Citizens of the 21st century don’t just want opportunities to easily and effectively engage with their local governments — they demand it. In 2025, even small townships and rural counties need to find ways to help citizens engage in and be informed about what’s going on in their community.
This challenge requires government professionals and elected officials to examine ways to better involve citizens whenever possible. Whether it’s sharing information about proposed and ongoing development or more directly empowering citizens to weigh in on local decisions, there are many ways of stepping up to meet resident needs.
Transparency has many benefits, including building trust, better understanding local needs, and empowering citizens. More transparency can also increase community engagement, encouraging the residents and stakeholders that governments serve to get involved in the process.
Modern technology can make local governments more responsive to their citizens, with online community development software and other digital innovations improving accessibility so the general public can get involved whenever and wherever they want.
What Does Citizen Engagement Look Like Today?
Citizen engagement is about far more than voting or attending a public meeting. Public engagement now ranges from volunteering and joining a neighborhood group to weighing in at a public hearing or reading a letter from the city about local issues.
Successfully fostering engagement can lead to more community buy-in while improving local decision-making because there’s a deeper understanding of what residents want and expect.
Still, this is hard to do if relying entirely on who shows up to offer their opinion about local matters. One national survey, for example, found that only about 1 in 5 people had contacted an elected official in the past 12 months, and only 1 in 4 had attended a public meeting in the past year.
This echo chamber that doesn’t include the vast majority of citizens can lead to major problems. A recent study suggested that overly cumbersome restrictions on new housing supply — often due to vocal opposition to affordable housing projects — led to a 36% lower growth rate in the U.S. between 1964 and 2009.
Five recent studies of a total of 1,470 people suggested the public, overall, prefers a balanced model of decision-making with citizens and local governments equally involved in developing policies for their communities.
How Government Technology is Changing
Technology has become a crucial tool for local governments to be more transparent and accessible, which can help improve citizen engagement in communities of any size.
A 2020 survey found about half of residents were satisfied with accessibility to local government services, but many wanted more options in addition to phone calls or office visits. Respondents also said they’d like online access to routine services, including street repair requests, government meetings, and building permits.
According to a Power Almanac survey of 1,199 local government officials, new software can significantly improve local governments. About 75% of respondents said new software helped them be more reliable, productive, or offer a better user experience.
Building officials had the highest level of satisfaction, with the vast majority saying they appreciated how these modern tools streamlined things like permitting and enforcement.
Today, more governments than ever are embracing the biggest GovTech trends by automating and simplifying processes and integrating different software products to all work together.
A growing number of digital tools are helping communities step up to modern challenges. Consider, for example, software for short-term rentals that helps departments become more responsive to this unique and growing lodging type that can affect the local housing supply — an important effort considering there were already nearly 2.5 million short-term rental listings in America by 2023 and 355,000 in Canada.
Another modern challenge is streamlining the process of public housing verification. New software is helping by supporting agencies with centralized data and reduced administrative tasks before an eligible resident can be approved.
A Growing Need for Accessibility
It’s clear that people want to engage with an accessible local government, so it’s essential to embrace opportunities to improve transparency and make it easier for residents to keep up to date with local matters.
For the most part, government officials are ready and willing to do this. There are signs of this willingness in several sectors, including sharing more details of business development incentives with residents. In a 2021 survey of 651 elected officials, 63% said they supported creating a database of companies that received these incentives.
At the same time, 322 local finance officers were asked about including this information on annual financial reports, with about half supporting that idea. A quarter of finance officers said current reporting standards were adequate, and one respondent pointed out that this information was already a matter of public record.
The survey points to one big challenge of being more transparent and engaging for citizens: These efforts often require more work, which can be challenging for already-strained departments and municipalities. As local governments struggle to meet the growing demand for services during an era of budget cuts and staff shortages, improving accessibility and transparency can feel like an unreachable goal.
What Software Can Do for Citizen Engagement
The right local government software offers new opportunities for citizens to weigh in, get informed, and do what they need to do in their communities — all while streamlining internal processes and reducing administrative work so government professionals can focus their efforts on more important tasks.
These new digital tools have many potential applications, such as building software that allows residents to apply for building permits and get automatic status updates without visiting an office or calling a local department.
Planning software can help local officials measure public opinion, keep interested parties informed with status updates, and automatically generate a list of property owners within a required public notice radius.
Cloudpermit is a leading provider of comprehensive community development software for local governments across North America. Our planning, building, inspections, and enforcement products are user-friendly for staff and citizens, bringing these processes online while also making it easier than ever to share information with residents.
Our Public Search Map generates a publicly searchable map with just a few clicks, allowing citizens to look up detailed information about development-related activity across their communities. Tools like this can level up transparency efforts and reduce the need to respond to manual requests for information — representing a win-win for strained local governments that want to improve engagement and transparency without additional workload.
The right local government software can help citizens engage with their communities in many ways. Learn more about everything Cloudpermit can do for local governments by booking a demo with us today.
