We believe that active, engaged Edmontonians make for a more vibrant, positive and welcoming city and their advice and wisdom lead to better decisions.
Public engagement creates opportunities for you to contribute to decision-making by City Council and Administration about the City’s policies, programs, projects, and services.
Share Your Voice. Shape Your City.
We invite you to provide input to help grow our communities, fine-tune government services and prepare Edmonton for the future.
More Ways to Engage with Us
You have valuable knowledge about your community and a unique perspective that can help make your city better.
Public Engagement Spectrum
These are the roles the public can have when participating in City public engagement activities.
As you move within the spectrum, there is an increasing level of public influence and commitment from the City and the public.
Advise
The public is consulted by the City to share feedback and perspectives that are considered for policies, programs, projects, or services.
Refine
The City involves the public to adapt and adjust approaches to policies, programs, projects or services.
Create
The public collaborates with the City to develop and build solutions regarding policies, programs, projects, or services. This can include community-initiated engagement.
Decide
The public is empowered to make decisions directly or on behalf of the City about policies, programs, projects, or services.
Public Engagement Process
Public engagement at the City of Edmonton follows a 6-step process.
At the identification step, the Public Engagement team seeks to understand the needs of City project teams, if public engagement is required and how best to support public engagement if so. The project request is reviewed for alignment with relevant City documents, including the Public Engagement Policy, the City of Edmonton’s Corporate Business Plan, and The City Plan.
In this step, project teams look to answer the question: “is public engagement required or helpful in decision making?” If yes, they further decide when and to what degree. Starting with assessing the decisions that need to be made, project teams develop a clear understanding of how Edmontonians’ perspectives and opinions can impact initiatives and projects.
Once a project team determines public engagement is needed, and what decisions will be informed using public input, a plan is developed to implement the strategy defined in the previous step. Digital and in-person public engagement activities and approaches are designed and the right tools, techniques and methods are selected to support gathering information for the project decisions that Edmontonians are being engaged about.
This step involves carrying out public engagement activities to collect public input. During this step, key attention is paid to evaluating each public engagement activity so that lessons can be learned to improve and refine any subsequent public engagement activities.
In this step, the data collected from the public is synthesized, analyzed and considered against other project data and decisions identified in the strategy step. Other project data may include Council direction, City Policies, budget considerations and internal expertise. Decisions identified during the strategy step are adjusted or adapted based on this analysis. To be accountable, this information is then shared with the public, community partners, interested and/or affected parties through internal and external reports.
The entire public engagement process is evaluated to determine areas of success and areas for improvement. The City measures and reports on the alignment of public engagement activities to the five guiding principles as part of continuous improvement. This information is used to create lessons learned documentation to support continuous learning and improvement of public engagement practice.
