Public Involvement Management Application

Digital Transformation Solutions

Public Involvement Management Application (PIMA)

Since 2015, the Public Involvement Management Application (PIMA) has played a vital role in public involvement services for more than 30 DOT, tolling, transit, municipal and aviation agencies across the country.

PIMA is a comprehensive, leading public engagement platform developed by transportation agencies, for transportation agencies. It’s initial development began when Iowa DOT identified the need for a new digital solution to document and track the public involvement process and partnered with HNTB to develop it. HNTB continues to partner with Iowa DOT and other agencies who use PIMA to continually enhance the platform to:

• Increase the regularity of meaningful public participation, with a focus on actively seeking input from underserved or overburdened communities.

• Minimize and streamline manual processes for preparing, hosting, and tracking all public involvement activities.

• Enhance the accuracy, consistency, and transparency of data collection for in-person and virtual public engagement.

• Reduce risks to project schedules and budgets by systematically and thoroughly documenting and tracking community input throughout a project’s life cycle.

PIMA was developed specifically to meet the needs of transportation agencies. No matter project type, location or phase, PIMA includes every feature needed to ensure flexible, inclusive and responsive public engagement.

Power of PIMA

30+ Transportation agencies, deployed on hundreds of projects

34,000+ Stakeholders engaging on multiple projects

2,500+ In-person and virtual events hosted

70,000+ Attendees engaging at events

Collect and manage stakeholder and comment data in one location Connect with stakeholders through

Visualize stakeholder and meeting locations through maps and dashboards, overlaid with project data

Configure comment forms with interactive maps

Promoting Equitable Engagement with Real-Time Analytics

PIMA allows project teams to actively analyze equity considerations and meaningful engagement across a project’s entire life cycle. This strategy mitigates risks by ensuring the project team has a strong understanding of their project area, including data about disadvantaged or overburdened communities.

Through the Equity Outreach Dashboard (EOD) built within PIMA, HNTB offers robust analytics support for the continuous development of public outreach plans in projects, studies or programs. The EOD integrates engagement data collected in PIMA with demographic data available in HNTB’s Community Intelligence Toolkit (CIT) to support public involvement strategies. Through a robust automated process, PIMA’s EOD provides meaningful statistics on engagement related to project participants and the communities where they live. The primary aim of the dashboard is to offer transparent, data-driven, and real-time information to guide an effective outreach strategy.

EOD Demographic Metrics

• Minority populations

• Youth populations

• In-poverty populations

• Households without internet available

• Limited English Proficiency (LEP) populations

• Population 18 or older with veteran status

• Senior populations

• Noninstitutionalized population with a disability

• Population 25 or older with high school diploma or GED

• Population 25 or older with college or professional degree

• Households occupied by a renter

• Population 16 or older employed

Additional demographic breakdowns are available for language, income and race/ethnicity data

Partnering with Multiple Transportation Agencies to Foster Innovation

HNTB and Iowa DOT have created the PIMA Consortium, a unique group of partner transportation agencies that are invested in advancing public involvement practices by using PIMA to complement their existing tools.

The Consortium actively collaborates in bimonthly meetings to share ideas and best practices around public involvement, brainstorm innovative new features and enhancements for PIMA, provide updates on their use and adoption of the platform, and promote its use to other agencies at a national level. In addition, Consortium agencies partner to fund new features and enhancements to continue the advancement of the PIMA platform.

All Consortium members have entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with Iowa DOT that allows them to use PIMA on a statewide level on any project. Being in the Consortium provides a significant advantage, as continuous improvements to PIMA are shared among members — an exclusive feature not found in any other public involvement software.