City of Morgan Hill Communications Assessment

government, due (in part) to the ability of residents to interact directly with elected leaders and City staff during everyday life. 8 Building and consistently executing a Communications plan helps cities foster an engaged community. By leveraging established communications platforms and creating new ones, cities can inform residents of upcoming initiatives, alert citizens to community meetings, and organize the community in response to emergencies. To see the most benefit from their communication efforts, cities must build trust through regular communications and proactive efforts. Times of crisis are not the best time to begin a dialogue with the community. Reactionary communications on controversial community issues can appear artificial and desperate. Morgan Hill is a relatively small, residential community with busy residents who are especially concerned with how transportation and residential growth are impacting Morgan Hill and it’s ‘small-town feel.’ The City places great emphasis on keeping its community up-to-date on City business, construction and other projects, namely through emails and website updates. This report documents the City’s current processes, identifies successes, and suggests future goals for the City’s communication efforts. Engagement Approach Summary To evaluate the City’s current Communications strategy and processes, Tripepi Smith met with City Council Members, leadership from departments within the City, outside agencies who serve the community, and community influencers who either create or consume City communications. These interviews allowed Tripepi Smith to assess existing communications from both internal and external viewpoints. For a full list of assessment participants, see Appendix A . Having completed the interview process outlined above, Tripepi Smith set about documenting existing Communications processes and platforms, identifying opportunities for improvement, and surfacing best practices that the City could most effectively integrate into existing processes. Consideration was given to organizational culture and fiscal viability. A Changing Communications Landscape The decline of the local newspaper across America and concurrent rise of the Internet has diversified sources for local news. The situation is made more complex by the continued consolidation of newspapers across the state and the rise of a highly saturated market in remaining outlets. During the course of the interview process, City staff noted that regional media coverage from publications such as The Mercury News is lacking and tends to focus on negative news versus promoting positive City services and programs. The City’s two local newspapers (Morgan Hill Life and Morgan Hill Times), by comparison, focus more on local news that relates to the City government and would be important to residents. Residents have significantly evolved the tools they use to gather information. For large numbers of residents, this is through the Internet and delivered on traditional computers or mobile devices. The information may come from social media, online newspaper sites,

8 http://www.gallup.com/poll/5392/trust-government.aspx

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