Since then, I have spent a lot of time practicing my “pitch” by talking to strangers about what I do – not just potential funders or city officials, but also the guy sitting next to me on the airplane, the nurse in a doctor’s office, a friend of a friend of a friend at a party.  Almost always, the first reaction from anyone who does not work for city government themselves is “why city government?  Isn't it just a big, useless bureaucracy?”  My initial response to this was: “don’t you see, city government is where the rubber meets the road.”  I would then launch into how much I learned while working for the City of New York the year after college.  After all, experiencing firsthand on a daily basis just how much even the most arcane aspects of city government (in my case, the information technology and telecommunications department) impacted regular people’s lives is what inspired me to launch City Hall Fellows.  But their blank stares told me very quickly just how useless that cliché was in persuading them that city government matters.  And my personal experience more than a decade ago as a 21-year-old city employee working on technology strategy was so far removed from their lives that it didn’t really resonate as much more than a mildly interesting anecdote.  Unlike me, the people I was trying to convince had never worked for a city government.  Nor did they care to.  So I turned to impressive statistics that I figured would make the impact indisputable. For example, according to the Brookings Institute, “85% of Americans live in metropolitan areas.”  But, again, their blank stares made it clear I wasn’t getting through.

A few months ago, Echoing Green sent me the book Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath.  In it, the Heath brothers (both columnists for Fast Company magazine, Chip is a Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Dan is the co-founder of publishing company Thinkwell and formerly a Consultant to Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute) discuss the importance of concreteness in making ideas clear.  Chip and Dan define concreteness as explaining ideas in terms of discrete, tangible human actions and sensory information.  They rightly point out that sensory information is too often absent from business communication.  And that this absence makes mission statements “often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless.”  Chip and Dan also make their point concretely, by contrasting typical business marketing with the concrete images replete in urban myths, such as “apples with razors”.  Ultimately, they argue, “Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.”

Reading Made to Stick got me thinking.  Eventhough everyone I was talking to lived in, worked in or visited cities, they had no idea how much of their daily existence was directed, governed or impact by what city governments did.  Most of them would never notice the routine services their municipality provides unless the city stopped providing those services. What these people needed to understand why city government mattered were concrete examples of how city government impacted them personally.  So I shifted my narrative.  When asked “why city government?” I stopped responding with statistics and clichés.  I stopped telling them why I cared about cities. Instead, I asked the person I was talking to if they knew who set the schedule for the traffic lights near them. How the streets and sidewalks near them were maintained.  How come the next neighborhood over got a playground and park but theirs did not. And who maintained that neighborhood’s park.  As these conversations continued, I could see the light bulbs start to go off.  When people started thinking about who was responsible for maintaining the daily fabric of modern life, they started to see just how important city government was.

Here at City Hall Fellows, one of our goals is to educate Americans about why city government matters.  To communicate this, we need concrete stories about how city government impacts regular Americans, for better and for worse.  And we need your help.  I am delighted to announce that City Hall Fellows recently partnered with one of the hottest new communityengagement tools to emerge this year, The Extraordinaries, by launching a profile on their new micro-volunteering platform. Now, whenever you have a few minutes of downtime (e.g. waiting at the doctor's office, sitting on a bus, or in line at the grocery store) you can use your iPhone to share in audio, video, photographic or text format how city government impacts your life.  To get started, download TheExtraordinaries iPhone app (Blackberry and desktop widgets coming soon). We plan to use your testimonials to help spread the word about the importance of city government.  And why it matters.  Thank you for being extraordinary and helping us fulfill our mission!