In March 2019, the Open Raleigh Brigade experimented with a new event: Lunch with a govie – and it was a huge success. Here are a few thoughts on why we did it and some information on how you could replicate this for your brigade.
Why host a lunch with a govie?
We’ve found it difficult to get some municipal and county staff to attend “after hours” meet-ups unless they have support from their managers/superiors to participate. Our thinking was to host a day time event, provide lunch, and experiment with “going to them” instead of asking our government partners to come to us.
For the first installment, we had no agenda. We kept it as simple as greet, intro’s, eat, and mingle.
Here’s what we did:
We picked out a few dates that we thought would work well
We found some meeting space that matched out dates, was collaborative, and good for hosting lunch–we ended up having the meeting at the Wake County Innovation Space
We created a Meet-up event to help promote the event
We sent personal invites to some of our city council, county commissioners, and gov’t partners
The results:
We had a former city councilor attend
We had a county commissioner attend
We had four different brigades represented: Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh
We had a good mix of brigade members, gov’t workers, and elected (former) officials
We had a really good spread for lunch and great conversations
Next steps, during the event, we talked about bringing in a government department/group to do a reverse-pitch to help generate ideas to help them solve a problem.
What thoughts or questions do you have about Lunch with a Govie.
We certainly could have had conversation prompts. We waiting until most people arrived, then we just talked about the brigade. Then we went around the room and everyone introduced themselves. I used that as a prompt to get people to go talk to each other and “learn more” about topics or roles they heard during intro’s. We kept it pretty causual.
We used meet-up to promote the event. We did not capture information because we knew everyone attending for the most part because we did a lot of individual invites to get the right folks in the room. This really wasn’t a meet-up, it was more of a curating effort–and a big experiment.
We recently hosted a similar event in January where it was some of our leadership team and representatives from both the county and city IT staff. We basically brought in lunch for them and walked them through our event schedule and plans for the year.
The real goal, which we got to at the end, was to discuss strategic areas where there was overlap between city/county and what topics would lend themselves well to civic tech. It was very similar to lunch with a govie except it was just our leadership team and we didn’t really open it up to the public.
I think the one take-away is that it takes work to keep it touch with our government partners and that doing something like this at the beginning of the year helps with planning and budget priorities.