Preparing
for PB

Staffing and Roles

When setting up your PB team, start by reviewing the core support areas needed to run the process effectively. Below are the main buckets of work involved in managing the PB process as well as suggested ways to cover those work areas.

Community Engagement Partnerships: Many PB processes fund and support community-based organizations to lead outreach or directly run PB events. These groups, whether service providers, membership associations, or advocacy organizations, are often best positioned to engage those most often excluded from civic life, including youth, unhoused people, undocumented residents, people who are currently or formerly incarcerated, disabled community members, and elders.

In-house city and county outreach and engagement infrastructure is not always as well-equipped to engage these community members as are the local, grassroots organizations that serve, represent, and/or advocate for these communities. These “trusted messengers” often hold the relationships that are so conducive to community engagement efforts across the PB cycle.

Since 2020, we’ve seen a number of PB processes set aside funds to resource community engagement partners to lead outreach and engagement.

Configuring Your Team

Your team configuration (size, roles, who is filling them) will vary with a few factors:

• Your implementation budget
• The size and geography of the area in which you’re conducting the PB process
• Weather you are a government agency hosting the PB process or a smaller institution
• The scope of your outreach and engagement audience
• The availability of part-time staff or support from other departments and agencies
• Whether you can resource Community Engagement Partners, and if so to what extent.

There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for staffing, but we generally offer the following breakdown as an example base/minimum staffing configuration that you can modify according to the factors mentioned above.

Note: FTE stands for Full Time Employment.

• 1 FTE (40 hours a week) Project Manager
• 2 FTEs (2 x 40 hours a week) Community Outreach and Engagement Staff
• .25 FTEs (10 hours a week) Communications Staff
• .50 FTEs (20 hours a week) Additional Support Staff

Large processes serving populations of 500,000 or more generally require more dedicated staff particularly in the form of facilitation, outreach, and support staff since they will be engaging more community members. These processes  may encompass a larger geographical area (and more meetings and events to facilitate). Smaller processes like those in schools often require less outreach, since participation is limited to the school community, and teachers can more easily share facilitation roles.

Working With Limited Budgets

In the event you are running a small process (<50,000 population) or are working with limited staffing or budget resources, we still recommend having at least one dedicated person covering the above functions (project management, outreach and engagement and communications). This will be a big job, but can be done by two people, particularly if they have the ability to pull in other stakeholders (elected officials, community-partners), other staff for specific events/ tasks, or a volunteer corps.

In smaller settings like a school or nonprofit, you won’t need as large of a team to run the process. In schools, for example, outreach can happen through announcements, lunch periods, and school activities. Teachers can also require student participation, making it easy to delegate much of the outreach. One PB project manager could draft the communications for the school’s communications team to blast through different avenues. The key in these instances is to have strong project management and training so you can tap into teachers for facilitation, school communications departments to help get the word out, and work closely with your Steering Committee to finetune your approach.

Other Staffing Models

Not every role needs to be filled by your own staff. Bringing in outside partners and community members can boost your team’s capacity, add needed expertise, and (especially with community-based partners) build trust with the communities you want to reach.

This could mean contracting with local organizations (as in a Community Engagement Partnership program), or hiring individual organizers, facilitation consultants, or other external support providers.

If you bring on staff who are new to PB, build in time for onboarding. PB is complex, and staff will need space to practice communicating the process clearly and answer community questions.

We recommend preparing an onboarding package that includes:

• A simple explanation of PB and why you’re doing it in your context
• The budget community members will allocate
• How residents and local groups can get involved
• Key team contacts for support
• You can adapt the “Our PB Process” presentation for your own context and use it as both an onboarding material for internal staff and for public info-sessions. You can also use PBP’s online resources or seek direct coaching and training to further support your staff during implementation.

PB Operations Budgets

A fundamental part of planning for a robust civic engagement program like PB involves:

1. Identifying the “operations budget” you have to implement it; and
2. Deciding how you will use it to resource your team and make participation accessible.

