Effectively Messaging Good Planning – A Case Study in Burlingame, California

You hear residents talk about it all the time – they want a more vibrant downtown, they want homes that fit with the character of their town, or they want to attract a mix of people and businesses to town. But when the tools necessary to achieve these outcomes are mentioned, opposition is immediately encountered. Higher-density projects, defined floor-to-are a rations, and diversity of housing types all provoke a response and frequently the response can stagnate any opportunity to grow a city. Clearly a gap exists between what residents believe they want and what planners are communicating.

With thirteen year in high-tech product management, I built my career talking with customers and prospective customers – whether small business owners, musicians, managers of telephone infrastructure, or home Internet users to name a few – understanding their needs, translating those needs into products, and then messaging these products to customers.

It was my job to understand what people wanted and how to market to these same people, and I become very good at it. Understanding the communication gap that existed between what residents wanted and how planners, developers, and even planning commissioners and city council members, I soon entered the fray as the campaign director for a planning commissioner running for city council.

As campaign director, my communication strategy sought to achieve the following goals:
- clearly communicate the candidate’s vision and plan for the city
- allow for dialogue around the city’s future without hitting roadblocks associated with baggage-laden terms
- differentiate candidate from other candidates with specific plans versus other candidates’ rhetoric

Ordinarily I would start by understanding what was important to our potential customers (in this case, city residents and voters). With years of dialogue between residents, planning commissioners, city council members, and developers, I knew what residents wanted – at a high level they wanted a more vibrant downtown with entertainment options in the city – a small movie theater or playhouse for instsance, they wanted to bring back independent merchants who had been driven away by skyrocketing rents, and they also wanted to do all this while maintaining the unique character of Burlingame.

The next step then was to define how we were going to address what residents were seeking. So we began by articulating a specific vision for Burlingame – one that extended retail one street beyond the existing downtown, providing blocks of available retail space, and thereby enabling a broader mix of merchants to exist. We began talking about mixed use projects downtown with ground floor retail and office space and housing above.

Our ideas and clear articulation of plans were so compelling and began to resonate with residents. Unfortunately for our campaign, something occurred that I had never before experienced. Other candidates (competitors) were taking our messaging and using it verbatim in their own campaigns. Now I’m not saying I haven’t seen competitors take ideas and enhance their own messaging based on the original ideas, but here candidates were simply taking our messaging and putting it as-is into their campaign literature, websites, and using it in their speeches. What was most confounding was that none of the other candidates were building off of our messaging, they were simply duplicating it. With a field of nine candidates, I was confounded as to why none of the other candidates were trying to differentiate themselves, and after a few candidate forums it became increasingly clear that the other candidates didn’t have any specific vision for the city and indeed didn’t have any specific thoughts on how to address the desires of residents, so all they could do was copy our messaging.

While I believed we had the best chance of winning the election based on my candidate’s extensive experience on the Planning Commission and her specific plans for the city’s future, I wasn’t about to let eight other candidates take credit for our ideas.

Excerpt from Ann Keighran campaign piece showing city today and potential for future

Knowing that the other candidates were simply winging-it on strategy and plans for the city, I took our vision for the city deeper, defined specific actions the candidate would take on council, branded components of the candidate’s plan so they couldn’t be copied, and engaged two architects to help with elements of our campaign.

High level messaging was supported by full-page briefs made available online (link to smarvoter paper) as well as 2-page in-depth position papers we made available to voters.

Where once we talked about mixed-use projects, we now had the “ANN” Plan, a plan for Active Nearby Neighborhoods, our specific take on a vibrant downtown plan. This branded plan raised the visibility of Ann’s ideas, resonated as a catchphrase associated with the candidate, enabled dialogue around Ann’s plan for the city, and couldn’t be copied by the other candidates.

Our campaign literature incorporated pictures of the city’s deserted streets to emphasize the opportunity for city growth. We also used architectural renderings to envision for voters wwhat the city could look like with Ann providing leadership on City Council.

Excerpt from Ann Keighran campaign piece showing city today and potential for future

Where I had seen discussions get hung up on topics of high density, low income housing, and specific numbers around building heights, setbacks, and floor-area rations, we instead focused on illustrations of what we wanted our city to look like. It’s not that the aforementioned concepts are too complex to understand, it’s simply that they’re too hard to visualize either alone or in the broader context of the city. Wokring from drawings instantly allowed people to say “yes that’s what we want,” or “no, here’s what we want to change.”

On the topic of city growth we faced similar challenges in messaging. All residents sought a more diverse retail mix and more entertainment options, but many argued that the city didn’t need to grow and that growth would hurt the city’s charm. Here the architects/urban planners helped us understand and illustrated various growth options. For those residents who originally preferred no growth for our city, we showed the growth that was occurring in surrounding cities and that no growth for Burlingame actually meant that we as a city were falling behind – losing businesses, realizing lower city revenues, and resulting diminished city services. Other concepts showed the effects of unconstrained growth in absence of any specific plan. Only with this portfolio of options could we effectively and more cohesively more forward with a plan for our city.

After years of working with the community and nine months specifically developing strategy and refining messaging, we had clearly been able to convey our vision for Burlingame to residents, and because these residents were involved in its creation, were bought into our vision and plans for the future. With a well-defined vision for the city combined with clear communications about our vision for the city, we won the election with the largest number of votes in the city’s history with nearly two thirds of voters voting for us, despite an unprecedented nine candidate field.