What does a citizen do when they can't find the information they need on a city council's website? In most cases, they post a comment on Facebook or call a hotline. You would think these channels would be the easiest way to get an answer. Yet a study by the Transparent Cities program, carried out as an undercover check, found that the speed and quality of communication with residents are low even in Ukraine's largest cities.

How the check was conducted 

The study covered 19 of Ukraine's regional centers (Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutsk, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Rivne, Sumy, Uzhhorod, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi, Cherkasy, Chernivtsi, Chernihiv) plus the city of Kyiv. Program experts tested whether a city resident could get an answer to their question by contacting the city council remotely through its official communication channels.

The check was carried out in three stages. Program representatives selected 20 city councils and, each month, left questions in the comments under posts on their official Facebook pages. In July and August, the questions covered a range of topics — from public transit schedules to services for defenders at local Administrative Service Centers. In September, every city council received the same comment, with a question that concerns many residents in wartime: where to find an up-to-date map of the city's shelters. To keep the check objective, the comments were posted from a private account unconnected to the program. 

In addition, analysts tested the hotlines listed on the city councils' official websites. A program representative called the numbers listed in the Contacts sections, or in page footers as a contact center, hotline, communications department, or mayor's reception office, to find out whether they could get advice or be transferred to the responsible unit. The questions asked during the calls concerned basic topics that residents commonly raise.

Concerning results 

Neither on social media nor in their responses to calls did the city councils show a high level of openness or responsiveness. Of the 60 comments left, analysts received replies to only 7. Finding an employee who could provide even basic advice by phone took nearly 60 calls across the 20 cities — an average of 3 per city council.

The Facebook comments left by program representatives in July drew replies from the Zaporizhzhia, Rivne, and Chernivtsi city councils. Zaporizhzhia provided a list of the city's kindergartens and schools, Rivne shared information on current job openings at the city council, and Chernivtsi sent a link to a video recording of an executive committee meeting. In August, Chernivtsi responded a second time — this time to a comment about the minutes of the meeting mentioned in the post — while Kropyvnytskyi shared a link to a public opinion survey platform. In every one of these cases, the cities replied the same day the comment was left.

In September, every city council was asked the same question about the location of shelters in the city. Only the Vinnytsia and Lviv city councils responded. Lviv replied on the day the comment was posted, while Vinnytsia's response took five days.

The hypothesis that city councils respond more readily to comments on particular topics was therefore not borne out. Important questions went unanswered — among them benefits for defenders, the humanitarian assistance available in the city, and reporting on large-scale construction projects. Nor was there any direct link between how quickly councils responded and how recent the posts were: comments were left both under the newest posts and under ones published within the week before the check. 

The 59 calls made by program representatives highlighted weak spots in the work of city councils' hotlines and reception offices: problems with repeated transfers, time spent on hold, unwelcoming operators, and even invalid phone numbers on the websites.

During the calls, our colleagues asked typical questions: the date of the next city council meeting and whether they could attend; decisions on compensation for property damaged by shelling; the procedure for getting onto the housing waiting list; and the publication of the mayor's report for the previous year. In 8 municipalities, they managed to get a complete answer — a link to the relevant page of the website or spoken reference information. But in most cases the answer came not right away, but only after several transfers and repeat calls.

In the other 12 cities, they got no result at all. The most transfers were recorded in Cherkasy: after conversations with the hotline, the Information Policy Department, the municipal enterprise Institute for Urban Development and Digital Transformation, and the mayor's reception office, no specific answer about where the mayor's report was posted was ever provided. Calls were also transferred many times in Zaporizhzhia, Uzhhorod, and Khmelnytskyi. In Khmelnytskyi, three calls went unanswered, and exchanges with staff from the mayor's reception office, the deputy mayor's office, and the organizational affairs department brought them no closer to the information requested. In Kropyvnytskyi and Sumy, none of the numbers listed on the official website could be reached at all.

The average wait on the line on the first attempt was 1 minute 13 seconds. Subsequent calls, or waits during transfers, however, took considerably longer. On the hotline of the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA), for instance, a program representative was kept on hold for nearly ten minutes.

Finally, the overall culture of communication on the hotlines came as an unpleasant surprise. In a number of cases, city council staff limited themselves to saying that the matter was "outside our remit." Staff at some city councils grew irritated, interrupted, tried to end the conversation as quickly as possible, and sometimes even hung up. At others, by contrast, hotline staff were courteous and willing to help, searching the city council's website together with our colleague. 

Conclusions and recommendations for city councils 

The basic channels of communication between city councils and citizens work in an uncoordinated and ineffective way. The Transparent Cities program has repeatedly stressed the importance of consistent, open approaches to interaction between the authorities and residents — including by developing a model template document, the Rules of Digital Communication for Local Self-Government Officials, and by drawing up a series of recommendations on properly structuring public information, handling petitions, and other aspects of public engagement in city life. 

City councils need to develop and put in place basic rules and scripts to help them engage residents more effectively.

We recommend following the core principles of openness in engaging the public, along with these more specific recommendations for managing city councils' information channels:

• keep the contact numbers in the Contacts section of the official website up to date;
• introduce internal standards for responding to inquiries on social media and by phone (in particular, by developing response scripts for typical inquiries and protocols for correctly transferring calls);
• train the staff responsible in effective communication with citizens and a client-oriented approach to inquiries;
• ensure that important information is updated and published systematically on official websites, not only as individual social media posts. 

As reported earlier, on November 20 the Transparent Cities program presented the results of the first stage of its European City Index study. This is a new format for assessing city councils that gauges how ready Ukrainian cities are for EU integration.