of data. Too often, data about our communities is not shared with them. Because our data is available to everyone from the mayor and city council to neighborhood leaders, we can come to the budget table speaking the same language, and with an honest, transparent data set from which we can work together to solve our city’s problems.

The People's Budget is a secure web-based application hosted in the cloud that uses a simple javascript engine for it's game functionality to provide immediate user feedback. Users can register with an email address or sign in using a Google or Facebook account. Our technology stack includes Linux, Nginx, PHP and a MongoDB replica-set as a datastore.

Users of the site interface entirely with a front-end that is graphically driven and engaging. Admins, typically city staffers, structure their game based on the feedback they're hoping to receive from residents through a content management system backend. All data is recorded in a downloadable .csv file that can be easily manipulated to see trends and quick poll responses. 

Demographic data is collected in a third-party ap called Typeform after a user completes their budget.

Our theory of change says that by giving residents an accessible, engaging activity through which to understand and weigh in on their budgets, we could create clean, usable data on resident priorities, get residents more engaged in the budget process, and ultimately improve trust and communication between city officials and residents.

The immediate output of the People’s Budget is our data; after residents take our initial action (completing the budget game), our organization receives their version of the city budget in data form. This data is shared with local elected officials and community leaders. Our short term outcome is to help elected officials create a more responsive budget based on that data and to give residents a basic understanding of their city’s budget. Last year, the New Orleans city council allocated $3 million to mental health care and services for children based on the data created by our site. Additionally, our demographic survey shows that residents are self-reporting an increase in understanding of the city budget each year. 

Our long term outcome is to build trust between the community and government. We believe residents cannot hold their government accountable for issues that they don’t understand. The budget game offers them a basic level of education and the opportunity to feel that their voice has been heard, setting the stage for a more constructive, informed conversation between stakeholders in the future.

Last year, the New Orleans version of the People's Budget served roughly 800 residents. The Nacogdoches version served 100, for a current audience of 900 residents.

Next year, we expect the number of residents served in New Orleans to rise significantly due to two partnerships with Junior Achievers and the City of New Orleans. We expect to reach 1,500 residents this year, and for Nacogdoches to grow to 150 residents. We hope that with the launch of Cambridge, MA's site, using the population to player ratio seen in our first two cities and accounting for their already engaged population, for Cambridge to reach 800 residents. We're currently exploring a partnership with the national level budget of The Gambia and with Northumberland County, Ontario, Canada. While it is difficult for us to estimate a number of engagements in the Gambia, we hope to see numbers near 5,000. In Northumberland County, we hope to see at least 300 residents in their initial year for a total 2020 audience of 7,750.

In five years, we hope to have a formal partnership in place with civic technology coalitions like ALTEC (Latin American Civic Technology Alliance), growing our site through systems rather than piecemeal. Our hope is that in five years we can see a combined audience of at least 1 million residents around the world.

Our focus on scaling this technology thus far has primarily included partnerships with cities who have motivated budget staff or chief finance officers. While this approach has allowed us to move into cities with staff who are ready and excited to work with us, it has made growth slow and difficult. We are currently exploring options for growth through networks that already have relationships with cities such as the Latin American Civic Tech Alliance (ALTEC), Code for All, and other professional groups that serve technologist and budget officers on city and state levels.

We currently have proposals out to two additional governments-- a civic group that would host the site for the national-level budget of Gambia and the county-level government of Northumberland County, Ontario, Canada. These partnerships would double our current footprint outside of New Orleans and help us grow internationally.

With the funds raised by scaling our technology, we hope to invest in further technological improvements, such as integrating the demographic survey into the game to better understand how people of different socioeconomic backgrounds spend money differently and to invest in a SaaS-based licensing model.

The largest barrier to our growth is the civic tech marketplace itself. As the Knight Foundation’s recent study found, the problems of growing civic technology are fairly predictable: sustainable and predictable revenue sources are limited, growth is slow, and impact measurement tools are underdeveloped. Additionally, we have found the will to innovate around documents as political as a budget to be limited in many cities.

Secondly, because our organization is small, we struggle to appropriately dedicate staff time to scaling technology when there is also the need to invest time and resources into ensuring local residents are being engaged in the game each year in an equitable way.

Finally, funding is our major barrier to growth. We aren’t able to invest in upgrades and updates that we feel would make the site both more marketable and more useful. We aren’t able to hire staff to serve in a sales role. Because funding for civic engagement and technology is incredibly limited, particularly in the American South at this time, we struggle to invest financially in this project in a way that it deserves.