Operations budgets generally include all the costs associated with implementing PB other than direct government staff time dedicated to the project. It is a separate and distinct budget from the “pot” of money that residents will allocate through the vote for winning projects. An operations budget typically includes line items for:

• External support (technical assistance, facilitation, and/or outreach)
• Community engagement partnership grants
• Digital technology
• Committee compensation
• Event resources: space rentals, childcare, food
• Interpretation and translation
• Advertising and marketing
• Supplies and materials

Facilitating meaningful participation at scale takes resources, as you will see from the examples included below. But which resources and at what level will be a question you will have to answer with your community to figure out what they need to fully participate.

To orient yourself to the size of the operations budget you will need, you can use one or both of two simple formulas to estimate the resources you will need to facilitate PB.

Dollar for every resident: You can estimate this budget based on the size of the population you are prioritizing (the size of the relevant neighborhood(s), district(s), planning area(s), or municipality/county by starting with $1 for every resident in the relevant geographic area. So if your PB cycle is covering 200,000 residents, you could start from a $200,000 budget and see if it is sufficient as you begin allocating it across your different budgetary needs.

Percentage of the Pot for winning projects: You can also estimate the required operations budget size as a percentage of the pot for winning projects, by starting with 10% of the pot. For a PB process allocating $10,000,000 in winning projects, you might start with a $1,000,000 implementation budget

These two formulas can be helpful, particularly when used together to average out a baseline number.

Estimating the budget based on the size of the population can prove challenging in cases where the population is either very small (under 50,000 – in which case you will still have some fixed costs that will likely push your budget well over that $ amount) or very large (say over $1,000,000 – in which case you will find that economies of scale, as well as the outreach and engagement resources you will need for such a large constituency) may distort the accuracy of the resident-to-dollar conversion. Estimating it based on the percentage of the pot, on the other hand, will prove tricky if – again – the pot is particularly small (under $1,000,000) or very large (over $10,000,000).

Once you have a budget estimate, break it out to plan for specific support needs or budget line items. Many of the primary costs you will need to cover fall under the following two buckets:

Personnel Costs

Staff time: project staff time, external department staff support time (for example for outreach or proposal development support)

External support: facilitation or project management support

Other-Than-Personnel Support (OTPS)

Participation resources: committee member compensation, participation incentives

Outreach resources: community-led outreach grants (“community engagement partnerships”), marketing, digital platforms

Accessibility resources: childcare, food, translation and interpretation

Supplies: printing, outreach materials

Advertising: (if budget allows), advertising on public transit, local media outlets, or social media

All together, these costs make up an “operations budget” – or the resources required to facilitate the process. This operations budget is not to be confused with the budget for implementing winning projects, or “the PB pot.”

Budget Examples

You can find examples of breakdowns for processes of different sizes below. These illustrate both the ways that implementation budgets of different scales have been allocated, as well as how implementers working with similar budgets have made different choices about how to prioritize resources.

Implementation Budget Examples

Drafting Your Operations Budget

The formulas and examples included above can help you get a ballpark estimate of the funds you will need to facilitate your process and give you a sense of how it can be broken out to resource specific needs. But to actually develop a specific budget to carry out your PB operations, it will be helpful to start estimating the unit costs of these specific needs (e.g. the hourly cost of an ASL interpreter) and then multiply that estimate by the number of units you will need across your process. See the table below for some examples.

Some of this math may feel pre-emptive if you haven’t had the opportunity to make key implementation decisions yet, such as how many languages you’ll need to translate materials into, or how many large public outreach events you will need food and childcare for. For the time being, you can figure out what a conservative but realistic estimate might look like for a given need and make revisions as your overall process plan comes into focus.

To recap, it’s important that you:

• plan how you will spend your operations  budget
• track all PB expenses to make sure you can report how the budget was used
• stay within your overall budget by making any necessary adjustments along the way.

You may find you overestimated some costs and can redirect those savings elsewhere. Or you might discover unplanned expenses or higher-than-expected costs, requiring you to shift funds from less critical items to cover them.

Budgeting for Community-led Outreach Efforts

Working with Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) is one of the best ways to build trust and deepen your impact. Early in the process, CBOs can help recruit Steering Committee members and bring diverse lived experiences to the table, especially from communities usually excluded from traditional decision-making. Once the Steering Committee identifies the populations to center, you’ll have a clearer sense of who you need to reach. Formalizing partnerships with CBOs allows you to work directly with organizations that serve communities you may have limited access to (e.g., unhoused people, youth in foster care).

