By Andrew Coons

If you’ve ever heard your director of planning or engineering describe a new development and felt a pit welling up in your stomach as you think of all the questions residents will have about it — you’re most definitely not alone.

In Shakopee (population 45,735), we are experiencing swift growth. To keep our residents informed and help support our city staff in answering questions, we knew we needed a way to reach people with timely, engaging information. The obvious answer was video communication, which has historically proven to be a successful tactic when communicating with our community.

Aiming to inform, entertain, and support

As we developed a video series centered around new developments, three key goals rose to the top. We knew we needed to inform, entertain, and direct community members to even more information.

Informing residents meant that videos needed to hit the highlights that apply directly to them. While details about an upcoming building are helpful, the most helpful information is letting people know which roads will be shut down to accommodate construction and how long construction is expected to last. Identifying our audience and thinking about which facts are most important to them is the most crucial part of this proactive video series.

You can have all the pertinent information in the world, but if people aren’t eager to watch your video, what good is it doing you? A good video entertains the audience while informing them, and that is what drove our second goal. We made our video series entertaining through several different approaches. We branded the series “The Dig” and came up with the catchphrase, “We bring you all the dirt on the latest developments happening in Shakopee.”

We also recommitted to the consistency and branding of the video series, developing a logo specifically for “The Dig,” creating a high-energy intro sequence, and increasing the pace of the videos to match the expectations of viewers on social media.

But informing people in an entertaining way is only two-thirds of the goal. We also wanted to help direct people to the best place for them to learn more. This was accomplished by having a dedicated page on the city’s website that we refer to at the end of every video.

By visiting ShakopeeMN.gov/currentdevelopment, viewers can learn more about the project talked about in that month’s episode and learn about other projects that aren’t covered in a video. This also helps direct people with questions to a place where they can learn the vast majority of the information they need, freeing up city staff to focus on projects rather than answering phone calls and emails. Directing viewers properly is a win-win for both our community and our staff.

The series evolves

As the series has progressed, we have made strategic adjustments, including releasing shorter, more mobile-friendly versions of “The Dig” on our Instagram page.

Perhaps the most important change we’ve made was committing to releasing monthly episodes, which we have been able to accomplish in 11 of the last 12 calendar months. Keeping information and “The Dig” branding in front of our community members regularly has grown our viewership over time, which in turn results in a more informed community.

To date, “The Dig” is one of our most viewed video series. We have shared the videos on Facebook, YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and have seen varied levels of success on each platform, with Facebook and Instagram being the strongest. We’ve produced episodes about the new amphitheater being built in Shakopee, roundabouts, disc golf course renovations, a hospital addition, SandVenture Aquatic Park’s renovations, and more. This broad range of topics under the umbrella of “new development” has allowed us to reach different pockets of our community, from the business community to parents to senior citizens and more.

Keep “The Dig’’ in mind the next time your city embarks on a roundabout installation or major public amenity improvement project and know that you, too, can prevent the onslaught of resident phone calls by getting out ahead of the message. If you dig deep enough, you might just find a clever solution to keeping your community members in the loop and off the phones.

Andrew Coons is a communications specialist for the City of Shakopee.