We are actively fundraising from as many appropriate sources as possible to invest in upgrades and scaling of this project. Networks such as NationSwell, a corporate social responsibility and impact investing organization, have been helpful in suggesting pro bono services and growing our presence organically. Speaking opportunities at conferences from Montreal to Buenos Aires have also offered many chances to spread information about our work at a minimal cost.

Full time staff: 3

Full time interns (beginning June 1): 1

Part time interns (beginning June 1): 1

Kelsey Foster operates the People's Budget Program at the Committee for a Better New Orleans. Foster has a degree in multimedia journalism from Emerson College and a professional certificate in municipal finance from the University of Chicago. Ms. Foster has been with CBNO since 2013.

Keith Twitchell is the President of the Committee for a Better New Orleans. He is responsible for project management, organizational leadership and fundraising/finances, and has led key CBNO programs such as the Community Participation Program, the Orleans Public Education Network and the Greater New Orleans Water Collaborative.

CBNO is overseen by a diverse board of 19 New Orleanians of diverse ages, genders, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

The People's Budget project relies on community partnerships in order to reach a diverse set of our population. Examples of current partners include: 

• The Council on Aging
• The New Orleans City Council
• Puentes New Orleans
• Friends of the Lafitte Greenway
• College Track
• Tulane University 
• Junior Achievement 
• YMCA Adult Literacy Program
• Hispanic Young Professionals of Louisiana
• Urban League
• Neighborhood Associations 

The current People's Budget model is usage based. In order to create an equitable pricing structure for cities of all sizes, we felt this approach was the most fair. Each license lasts one fiscal year, and can be renewed. We've capped the maximum cost in order to help extremely large cities afford this technology over time.

Although the Committee for a Better New Orleans is a 53-year-old organization, our expertise lies in civic engagement and the New Orleans community, not necessarily the best practices in scaling and licensing civic technology. We currently have extremely dedicated and supportive technological partners in the New Orleans community who volunteer their time to help us navigate this new and exciting opportunity to make our organization more sustainable, and hopefully to help us serve our city for another 50 years.

As we grow, the People's Budget program, a part of the Committee for a Better New Orleans, will manage the scaling and advertisement for all new cities and organizations that wish to be a part of using our technology.

It's our goal in the next year to secure funding to build out a SaaS system to support the scaling of the People's Budget. SaaS systems, or Software as a Service, are typical in web-based gamification sites. Most users are familiar with the web-based, sign-up and go models of companies like Mail Chimp, Sales Force, or Dropbox, which make hosting technology such as this on a much larger scale possible for a small, community based non-profit. Our plan for securing this funding is to leverage our relationships with local technology firms, foundations, and small-scale seed investors to help us raise some initial money that we can invest in this crucial update.

In additional to revenue generated by licensing sales, the Committee for a Better New Orleans is supported by philanthropic grants and private donations.

There are two major gaps in our current programming that the Solve community can help us close in order to advance our work. 

First, and most crucially, funding for our work is extremely limited, particularly in the Southern U.S. at this time. We simply cannot continue to provide programming here in New Orleans or to grow our site to other cities and countries without financial support. Introductions to networks of funders could offer us the sustainability we currently lack in our region.

Secondly, we could benefit greatly from a network of expert peers. As mentioned earlier, the Knight Foundation's report shows that there are great, systemic questions about the viability of scaling civic technology. We would be honored to tackle those problems as a team with contacts made through Solve.

We would benefit most from partnership with groups that can help us reach government decision makers around the world who are interested in innovating ways to engage their residents. Helping us find progressive and innovative thinkers in government positions would help us overcome one of the largest barriers both we and the Knight Foundation's study have identified: a marketplace where customers are not yet sure they value the product of a more engaging democracy. 

We would also like to work with other civic technologist to learn how they have tackled similar problems, to share best practices and to consider alternate ways to frame our business model. 

If chosen as the winners of the GM Prize on Community-Driven Innovation, we would use the new funding to re-invest in our product: the People's Budget. We have long hoped to upgrade two major aspects of the site-- integration of the demographic survey and an upgrade to a SaaS-based licensing model. 

With a $10,000 prize, we would be able to engage our development partners to fully integrate our demographic survey, making it easier for elected officials and community like to see how residents spend tax dollars by demographic. For example: how do young black men invest public money differently than a white woman over the age of 70? What does that tell us about the needs of different people in our society? How do residents in a particular zip code or neighborhood chose to invest tax dollars? How can that information best inform their city councillor? We believe this investment will enrich the data we are already creating and sharing in a novel way. 

Further, we believe that by winning the GM Prize on Community-Driven Data, we will be able to leverage additional funding from a much larger network of philanthropists and corporate donors to make the costlier investment of a SaaS buildout. By moving to a SaaS licensing system, we can more easily and readily scale and onboard new customers interested in using our technology. 

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