Local governments produce more public information than ever: livestreams, agendas, project updates, emergency notices, budgets, and records. Publishing it and reaching residents are two different jobs. A strong local government communication strategy treats the city website as the authoritative source while actively distributing information across the channels residents already use. The target is discoverable transparency.
Imagine a resident who wants to understand what happened at last night's council meeting.
The recording exists. The agenda is online. The minutes will be published. But first that resident has to know the meeting happened at all, find the right section of the city website, locate the meeting page, and work out which agenda item affects them.
Technically, the information is available. Practically, they may never encounter it.
Can Public Information Be Available and Still Be Hard to Find?
Yes, and that gap is where most municipal communication strategies quietly lose people.
Transparency answers one question: is this information available? Discoverability asks a harder one: can the people who need it actually find it? A city can satisfy the first completely and still fail the second, because availability is a publishing standard while discoverability is a reach standard.
For city managers, that distinction keeps getting more important, because residents no longer get local information from one predictable source.
Where Do Residents Actually Get Local Information?
Nearly everywhere, and in overlapping combinations. Pew Research Center's December 2025 survey found that 40 percent of U.S. adults often or sometimes get local news and information directly from local government agencies or officials, up ten points from 2018. That is real growth, and it is also only part of the picture.
Local Information Doesn't Live in One Place
Where U.S. adults say they often or sometimes get local news and information, 2025
Respondents could report more than one source, so percentages do not total 100%. Source: Pew Research Center, survey of U.S. adults conducted Dec. 8-14, 2025, published April 14, 2026.
The takeaway: Your residents don't have one information channel. Your distribution strategy shouldn't either.
These categories overlap, because people use several sources at once. That overlap is the finding. The local information environment is fragmented, and no single channel reaches even two-thirds of residents.
Pew's 2024 research on local political news sharpens the point further. When the question narrows specifically to news about local government and politics, 54 percent of Americans say they at least sometimes get it through social media, compared with 32 percent who get it from local government websites.
None of that makes the municipal website less important. It does mean the website works better as one doorway among several than as the only one.
Should the City Website Be the Only Place Residents Look?
A workable municipal communication model is simpler than it sounds: create once, verify once, distribute everywhere appropriate.
The official website stays the authoritative home for agendas, recordings, documents, and updates. Discovery happens elsewhere. One resident encounters a council meeting on YouTube. Another sees it on Facebook. A third hears about the issue in a neighborhood group and follows the link back to the city's official source. The job of your communications infrastructure is making those paths shorter.
From public information to public reach
The website remains the source of record. Distribution creates more paths to it.
That is why we have argued that livestreaming belongs in the civic infrastructure conversation rather than the media-format conversation. Distribution is what connects official information to the places residents already spend their time.
Does Keeping Residents Informed Actually Build Trust?
The evidence points that way, and it comes from research built specifically for local government.
A recent ICMA PM Magazine article on resident trust summarizes a multi-year partnership between Arizona State University, two govtech companies, and three municipalities, drawing on original survey data from almost 3,000 residents. The study built a validated Trust Index around four dimensions: competency, integrity, openness, and fairness.
One finding stands out for anyone running communications. Among residents who described themselves as very informed about their local government's activities, roughly 80 percent expressed confidence in that government. Among residents who were only slightly informed, confidence dropped sharply.
That association is not the same thing as proof that communication causes trust. What it does show is that feeling informed and trusting your local government travel together, and that the researchers found openness to be one of the dimensions with outsized impact on trust overall. Notably, the study frames openness as actively informing residents, not simply making information technically available.
Bruce Edwards, digital and brand manager for Dublin, Ohio, put the management challenge plainly in that same article:
We shouldn't expect residents to seek us out for information. Our job is to understand where residents already get their information and meet them there, whether that's Nextdoor, Facebook, or another platform. The days of posting something on the website and assuming everyone will find it are over.
How Can Cities Make Public Information Easier to Find?
Improving discoverability does not mean publishing more. It means getting more value out of the information your city already produces. A practical framework:
- Establish an authoritative source. Residents should always be able to trace information back to an official city channel.
- Distribute across multiple channels. Websites, email, social platforms, livestreaming, PEG channels, alerts, and community partners, matched to the audience and the message.
- Remove unnecessary friction. Six clicks to reach a meeting that is already being broadcast somewhere else is a design problem, not a resident problem.
- Design for accessibility. Discoverability means little if residents cannot meaningfully access the content once they find it.
- Measure reach, not publication. Posted is an operational metric. Reached is a communication outcome.
That last one tends to change how a team thinks. The broader goal is the kind of connected municipal ecosystem we described in our blueprint for the modern municipality: digital communication that connects residents to civic life rather than building another repository nobody visits.
Why Transparency Has to Travel
Local government has spent years improving public access to information. The next piece of that work is making the information easier to encounter in the first place.
The most transparent meeting, project update, or public announcement has limited civic value if the people it was meant for never see it. Transparency shouldn't require residents to know where to look. It should meet them there.
Switchboard Live takes one broadcast and puts it on every destination your residents already use, so the meeting you are already producing has more than one way to reach them. Your website stays the record. Distribution does the rest.
See how it worksFrequently Asked Questions
What is discoverable transparency?
Discoverable transparency means making public information both available and easy for residents to encounter through the channels they already use. Availability is a publishing standard. Discoverability is a reach standard.
Should cities stop relying on their official website?
No. The city website should remain the authoritative source of record. A multi-channel strategy uses other platforms as additional paths that help residents discover and access that official information.
Why should local governments use multiple communication channels?
Residents use multiple sources for local information. Pew's 2025 data shows local news consumption spread across television, radio, online forums, government sources, digital publications, newsletters, and community organizations, with no single channel reaching even two-thirds of adults.
How does multistreaming improve government transparency?
Multistreaming lets one official live broadcast, such as a council meeting, public briefing, or town hall, reach multiple digital destinations at the same time. That reduces the number of places a resident needs to know to look.
Does communicating more actually increase resident trust?
Research summarized by ICMA found that roughly 80 percent of residents who felt very informed about their local government expressed confidence in it, with confidence dropping sharply among those who felt only slightly informed. That is an association rather than proof of cause, but openness was one of the dimensions the study found had outsized impact on trust.