Budgeting for this outreach ensures the organizations are compensated for their time and resources. Make sure the scope of work you set is realistic and covers their needs. To reduce the burden, encourage CBOs to carry out engagement through their existing spaces and programming.

We have seen Community Engagement Partnership grants generally range from:

$10,000 – $15,000 per organization

Or

$15,000-$30,000 per focus neighborhood (broken out across partnerships for multiple organizations).

We recommend starting with $10,000 as a floor for a single organization to ensure the grant can cover staff time, administrative expenses, and other unforeseen costs associated with supporting this type of engagement effort. If organizations are also hosting idea collection or voting events, make sure the funding covers those costs, including food and stipends. The best way to confirm your estimates? Ask them directly.

Contracts with Community Engagement Partners usually set goals, expectations, requirements, and funds are often dispersed in two or three installments (e.g., upon signing, a month before idea collection, and a month before voting to cover event costs). Reporting requirements vary by government or institution, but we recommend keeping them as light as possible so partners can focus on outreach. Nonetheless, some reporting is essential to confirm they met the contract scope. A simple form works well, asking them to note:

• Events held
• Estimated number of people engaged
• Notable findings
• Pictures from events

Funding sources

Funding to run your PB process should begin with an investment from the city or institution administering it. For PB to be sustainable, it must be institutionalized and integrated into government operations. In some cases, early processes have relied on seed funding from private foundations to demonstrate proof of concept and build stakeholder buy-in. To secure long-term sustainability, it’s important to pair this with advocacy efforts to establish a dedicated operations budget and make PB a recurring process.

To lower the costs of running your PB process, partner with other city departments or institutions for in-kind support (e.g., event space, translation). You can also ask local businesses to contribute food or refreshments for events. This can often be mutually beneficial as it helps raise awareness of what they do!

Developing & Managing Your PB Timeline

One of the hardest and most important parts of launching PB is setting the timeline. When does the cycle start and end? How long is each phase, and what happens in between? Since no two PB processes are alike, there’s no one-size-fits-all timeline.

You’ll need to adapt your timeline to fit both internal constraints (e.g., deadlines to select winning projects or spend the budget) and the needs of community members and partners, like the Steering Committee or Community Engagement Partners. Build around key moments that might be busy for them and allow enough time for full participation. To guide your planning, we’ve outlined key considerations below: phase lengths, transitions, and contingency planning.

Let’s start with one thing that is true for every pilot participatory budgeting process: the process will take, and deserves, a lot of time. Including the planning period, pilot participatory budgeting processes can rarely be completed in less than one year, and often take up to two from the start of planning to the announcement of winning projects. You will notice we generally don’t include winning project implementation in our process timelines, as they vary so much depending on project type and institutional context. It will be easier to fit the entire cycle into a calendar or fiscal year after the pilot, once you have a foundation to build from.

Failing to account enough time for each phase will affect the community’s ability to participate, the time it will take to train and onboard them, as well as the quality of proposals. If the timeline doesn’t allow for enough outreach to take place, it may lead to low participation levels, and those who are most typically left out of government and institutional decision-making will not be able to participate, making it a largely inaccessible process. A PB timeline that isn’t built around community members undermines the values of PB and limits its impact.

If your timeline doesn’t account for the time it takes to onboard your internal teams, external groups and individuals supporting the process, the quality of proposals will be affected. This can lead to community members losing trust and affect political support for the process. 

The chart below shares an overview of the tasks to accomplish in each phase as well as some guidance and considerations to help you design the length of your own process. We have expressed the suggested length in ranges because there may be differences according to the demographic breakdown and unique needs of your context. For example, if you live in a rural community with a lot of seniors, convening your Steering Committee or collecting ideas might take longer in order to accommodate accessibility needs.

Phases  and Tasks

You can reference our sample PB GANTT chart timeline in the Sample Project Management Plan (spreadsheet tool commonly used to visualize project timelines) to help you build your own. You can also use project management tools like Asana or Trello, which have both free and paid versions.

One common problem you’ll want to avoid is jumping from one phase to the next without building in sufficient transition or “buffer” time between phases. .

