Improving Financial Storytelling & Engagement with Modern Budget Cycle Management

Many taxpayers want to know how their tax dollars are being spent. And as residents, many want to understand their community’s budget and financial health. 

But let’s face it: Financial reports and documents like budget books aren’t exactly casual porch reads — even for finance buffs. They also don’t tell your community’s full financial story. As a result, public organizations get more calls for information, more FOIA requests, and more public complaints about opaqueness. 

What’s the solution? Implementing a modernized budget cycle management (BCM) approach that prioritizes cross-team coordination, forward thinking, cloud-based technology, efficiency, and transparency. The modern BCM framework places engagement as the final one of four key, interconnected phases of its holistic budget cycle model, along with planning & tracking, budgeting, and reporting. 

With engagement considered in the context of the greater budget cycle and carried out using cloud-based tools, telling your community’s financial story is easy and meaningful. Read on to learn how to do it, and why financial documents often aren’t enough to convey your community’s financial health.

Can Your Community’s Average Reader Follow Your Financial Story? 

Dollar amounts alone don’t provide the full picture of a community’s financial health or story. Demographics such as population, household income, and more play a role in the financial decisions made by local governments. Tracking historical revenues versus expenditures, as well as ongoing budget performance, also plays a crucial role in tracking financial health. And when your community is better informed on current financial health and expenditures, they’re more likely to be responsive to tax increases.

Yet the average person often has a tough time accessing, understanding, and visualizing this type of information, too. And governments aren’t exactly creative agencies, either. So, they may have a difficult time pulling their metrics together as visualizations and narratives — especially for stakeholders who don’t understand finance.

Budgets are more than just financial plans — they’re a key communication tool to engage your community. But without a means to combine them with other key historical and community metrics, visualize the metrics, and tell a comprehensive financial story with brevity, governments and school districts often can’t adequately engage their residents and stakeholders. 

How to Present Your Budget and Financial Story in an Engaging Way 

The BCM model prizes harnessing transparency, efficiency, clear communication, and the use of cloud-based tools to ensure a holistic, seamless solution to effectively managing budget cycles. To that end, stakeholder engagement in the BCM model means bringing all community metrics together into a comprehensive digital hub that’s clear-cut, accessible, and easy to navigate.

You don’t need a design background to tell your government or school district’s financial story well. Adopt the following BCM-based strategies to make your community’s financial story clear to your audience:

• Write in straightforward, simple language.

• Create clear-cut charts and graphs with well-defined legends.

• Emphasize key numbers and make them stand out.

• Use consistent messaging throughout your documents and information.

Citizen engagement is ripe ground for cloud and web-based software adoption, since it meets stakeholders where they spend a lot of time: online. Using software for transparency initiatives lets you engage the public in ways that PDFs can’t.

Leverage the cloud to optimize engagement in the following ways:

• Create two-way, controlled communication channels to encourage feedback and allow stakeholders to ask questions. 

• Centralize your financial information, performance metrics, and more in a digital, interactive hub with seamless, user-friendly navigation.

• Give department heads a place to share ongoing updates about their performance, popular events, and more — without giving them access to your website.

• Lay out all relevant community metrics and track them over time to stay as transparent as possible. This can include information about revenues, expenditures, demographics, debts, capital projects, strategic plans, debts, an ongoing checkbook, and dashboards 

The City of Page, AZ, Boosts Citizen Engagement with Comprehensive Digital Transparency Platform

The City of Page, AZ discovered the value of engagement after residents had requested more visibility into their tax processes. Declining tax revenues in recent years led to residents frequently having questions about how the city’s tax dollars were being used to help locals, rather than visitors to the city’s beautiful landscapes. And residents weren’t combing through the city’s 400+ page PDF budget book to find their answers.

Page was not particularly technologically advanced — but it leveraged the cloud to quickly modernize its transparency practices to better engage the public. Page started by creating and publishing its first website-based budget book using ClearGov Digital Budget Book. This new budget book is easy to navigate, graphics-driven, and engaging. Page’s previous budget book had won a GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation Award, and their digital budget book continued the streak.

Next, Page quickly funneled its complex financial data into ClearGov Transparency, which automatically converts metrics and community information into digestible infographics and charts. Page’s transparency center hosts easy-to-find information about revenues, expenditures, demographics, and debts. It also features an open checkbook to track spending, dashboards for city departments, and a project tracker to see the Community & Recreation Services department’s spending and progress on local projects.

Staff members find the department dashboards easy to update with timely and relevant communication for residents. And for community members, being able to clearly see budget data and easily understand it has legitimized what the city says about its changes in revenue and expenses. View Page’s transparency center.

“One of the best aspects of ClearGov is the ability to present our finances to residents in a clear and understandable way that fosters trust between the city and the community.” 

– Lynn Cormier, Director of Community and Recreation Services, City of Page, AZ.

Harness the Power of Digital Engagement with ClearGov Transparency

ClearGov Transparency incorporates BCM best practices to democratize financial understanding across your community. You can use ClearGov Transparency to tell your financial story in a way everyone can understand to drive community support. By telling your financial story and explaining your financial health with sharp visuals and narrative language, you can keep stakeholders informed and educated about their community. 

Digital technology plays a central role in most people’s lives today. And virtually anything can be learned with a quick Google search or by asking ChatGPT. By prioritizing engagement through the BCM lens, you’re engaging the people where they are and in familiar ways to them. Staying transparent will bring your community together even further.

Our public finance experts are here to help you apply BCM principles to your engagement efforts. Reach out to us for a demo to see how BCM can work for your organization.