Screenshot from insidedistrict9.com
In the first two years that 9th District Councilmember Steve Neal has been in office, he has made it a personal mission to foster more open communication and increase community involvement in Long Beach’s northernmost neighborhoods.
Through monthly district meetings and a highly successful weekly newsletter called “Inside District 9”–which recently sent out its 128th consecutive issue–Neal has pooled together the district’s nine neighborhood associations and cultivated a still-growing group of active community members looking out for the district’s 12 geographic areas.
Neal’s newly redesigned “Inside District 9” website is the piece de resistance to his councilship’s operation and its sleek design and interactive features are setting the bar for what other civic leaders around the country can do to engage their constituents.
“We wanted to change how we normally do things and do things haven’t been done before, especially in the 9th,” said Floyd Hampton Livingston, the Communications Organizer for Neal’s office, who took the job last year after running the local social networking site 562 City Life. “We didn’t want to just make a regular website. We wanted a website of service.”
A simplistic modern design immediately draws visitors into the new Inside District 9 site, inviting users to create an account and choose their specific neighborhood so they can take advantage of a custom, personalized news feed.
In addition a being a permanent home for the basic district-wide news updates that are sent out in Neal’s weekly newsletter, the website also offers greater opportunities for involvement through an event calendar, initiative spotlights and actionable options that let residents report a neighborhood issue and get in contact with their district point person through social media.
“We’re trying to make it a one-stop shop,” Livingston said. “You can report an issue, get in contact with the office, host a meeting, share stories with your Facebook friends, learn about our inititatvies and find out latest news. Instead of people coming to a site to just read text and click on things, we wanted people to be interactive.”
The website is not only something different for the 9th District, but for Long Beach and civic-leader websites as a whole. While most Long Beach councilmembers use their district’s longbeach.gov-hosted page to post informative news and provide links to their Facebook and Twitter pages, Inside District 9 is one of only two district websites that reside on a separate domain (5th District Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske operates gerrieschipske.com) and the only one that allows residents to create an account and interact with the offfice to become a major component of the site’s content.
After officially launching last week, the site already has 3600 names in its database, a number that Livingston said is growing by the day.
“The councilmember wanted to incorporate a community empowerment model into the website,” said Livingston. “We are small team of five or six, but we have a constituent base of 50,000 residents. We need to utilize their voices in all aspects of work that we do.”
Visit the new insidedistrict9.com.