Keeping In Touch / Communicating Your Budget to Your Citizens: An AWC Toolkit
Communicating Your Budget
to Your Citizens
An AWC Toolkit
This toolkit includes a series of checklists, articles and templates that cities of all sizes can use to communicate more effectively with their citizens. Use in your newsletters, on your website and give to your local media to explain issues like budget, or street maintenance, or the impacts of initiatives and the value of essential city services.
What's Below:
- Reach Out to Your Citizens
- Connect with Your Media
- Communicate Your Budget Info
- Show Your Tax Dollars at Work
Reach Out to Your Citizens
As budgets tighten and your choices become more difficult, it's important to ask your citizens what they think.
This section also includes some public outreach tools, and a case study of a city budget outreach that received an AWC Municipal Achievement award.
Connect with Your Media
The following checklists give you practical information for working effectively with your local media.
Communicate Your Budget Info
This section includes samples from citizen newsletters, web pages, special budget reports, PowerPoint presentation to citizens, and op-ed piece for a local paper.
- Lynnwood's Preliminary Budget Presentation (pdf, 110 kb)
- City of Shoreline Currents: Special 2003 Budget Issue (pdf, 643 kb)
- City of Burien: Financial Report (pdf, 508 kb)
- Value of Your City of Port Angeles Dollar (pdf, 346 kb)
- City of Des Moines Budget Report (pdf, 200 kb)
- Property Taxes in Kent for 2004 (pdf, 24 kb)
- Vision Tukwila Meetings (pdf, 217 kb)
The Hazelnut, City of Tukwila
- Do You Know Where Your Sales Taxes Go (pdf, 105 kb)
Lacey Life, City of Lacey
- A Look at Property Tax Revenues and Public Safety Costs (pdf, 125 kb)
Lacey Life, City of Lacey
Show Your Tax Dollars at Work
The templates in this section are for you to use with your own information. The numbers and examples give you some ideas for communicating your city's budget numbers.
AWC can either send you our original files OR you can send us your information and we'll prepare a camera-ready copy for you to use. To order a camera-ready copy, please call Suzy Ziesemer at (360) 753-4137 x108 or email her at suzyz@awcnet.org.
9/17/08
