The City of Buffalo needed to effectively garner support for the two year zoning ordinance rewrite project. They desired to reach different age groups, leverage social media, increase turnout to public meetings, and capture citizen comments through out the planning process. Visit the Buffalo Green Code website


The launch of the project web site and online engagement strategy produced exceptional participation: in just the first month of workshops, citizens added over 50 useful comments to our cutting-edge online comment map to compliment workshop comments. The web site received 5,192 unique visits, 970 were a result from the comment map.

In Phase 2, we grew Buffalo’s reach by adding over 650 Facebook fans, 260 Twitter followers, and 1,520 e-newsletter contacts to keep citizens updated about the project, invite them to further interact with the City’s planners, and share content with other citizens.

In Phase 3, community workshop summaries were displayed using Google Earth embedded maps and graphical imagery. Citizens were able to search the workshop results through Google, social media, and affiliate websites where they directly responded to the workshop summaries. Over 3,692 page views were served during the summary feedback phase, 58% of the visitors were new to the project site.