Community Engagement Success for Nonprofit

Encinitas’s E3 Collaborative, a group of neighboring nonprofits, needed community support for its traffic calming plan. We won E3 support from residents and city leaders alike.

The Opportunity

The E3 Collaborative is a group of neighborhood non-profit organizations and public sector partners that collaborate to provide environmental education opportunities to the Encinitas community.

The group needed to a community engagement program to gather input on proposed traffic calming recommendations. This project was the first community outreach effort between the E3 Collaborative partners and the residents and businesses located on Saxony Road and Quail Gardens Drive.

The Solution

We developed a community outreach program that included six main features based on our community outreach best practices:

  • Brand development including logo and tagline
  • Website and social media strategy
  • Outreach strategy
  • Two workshops for direct community involvement
  • One informational meeting to share the results
  • Media relations

The E3 Collaborative was relatively new. It had a name but no logo or web presence. We created a visual identity, tagline and online presence that brought the organization to life, made it recognizable to the community and gave residents multiple platforms to engage with it. The logo and Facebook page we created continues to serve the group to this day.

Our community outreach plan included branded print collateral such as flyers, banners and mailers to promote the meetings and build the Collaborative’s brand. The two workshops engaged Saxony Road and Quail Gardens Drive residents who voiced their preferences for the traffic calming, which we shared at the informational meeting a month later.

To give the project staying power, we built and maintained a detailed stakeholder database that tracked all outreach and enabled future direct communications with interested neighbors.

The Results

  • Over 130 residents participated in the community survey and gave the preliminary traffic calming plan positive feedback
  • More than 90 people attended the first two workshops and about 40 people were present at the following informational meeting
  • Over 250 people liked the E3 Facebook page
  • Stories on the project ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Seaside Courier, Encinitas Advocate and Coast News
  • The City of Encinitas participated in and supported the process and agreed to evaluate the E3 Cluster’s final traffic calming plan which it ultimately passed
Close