The technology behind the Participatory Budgeting in Rivas Vaciamadrid

It is no secret that participatory budgets are all the rage. In 2017 the city councils of the Spanish provincial capitals dedicated more than 130 million euros to this concept. And the figure continues to rise. But carrying out participatory budgets is not a simple task. It is necessary to select the appropriate methodology for each municipality and plan a good communication campaign. In addition, the resources available to the municipality must be properly sized, especially during the technical evaluation phase of the citizens' proposals, to avoid overburdening the technical services.

Our client

Technology is one of the factors that can contribute to improve the results of participatory budgets while reducing the workload of the council. Thanks to technology, many citizens who are not willing to travel to submit their proposal or cast their vote will be able to do so comfortably from their cell phones. But not all technologies are equal. And if we choose the wrong solution, we can achieve a radically opposite effect.

"Participatory budgets require a lot of work, we needed to facilitate the process."

The technology behind the Participatory Budgeting in Rivas Vaciamadrid

The City Council of Rivas Vaciamadrid is one of the most innovative in Spain. And in transparency and open government forums it is recognized as one of the most participatory municipalities in the country. However, it had experienced several setbacks with the technology it had used to support its participatory budgets until 2018. The user experience was not optimal. The internal management of the budgets required a great deal of effort on the part of the technical team. More importantly, any improvements to the product were taking too many hours from the IT team. Thanks to Kuorum, Rivas City Council was able to have a new customized citizen engagement website ready in less than 1 minute. And the 2019 participatory budgets were a success, not only in terms of participation but also in terms of reducing the workload of the technical team.

One of the advantages of citizen participation websites created with Kuorum is their great usability. Thanks to this, Rivas has had more than 2,000 users (verified against the municipal census) in the first two weeks since its launch. Managing these users can be a daunting task with other tools. But now Rivas had Kuorum's powerful contact manager that allowed it to segment audiences according to numerous criteria and send them mass and personalized mailings.

Increased participation

Voter experience

From any device

No incidents

"Thanks to the citizen participation platform, many more citizens became involved in the initiative."