Lessons learned from creating Sioux Falls 101

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.

Working with Sioux Falls Simplified, we developed a civic health guide — Sioux Falls 101 — including a fun and informative civic action quiz that gives personalized results that inspire civic engagement. We built these using only a few easy tools, Canva Pro, Ghost and Typeform. 

Our goals with this guide

• It will be a tool to convert subscribers to paying members by offering bonus content
• It will encourage people to get involved with local government in Sioux Falls
• It will bring in funding to support the creation of zines and other materials that can be placed in public areas 

How we structured the guide

We were inspired by two things: our recent survey and CivicLex. Our survey revealed that people feel disconnected from local government and don’t have time to get involved. They were also willing to pay for bonus content, such as the ability to send in questions for candidates during election season and a civic action “sorting quiz” that gives them actionable items based on their occupation, capacity, etc. 

Early in this process, we had a meeting with Kit Anderson from CivicLex. We pitched her our idea and she gave us some pretty crucial advice: Balance education and action so that people want to get involved. 

So, we decided to literally split the guide into two parts: education and action. 

The education covers the basics of how the state, county, city and the school board work. The action includes our quiz, civic explainers, a how-to-attend-a-city-council meeting guide, etc., which gives people a variety of options to put their knowledge to use. 

Chatting with people in local government 

We spoke with people from the school board, the county commission and the city clerk’s office for a crash course in Sioux Falls civics. All of these people were a delight to learn from and helped verify the accuracy of the educational portion of the guide. 

Here are some questions that we asked (repeatedly): 

• How does ______ work? 
• Where can people access this information? 
• What do you wish more people knew about being a city council member, on the school board, etc.? 

These questions prevented us from getting too into the weeds, which can sometimes be fun to do as nerdy journalists. The last question in particular helped us hone in on action items like meeting attendance basics and helpful tips because they were things we could have easily missed not being on the inside of government happenings.  

Civic explainers

The job of a civic explainer is to connect a local current event to peoples’ everyday lives and provide action items. This can include things like the city budget, building projects, conservation efforts, etc. We got this idea from the folks at CivicLex (see their civic explainers here). 

The best part about these is that you can connect them to reporting that you’ve already completed, so you have a foundation. 

A clickable graphic 

We realized early on that we needed a visual tool in our guide. In Canva, we designed our home page graphic that provided a table-of-contents. Each tab links to the article within the guide.

We also created “What’s ahead” images at the start of each section that broke down the content. These link back to the main infographic on the “Start here” page. 

Both of these graphics were put into Ghost.io using HTML codes provided by Canva. Here’s how to get that code: 

• Go to the SHARE button in the upper right corner of the screen on your Canva design. 
• A box should pop up. Click the ellipses button that says “See all” underneath it. 
• Find the button that says “Embed.” 
• Another button that is purple and says “Embed” will appear. Click on this one to create your HTML and Smart embed links. 
• Copy the HTML code provided and paste into your website. 

How we tested and launched the guide 

Our beta test was an email sent to a small group of folks, including the people we interviewed in the early stages, plus other journalists and civically engaged organizations in Sioux Falls. We sent them the published guide, our civic action quiz and a feedback survey you can see the results from here. 

This helped us gain insight on things we needed to tweak, including some informational items and structure, and gave us ideas for our big announcement to the Sioux Falls Simplified audience.  

Next steps are: 

• Use social media and a mass email to announce the guide 
• Host “office hours” at local businesses where people can ask us questions and generally get to know Sioux Falls Simplified better
• Send a press release to other local media organizations who might share it 
• Present the guide at local civic organizations, such as the League of Women Voters 
• Post flyers at local businesses and public areas 

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Cite this article

Voris, Makayla (2025, Aug. 12). Building a civic health guide that inspires action and education. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/building-a-civic-health-guide-that-inspires-action-and-education/