Surfacing the Stories for Enhancing Co-Created City Solutions

CityStudio London is a proven model of community-based learning and civic engagement that provides post-secondary students with direct opportunities to work in and with the city on urban challenges.

By furthering connections between City Hall, academic institutions, and local community, London Ontario’s post-secondary students have practical opportunities to apply their skills and creativity to real-world challenges facing the city and help shape its future.

The Challenge

CityStudio London aims to shift the way students, city staff, faculty and the community work together to co-create solutions for the city.

CityStudio acts as the hub for these multi-stakeholder projects and each stakeholder group needs a slightly different story. The projects are also modular and take place over several years. Demonstrating progress back to the various stakeholders involved in funding and delivering the work is therefore a complex task, requiring data from multiple sources.

Our task was to surface the things that CityStudio London wanted to know and show in terms of impact. Discerning the signal in the noise had proved very challenging.

How We Helped

We began by creating an information map setting out the story that we wanted to tell and the information needed to support it. While key messages for different audiences overlapped, they were also distinct. We validated and refined our first cut with stakeholder interviews.

Next we designed surveys to gather data and methods to deploy them. We wanted to understand the quality of the students’ experience and capture any change in their attitudes and opinions during and after the programme.

We developed a relational database that allowed us to query data collected from city projects, academic courses and students, and built an annual report template using Google slides – a flexible, collaborative and shareable way of presenting impact.

Measuring Success

The information map gave us a clear idea of the audiences’ information needs – what mattered most to them and what they needed to know – which will inform all future communications.

The evaluation strategy we produced and data they were able to present allowed CityStudio London to show the momentum their projects had generated and the good work that was already underway. More importantly, they have much greater ability to analyse the data and gain deeper insight into how their programmes are performing. CityStudio London has since won additional funding for their work.