> Despite targeted outreach, we've noticed that community members are not returning to use the tool after their initial interaction. There has been minimal engagement apart from a spike during a mid-November focus group. This indicates that Sawt is not helpful enough yet for people to want to come back.
Perhaps they have trouble thinking of additional questions to ask? Their first few interactions probably cover the things they care most about. They get an answer and that’s it. Maybe a “subscribe to updates whenever this topic comes up in a meeting again” feature would be useful?
Your tool is too effective. It actually answered our questions. Don't you know the money's in treating the symptoms? Partial joke, yet interesting to see the jump to a result (weird when they're all about bias).
The suggestion's a cool idea. In addition to generic warning updates, you could also do "send me a summary" every time it appears. Kinda RSS feed summaries. Since they're integrating the news, they could also do full news coverage of the day summaries. Might actually be helpful for some people. Daily summary of "what happened in New Orleans yesterday?"
Right - my intuition is that most people don't have questions that they want answered in this way very often.
Learning how to use this tool involves learning what kind of questions can be answered by this data, and formulating those questions requires a pretty in-depth knowledge of how city politics actually works.
The same way you don’t care about plumbers and their issues, you already have your own, a job ( or two ), family and need to rest.
On top of that people ( rightfully) feel they have no power to change anything on their own without requiring a multi-year almost full time job pressuring and bringing awareness to the public, which is part of being a politician, which is exactly what they don’t have the time for and the will to deal with those type of people, which are being paid for and you don’t.
Perhaps they have trouble thinking of additional questions to ask? Their first few interactions probably cover the things they care most about. They get an answer and that’s it. Maybe a “subscribe to updates whenever this topic comes up in a meeting again” feature would be useful?