Brewer asks Van Auken how OME decides on campaigns and measures success

In terms of the Office of Mass Engagement, you listed some of the wonderful things that you're doing, and you did it in a very clear fashion because I didn't know what the hell the office did before that, so I appreciate it.

But can you just give us...

some, like, just generally, are there, like, how many initiatives you're working on?

You mentioned some of them, but how do you decide what's going to be a campaign?

How do you decide what you're going to work on?

How does that process work?

Thank you, Chair, for the question.

Our main focus with our campaigns is that they are touching on the issues that New Yorkers bring up time and time again.

So often that centers around affordability in New York City.

We are in month nine, so we are still in the beginning of this work, and we really look forward to working with you, other council members, on future campaigns that might be worthwhile.

We know that you all really understand your constituents and have your ears to the ground, and so we're very interested in collaborating.

Most of the time we're building campaigns.

So our current campaign is, just to give you an example, is called Talk to Tenants, and it's an outreach campaign to tenants who live in buildings with high rates of violation.

This campaign, we are not running it in a vacuum, so we are working on this outreach campaign along with the mayor's office to protect tenants and HPD's partners in preservation.

So our work is also defined by work that other agencies are doing.

Okay.

I mean, how do you, I mean, I see.

I certainly went to the forum in East Harlem, but I saw all the follow-up that takes place, and then the next step is to do what you're talking about.

But how do you measure success for any campaign?

I suppose in your situation, you could see, do X number of buildings get the services they need, and are people not calling 311?

I don't know.

How do you measure success for a campaign?

Thank you for that question.

I love that question.

We think a lot about that, and I think it really varies depending on what the purpose of the campaign is.

So our current campaign, Talk to Tenants, we want to make sure that tenants understand their rights and that they know how to connect to other tenants and they know how to form a tenant union and fight for their rights.

Earlier this year, we ran a shorter campaign to increase turnout at the Rent Guidelines Board hearings.

And as an example to your question, our goal there was to increase turnout to the hearings, which we did.

Turnout more than doubled.

So it really depends on what the campaign is about, what the outreach is about, and what we're hoping to help support New Yorkers in doing through the work.

The public advocate and I have testified at those damn hearings for the last hundred years, and so you definitely did turn out more people, I can tell you that.

That was good.