Vistacom Additional Casestudies: Sacramento Area Council of Governments Blueprint Project

Additional Case Studies

SACOG - Blueprint Project

Overview
The Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) is an association of local governments in the six-county Sacramento Region. SACOG provides transportation planning and funding for the region, and serves as a forum for the study and resolution of regional issues.

The Challenge
In the wake of increased traffic congestion, SACOG initiated the Blueprint Project to study future land-use patterns and their potential effects on the region's transportation, air quality, housing, open space, and other resources. The process of deciding a final course of action would require the feedback and opinions of thousands of citizens and elected officials.

The Solution
SACOG used Vistacom's audience response services for their Regional Forum, a public meeting for 2,000 people, as a means to gather important demographic information and feedback to help craft the vision of their future transportation system. Opinions on land use, open space, housing, and air quality were all taken into account in several different scenarios that described varying patterns of growth and development throughout the region.

The Forum's participants chose the scenario they preferred. In addition, individuals voted for their first and second preference for their local area, as well as for the region.

Additionally, SACOG held their Elected Officials meeting whereby the officials also had the opportunity to "weigh in" on different proposals versus a base case scenario using a number of different indicators.

The information captured through Vistacom's audience response services was used two months later to adopt the final Blue Print plan.

How SACOG benefited
Vistacom's audience response technology provided a turnkey solution that streamlined the process of gathering and tabulating opinions from 2,000 people and enabled critical decisions to be made in a fast, cost-effective, and uniformly simple manner. The resulting preferred Blueprint Plan was a major milestone that they accomplished in a very timely manner.