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Digital Team Case Studies: Web Content

To better educate the public on what our team does for the City, we've put together case studies of our work. These case studies go into detail on how we help departments get stuff done.

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The case study below dives into our work around engaging the public on parks projects. The Parks and Recreation Department had a need to give the public more information, so we stepped in to help them.

The challenge

When Boston residents see a park under construction, they want to learn more about what’s planned for the space. As a result, Parks project managers get a lot of requests for presentations and other information related to parks projects.

On the old website, there was no easy way for our Parks Department to make that information accessible to the public. And even if they could make that information available online, it was very laborious to keep it updated. They maintained a construction projects page, but most of the projects listed were out-of-date and — aside from the names of the projects — there wasn’t much information for the public.

Image for public parks project page on old city of boston website

The goal

Build a web presence for Parks that allows them to engage the public on their projects. The page needed to be easy for Parks to:

  1. add new projects
  2. update existing projects, and
  3. engage the public around public hearings and other project-related issues.

The outcome

After meeting with Parks to better understand their needs and the audience they were looking to engage, we created a plan. Using templates that already existed on the new Boston.gov, we were able to build dedicated pages for active Parks projects. The Parks Department sent us sample information on a number of projects, and we used it to create a template for an ideal parks project webpage.

We worked with Parks to build out more than 20 parks project pages. To ensure the pages stay up-to-date, we trained Parks project managers on how to update the website directly. In three months of work, we turned a single outdated page on the old City website into 24 active pages that allow Parks to engage the public on their projects.

Image for current public parks project content on boston gov

Image for a sample project page on boston gov

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