Onboarding the cities
How do you onboard the cities and get started on strong foundations?
Setting up the network well requires thinking carefully about how to effectively onboard each city and gather information about and with them so that method can be designed to suit their needs.
To make sure the network starts on solid foundations, it needs a dedicated period of well-considered onboarding. This includes the more formal aspects like dealing with the formalities of contracting and officialising the collaboration on paper, and the softer, intangible aspects of setting up an innovation network like preparing the teams to collaborate, learn and experiment. When designing the onboarding phase, it’s important it fulfils several objectives:
- Confirming participation and completing all paperwork necessary
- Publicising the city’s participation in the network
- Setting expectations
- Answering any arising questions from cities on how the network will run
- Getting participants to know each other, and
- Starting establishing the right culture and (innovation) mindset for the partnership.
Our approach and methods
- 1st contact and follow up call: Let cities know they have been selected for the network and ask them to confirm that they are still interested and available to participate in the programme. Give cities an opportunity to ask any follow up questions they may have.
- Admin: Complete all necessary onboarding paperwork.
- Kick-off event: Host an in-person event in one of the cities to kick off the network, use this time to get to know each other, set expectations and start to establish the culture of the network.
- City visits: Organise a team visit in each partner city to know the wider local team and provide the city the opportunity to communicate on the new project (to the citizens, media and other key players). The city visits are a good opportunity to collect additional information in answering the baseline questions, and a catalytic event for each team to engage their Mayor and leaders, local stakeholders and other stakeholders sparking interest from their local action group.
Lessons learnt from ASToN (2019-2022):
• Make sure city selection is followed closely by project launch. Between the selection of cities, their confirmation and the official start of activities 8 months passed (January to September 2019, period during which we tried to keep the cities engaged with a newsletter and a series of messages). This made it difficult for us initially to take the network off the ground and re-engage with the cities (turn-over in city teams, change of political priorities, elections). In the first months of the project we spent more time securing cities’ involvement to the detriment of other activities (designing the working method, starting the research for the baseline etc).
• Do not under-estimate the time needed for the initial paperwork (contract signature, first bank transfer). As these processes are happening for the first time they generally require more time than subsequent ones (people within the institutions concerned need to get familiarised with the project, need to create new budget lines etc).
• Respect local processes and timeframes. We were able to have 11 out of the 12 initially selected cities engage on the project because we were able to give them time and adjust the enrollment process according to what was possible for them.
