Hello from Sioux Falls, South Dakota!

Makayla Voris is a 2025 RJI Student Innovation Fellow partnered with Sioux Falls Simplified. The RJI Student Innovation Fellows will be sharing their innovative work throughout the summer in Innovation in Focus.

Sioux Falls Simplified is a weekly email newsletter that takes the news of Sioux Falls, South Dakota and breaks it down into bite-sized pieces with the occasional pop culture reference. 

Working with founder Megan Raposa, we have several goals this summer, including: 

• Make a civic guide that simplifies local government (inspired heavily by CivicLex) 
• Create an audience growth campaign using social media (Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook) to get 7,000 more emails by 2025 
• Use social media and the civic guide to Increase SFS’s number of paying subscribers by 30%, almost 60 people by the end of 2025 

Since many of these goals are in the initial stages, we started with a survey. We wanted to understand why and how Sioux Falls-ians interact with local government, so that our civic guide can be used as an involvement tool. 

While Sioux Falls is growing rapidly, there appears to be a decline in public involvement with local government. For example, Sioux Falls recently experienced its lowest voter turnout during this year’s school board election. Only 2.33% of the 126,000 registered voters in the Sioux Falls School District cast a ballot. 

As a bonus, we pitched some ideas for the guide that may incentivize people to pay for a subscription. For example, a paid subscription might give someone a chance to view live, one-on-one interviews with local political candidates during election season and send in questions beforehand. This got great feedback from our survey respondents! 

Survey

We used Google Forms to create the survey and provided an incentive. If they provided an email, people could enter for a chance to win a $25 gift card to a local coffee shop of their choice and a cute SFS tote bag.

We hoped for 200 responses, but got 235 legitimate responses in just two weeks. The biggest issue was bots, but those were quickly eliminated using zip code responses and deleting spam emails (e.g. weird alphabet combinations, fake websites, etc.). 

We promoted the survey on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and the weekly newsletter. Most respondents already followed us on these channels or were subscribed to the newsletter. 

Insights 

After closing the survey, we initially tried to put the Google Forms sheet directly into Datawrapper. However, since most of the data was text, Datawrapper didn’t like the format. So, we popped each portion of the survey into Claude.AI and asked it to format the results for Datawrapper. Claude was very helpful in calculating the percentages of respondent answers for each question, as seen below: 

Habits 

Most respondents interacted with facets of local government (including city council, school board, county commission, etc.) at least weekly using local news outlets or social media. Typically, these interactions happen on work breaks, when they wake up or during lunch. 

Most respondents said they don’t go to meetings regularly nor are involved with local government. 

This data gave us a good starting point for what form the civic guide will take. Right now, we’re heavily leaning towards a website format. This format would make it easy to link existing information on the City of Sioux Falls government website and would be easy to access via a smartphone or other device during a downtime period. 

Engagement 

The top three reasons for being active in local government were infrastructure and accessibility, social justice issues or just to stay engaged with the community.

To follow up on this, we asked a series of questions to understand peoples’ feelings about the Sioux Falls local government. Did they feel like it was accessible to them? Did they feel like it influenced their life in a significant way? Did they feel cared for by the local government? 

In each case, only a quarter of respondents chose “neither agree nor disagree” or disagreed entirely. While this did not help us identify any clear gaps we could fill, the biggest engagement insight came from our question about why respondents did not interact with local government. Most people just didn’t have time in their schedule or wouldn’t learn that something they cared about was happening until it was too late to voice a concern. 

This feedback helps inform our choices when creating the guide. We need to provide options for involvement that fit into peoples’ schedules, alert people of upcoming events/meetings and connect people with … well, other people! 

The Guide 

Maybe not surprisingly, our readers wanted to see news from Sioux Falls Simplified about local government. But, it seemed like people wanted to get involved and know the people in local government. 

We offered respondents a few options for bonus content that would be available for a premium. The majority of respondents said they would appreciate the three features below: 

1. Live interviews with candidates during election season where viewers can send questions in advance
2. A quiz that would help connect them to activities or groups to get involved with
3. Notifications about upcoming meetings and a quick look at the agenda

A quick note about demographics. The average Sioux Falls Simplified reader is a white female, between the ages of 26-45 with a bachelor’s degree that has lived in Sioux Falls or its surrounding areas for 10+ years. 

However, this survey, compared to one conducted last year, revealed that more people of color and more people who have lived in Sioux Falls for less and five years are connecting with Sioux Falls Simplified. 

This is important because Sioux Falls has a large immigrant and refugee population. Part of our considerations for this guide is to make sure that language barriers are minimized as much as possible, so that more people have a voice in local government. 

What’s next? 

Next, we are going to start designing and drafting content for a web-based civic guide. Our plan is to collaborate with local artists for the design. We’re also going to explore how much we should charge for bonus content and local organizations we can partner with to promote and/or fund the guide. 

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Cite this article

Voris, Makayla (2025, July 2). Simplifying civic engagement with local government. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/simplifying-civic-engagement-with-local-government/