Webinar Summary: Boost Your COVID-19 Tech Toolbox

On April 13, IEDC hosted a webinar titled “Boost Your COVID-19 Tech Toolbox” where economic development technology experts shared the various tools your organization can use to better understand how the virus will impact your community, and how to incorporate digital literacy, technologies, and complimentary services into your organization’s day-to-day workflow.

The session was moderated by Bethany Miller, Vice President of Regional Economic Development at Greater Houston Partnership and IEDC Board Member. The speakers were Sean Maguire (AICP CEcD), Director of Planning and Economic Development for Colonie, NY; Allison Larsen (CEcD), Founder and Empowerment Superhero of TadZo LLC; Laith Wardi (CEcD), Owner and President at ExecutivePulse Inc.; Calandra Cruickshank, President and CEO of StateBook International; Ron Bertasi, CEO at GIS WebTech; and Chris Briggs, Senior Vice President of Buxton.

Sean Maguire kicked off the webinar with a presentation on “Adaptive Distance Learning Tools to Preserve Public Engagement.” By sharing his experience with online learning from the time he was an adjunct professor at the University of Albany, Maguire outlined the various methods that can be used by organizations to host engaging and interactive community/public meetings.

Continuous public engagement is important for minimizing the disruption to a community’s economic cycle. It assists in bringing business and community members together to carve out solutions to the recovery and planning process. During a time of crisis, public engagement is crucial to maintaining some sense of normalcy. So given this context, how does one go about engaging with the public remotely?

Maguire outlined some of the key aspects to keep in mind when hosting a public meeting:

  • Engagement cannot be forced
  • Remove barriers to engagement – this includes using user-friendly platforms.
  • Maintaining authenticity is crucial to engagement, so using video as much as possible

There are two types of platforms that can be used for this:

  • Web-based meeting platforms such as GoToMeeting, WebEx, Google Meet, Skype, and Zoom
  • Live-stream options such as Facebook Live, Youtube, and Instagram

Maguire highlighted some of the larger more secure platforms:

  • Google Meet allows up to 100 people to connect at the basic package level and 250 people at the business package level. In response to coronavirus, Google has expanded the number of participants to 250 for both through to September.
  • GoToMeeting allows up to 250 people to connect through audio but caps the video feed at 25 participants at a time.
  • If a meeting exceeds the 250 participants, it may require a larger platform like GoToWebinar
  • Zoom’s appeal comes in its easy to use interface but has recently made headlines for some security concerns (that they are trying to address). It is crucial to double check who is in your meetings before sharing any sensitive information. Maguire suggested that for larger public meetings, Zoom is probably the best option. It also allows for up to 1000 participants when upgraded.

How to implement public meetings:

  • Be a director and producer – conducting meetings is a skill, that requires you to control and direct the conversation accordingly
  • Make the platform accessible – easy to use, and affordability
  • Making sure it's secure, for example registering to attend the meeting. Turn off the comments or muting public until it's time for them to speak 

If you would like to know more about this, Maguire will be doing follow up webinars which you can register for at www.essemstrategies.com.

Allison Larsen builds on Maguire’s presentation, by sharing how to bring people from the fringe of a meeting to actively participating. She argues that instead of settling for conventional structures of meetings (presentation, managed discussion, status update, brainstorming, and open discussion), meetings should take a Liberating Structures approach to foster innovation, creativity, and interaction.

A basic technique for the Liberating Structures approach is the 1-2-4-all method to engage everyone in making suggestions, answering questions and generating ideas:

  1. It starts off with a general question where you ask participants to reflect on a question by themselves for one minute e.g. what opportunities do you see in progressing with this specific challenge?
  2. Zoom and Microsoft Teams allow participants to split off into groups, so for 4 minutes split people into triads to discuss the problem (the in-person context suggests pairing off people for 2 minutes)
  3. Pair the triads and discuss the same problem for 6 minutes (noting similarities and differences in approaches) – the in-person context suggests merging the pairs into groups of four and discussing for 4 minutes
  4. Bring the meeting back to include everyone and go around and ask what the most important idea was from that group’s discussion.

Larsen shared another technique the 3 W’s – What? So What? Now What? This helps breaks down the Ladder of Inference (data, meanings, assumptions, conclusions, beliefs, actions) when dealing with a challenge and coming up with a strategic plan. For more detail on this technique, refer to the webinar slides here.

Allison Larsen will be hosting follow-up webinars detailing the process and benefits of using Liberating Structures in your virtual meetings, you can register for these webinars here.

Laith Wardi went on to introduce a COVID-19 business diagnostic and client assessment tool to help organizations reconfigure their business retention and expansion (BRE) within a pandemic context.  This tool is free to use as a static or fillable PDF here to either modify or take as it is. Wardi also outlined his business directory tool (not free to use) which allows community developers to map their resources. This includes gaining insights into what organizations are doing workforce and talent development, business attraction, what entities provide transportation in the community etc. This resource guide will be useful for clients looking to gain insights into a community for investment.

Calandra Cruickshank went on to provide a live presentation of the Viral Insights platform and detailed how EDOs can use it to create data-driven crisis management plans, understand where to allocate medical resources, and create recovery and resilience plans. The platform provides city, county, and state data for COVID-19 including number of cases, and total deaths which are updated daily. There is a free version, and a paid version that includes additional dashboards and customizable data.

It ranks the states according to demographic, behavioral, and economic risk, and outlines individualized risk factors for businesses by states and counties. Other data points that can be found on here include populations at high risk of contracting the virus; demographics on who is at most risk of losing their jobs (e.g. leisure and hospitality); areas that have a health professional shortage; number of ventilators needed; percentage of people that work from home and take public transportation, percentage of population underserved, and more.

Cruickshank briefly introduced another free to use platform they have developed called the Mobility Monitor. It is a fully interactive map that shows percentage of people moving around the U.S. and the amount of people who have stopped and are sheltering in place.

Building on data driven decision making, Ron Bertasi provided an in depth look into free GIS tools for economic developers and public officials to navigate the COVID-19 crisis. GIS WebTech is a technology company exclusively focused on economic development. Their technology is based solely on Esri’s ArcGIS platform, and all the tools described in the webinar are available for free here. The landing page provides a link to download a COVID-19 Impact Planning report, a 2-pager presented in infographic format which gives all the relevant population and health impacts related to the pandemic.

The second resource is Esri’s COVID-19 GIS hub is a database of 19 apps related to the pandemic, and all datasets are accessible, easy to use, and updated in real time. Esri also has a disaster response platform that is more geared towards public health, but it includes a Coronavirus response template which communities can use to come up with a customized pandemic response plan based on your community’s data.

Bertasi then introduced the ArcGIS Coronavirus Business Continuity Solution. It is a collection of maps and comprehensive information about businesses that can be used to understand the operational capacity of your workforce, monitor the status of your facilities, and communicate disruptions to customers and stakeholders.

The last example is Esri’s Public Policy maps which provides national, state, and county level demographic data. You can find information such as areas with the highest daytime population, number of people over 65, where the uninsured are located, and travel restrictions.

Chris Briggs rounded off the webinar by showcasing a tool that demonstrates how the business community has been impacted by COVID-19 in real time using consumer data. It covers consumer data at a granular level from an individual zip code, up to the national level. Buxton has geofenced over 4.5 million businesses where data about visitor frequency and characteristics of consumers can be extracted for individual businesses (by using GPS data). This can be useful to understand sales volumes, how the slowdown in economic activity will affect city and county budgeting, estimation of revenues for an industry, and other public and business insights.