Our move towards providing a clean, safe, and affordable public housing option for the residents of Saint Martin’s blocks was inspired by their previous living conditions. Our new homes are equipped with modern appliances and are sure to be a safe haven for all our residents. Information about the new Saint Martins’ blocks project can be found on our website. However, we wish to engage with the public a little bit more to get their thoughts and experiences with the new houses this far. In addition to this, we also intend to reach out to potential residents who might be interested in joining our community. In order to achieve this, the city government of Montreal is preparing to launch a blog campaign that captures the thoughts of four current residents of the new housing projects. Three of these inputs will be from members of the general public, and one will be from a member of the resident representatives’ council.
AUDIENCE
The purpose of our blog campaign is to invite members of the public who are looking for a more affordable option compared to the private housing sector. These blog inputs will provide real unbiased opinions of residents of the new Saint Martin’s blocks, and this will hopefully provide potential residents with the information they need to make an informed decision.
RESEARCH
According to a research conducted by Eastham on the use of blogs for public documents, blogs have been linked to reduced research costs and wider geographic coverage. This means that our readers will have access to free information about our housing projects, from anywhere in the world. It is for this reason that we decided to run a blog campaign because of the fact that they can be widely shared across multiple platforms. They can be shared as links between your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Messenger accounts, as well as via email. We hope that this will be accessible by our potential residents from wherever they may be. Since majority of our residents are comfortable with using blogs as compared to other forms of mass media communication, we decided that this was the most effective way to reach out to as many people as possible.
Information about how to contribute to the blog campaign has been posted on the city government website and on our other social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram to direct traffic towards our blog campaign. This information will also be discussed in our in-person public forums and residents can get information on how to contribute if they are interested.
SPOKESPEOPLE
As was mentioned earlier, the contributions to this blog campaign will be made by current residents. These are people who had been living in this neighborhood before it was renovated and returned after it was improved. Therefore, they have the best input in regards to the changes that were made. This will provide those interested with first hand opinion from their fellow members of the public, to whom they can relate. This campaign will include the contributions of three members of the general public and one member of the representative council. This will give potential residents the opportunity to interact with both current residents and a member of the administration.
CONTENT
General information about the renovation of the Saint Martin’s blocks can be found on the city website. However, this blog campaign is proposed to provide first hand experiences as described by the current residents of this neighborhood. The input should be written by the residents themselves, and in the case a resident cannot write, the input will be presented as a word for word documentation of their speech. The writers will get to talk about how life was before the renovations, how the idea of a renovation made them feel, how coming back home made them feel, and finally how the ‘new’ Saint Martin’s blocks are different from the ‘old’ ones. These accounts will give the readers an idea of what to expect, should they decide to move here. Inputs from the representatives will also give accounts on how the creation of a representative’s council has helped improve the lives of the residents of Saint Martin’s blocks.
CALENDAR
A call for participants has been issued and three members of the public will be selected to take part in this campaign. The first entry into the blog campaign will be done a month from the release of this document (April, 2021) and will be done every week after that for three more weeks. The campaign will be kicked off by inputs from the members of this community, and will be wrapped up by the contribution from the resident representative.
Responses to the posts will be reviewed every week before the next post gets published.
CONCLUSION
This blog campaign will give potential residents an opportunity to interact with members of our community and gain insight into what it means to be from Saint Martin’s blocks. With the contribution from one of our representatives, they will also get to know how residents can contribute to the administration of their neighborhood. This blog campaign will also help us know what else we can do to further better the living conditions of our residents.