Participatory budgeting technology in Rivas Vaciamadrid

Participatory budgeting has been gaining popularity worldwide. In 2017, provincial capital city councils in Spain allocated over 130 million dollars to these initiatives, and the trend continues to grow. However, executing participatory budgeting is no small feat. It requires selecting the right methodology for each municipality, planning an effective communication campaign, and carefully managing the available resources - especially during the technical evaluation phase of citizen proposals - to prevent overwhelming municipal teams.

Our client

Technology plays a crucial role in enhancing the success of participatory budgeting while reducing the workload for councils. Thanks to digital tools, citizens who may not be willing to visit an office in person can submit their proposals or cast their votes conveniently from their phones. However, not all technology is created equal. Choosing the wrong solution can lead to opposite and undesirable outcomes.

"Participatory budgeting requires a lot of work; we needed to make the process easier."

Participatory budgeting technology 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 launch a new customized citizen participation platform 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 key advantage of Kuorum’s citizen participation platforms is their outstanding usability. Within the first two weeks of launching, over 2,000 users - verified against the municipal registry - joined the platform. Managing this growing number of users could have become a daunting task with other tools. However, Rivas benefited from Kuorum’s robust contact management system, which enabled the segmentation of audiences based on numerous criteria and the ability to send personalized, bulk email campaigns effortlessly.

Increased participation

Voter experience

From any device

No incidents

"Thanks to the citizen participation platform, many more residents engaged with the initiative."