The Top 3 Engagement Takeaways from the GFOA Annual Conference

The 2025 Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) Annual Conference featured a wide array of sessions and speakers that presented amazing public finance information and best practices. Citizen engagement was a central theme across some of these sessions, and it’s a key part of public finance.

As we attended the conference sessions, we picked up on some key insights that centered on getting community stakeholders further involved in local government. Below are our top engagement-related takeaways from the conference.

Takeaway 1: Explain your budget and financial story in easy-to-understand language

Communicating public financial decisions to the public often requires a completely different skill set than making those decisions. A lot of complex ideas and concepts go into public finance, but the members of your community don’t always have a clear-cut understanding of those concepts.

A chief public information officer from a California municipality emphasized the need to share financial information in a digestible, impactful way. She encouraged attendees to use the following when communicating financial information:

• Sharp focus on key messages

• Short sentences and paragraphs

• Strong, clear words and no wasted words

• A positive slant — focusing on what is, rather than what isn’t

• Headlines and sub-headlines to break up blocks of text

• Sidebars, timelines, and photo captions to better explain information

• Plenty of white space

Whether you’re building an online report or delivering a printed handout, the same principle applies: make it simple, make it visual, and make it stick.

Takeaway 2: Use Charts and Visuals to Illustrate Your Financial Story

Another aspect that the PIO in California emphasized is using charts and visuals in your financial communications with the public. And it’s not hard to see why. 

Whenever there’s a picture in an article or a book, who doesn’t make a beeline towards it with their eyes? The same principle applies to telling your financial story: Visualizing your community’s data can make a big difference.

A public engagement professional from a Virginia county noted how her county created the following visuals to help explain budgeting:

• An infographic detailing an anticipated budget gap and what it would take to balance the budget was well-received among residents.
  
• Short videos explaining the budget process, how to develop a balanced budget, and the importance of community engagement.
  
• A colorful, visual-heavy guide explaining their FY’26 budget

Charts and figures break down complex data into human-scale insights that people can understand and act on.

Takeaway 3: Make Transparency Convenient, Centralized, and Digitized

When you have visual rich assets that explain your financial story, where do you put them? 

You could stick them on your website on some department’s homepage. Or you could create a new dedicated space for it — a digital transparency center or transparency platform for your stakeholders.

Having an online transparency platform provides immense value to your community. They can access key community data on any of their devices whenever they want, and it offers a great way to further visualize data.

A Florida county did just that with a homegrown system managed by their County Clerk. Their transparency platform gives everyone (in the county and outside of it) easy, open access to detailed spending and payroll information. The county also included instructions for how to view the data and content on their platform.

While this county’s system is unique, the takeaway is universal: centralizing key metrics in a digital hub helps build public trust and encourages ongoing engagement. 

The BCM Approach to Better Engagement

Clear communication, visual storytelling, and easy, digital access to information are all hallmarks of the Engagement part of modern Budget Cycle Management (BCM). BCM is a strategic framework that transforms budgeting into a holistic, streamlined set of planning and budget management practices that any public agency can implement. 

The goal of BCM is to ensure a seamlessly integrated approach to budgeting that involves all relevant teams with as little friction as possible. And the goal of engagement as practiced within BCM is to do the exact same with financial transparency with community stakeholders.

BCM advocates properly engaging stakeholders by bringing all community metrics together into a comprehensive, cloud-based digital hub that’s clear-cut, accessible, and easy to navigate. And don’t worry — you don’t need a design background to tell your government or school district’s financial story well. 

You can practice the following strategies to implement engagement the BCM way:

• Use plain, straightforward language.
  
• Build clear charts and graphs with simple legends.
  
• Highlight the most important numbers.
  
• Keep messaging consistent across documents.
  
• Leverage cloud tools to bring everything together in one place.

ClearGov can help you engage, plan, budget, and report for your community throughout the entire budget cycle. Watch our product tour webinar and learn how ClearGov is making budgeting easier, more transparent, and future-proof for over 1,300 agencies!