You’ll plan a stronger, more nimble process by performing tasks for the next phase in the preceding ones.  For example, by:

1. Onboarding and preparing Community Engagement Partners for idea collection while the steering committee is still finalizing guidebook decisions, or
2. Conducting a feasibility review of ideas submitted on a rolling basis during idea collection (to prepare for proposal development).

While this breakdown can help you map out general timelines, it shouldn’t be read as prescriptive. In general, it’s helpful to build out your timeline conservatively, saving some overall buffer or slack time in case things come up, as they often do. Otherwise, it will be difficult to accommodate unanticipated delays.

Planning phase length

The time you’ll need to prepare your PB process depends on how many variables are already in place and what resources you have. Do you know where the operating budget is coming from and how you’ll use it to keep the process accessible? Do you already have a full team in place? That saves the time you would otherwise spend hiring. Are team roles clearly defined? That clarity can speed things up too. If many of these questions are still unanswered, expect to spend up to six months planning before launch. Each chapter of the guidebook will include more detailed guidance on how to manage timelines within that specific phase.

Project Management

One of the most important steps in planning and preparing for a PB process involves setting up a project management infrastructure. As mentioned earlier, implementing and facilitating a PB process requires a lot of work and coordination by multiple different team members and any number of participants. The “infrastructure” for project management encompasses the systems, resources, and protocols you will use to manage that work, from the document storage system that will hold your materials and resources to the tools you will use to track the progress of tasks across each phase. These tools, systems, and protocols should help you answer questions such as:

• “Where is [A] document?”
• “Who needs to review and provide feedback on the draft of [B] material?”
• “Who is responsible for [X] task?”
• “What is the status of [Y] task?”
• “If we are launching Idea Collection on [Z] date, how far in advance should we submit our outreach materials to be translated?”

Generally, any given project management infrastructure for participatory budgeting includes:

• A document storage system where all project documents, resources and materials live (such as Google Drive, Microsoft sharepoint, etc.)
• A task tracking tool (a live, editable task list in spreadsheet form or using project management software such as Asana or Trello).
• A budgeting spreadsheet tool to plan for and track implementation expenses against the budget for each type of expense.
• A meeting agendas and notes document or tool
• A project management plan that outlines protocols for using the above tools, establishes roles, and clarifies contingency plans in case timelines, roles, or other key aspects of the project change. Check out our sample PB Project Management Plan for an adaptable template.

The best project management infrastructure provides:

• Clarity: to easily access the status of a task
• Transparency: to ensure as many people as possible know what is happening, when, and how (this could include stakeholders outside of the immediate project team)
• Accountability: to ensure tasks get done
• Collaboration: to allow multiple team members to work together on the same document, task, or project
• Adaptability: to adjust or adapt how work is getting done when you encounter obstacles or need to change the way you are working (such as when your internal team composition changes with the addition or loss of project staff)

In our experience, strong project management leads to stronger collaboration. When multiple team members help maintain and update the project management system, they gain visibility into each other’s work and a clearer sense of how to support one another.

Additional Resources

There are many free and open-source tools accessible online that can support you in planning for and implementing various elements of your process. The table below offers some examples of such resources, where they can be found, and what they can be used for.

Deciding On The Digital Footprint For Your PB Process

One key decision before launch is what digital presence to have for the PB process. You can use a dedicated PB platform that supports the full cycle: idea collection, proposal drafting, and voting, or you can create a webpage on your government or institution’s site to share information and pair it with a separate voting platform.

The benefits of a dedicated PB platform include having a one-stop shop to share information, explain how to get involved, collect ideas, support proposal development, and host online voting. Some platforms, like Decidim, even let community members comment on and like ideas, giving you extra data on community support. We recommend reading People Powered’s Digital Participation Tools resources which include ratings for different tools to help you decide which to use. There is also guidance on how to use them effectively.

This convenience comes at a cost. If your budget doesn’t allow for it, free and open-source platforms such as the Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform can host the vote.

Whatever you choose, we strongly recommend having a PB website to share updates and provide a clear source of information. Without it, people may question whether the initiative is real. Once you decide what your digital set up will be, build this into your timeline and identify when you need to start preparing your materials to activate each phase online.

Once you set up your platform you can start communicating details about the process and how to get involved to help you for the launch!