The City of Mound is located on the western shores of Lake Minnetonka. Mound is a full-service community which strongly focuses on creating a close-knit culture. The neighborhood provides the community with easy access to shops, schools, majestic natural sceneries and recreational activities. The council is committed to preserving the natural environment including the numbers number of wetlands, the open spaces and parks.

Mounds’ recreational system intends to give a variety of activity options to suit all ages and members of the community. The neighborhood aims to improve quality of life and develop the community according to the needs and desires of residents. The comprehensive planning process has been created to seek input from the community on how to improve the City’s recreational system and parks within the limited to space and size.

The 2040 City of Mound Comprehensive Plan needs to establish goals, policies and actions to suit the community’s needs and the context of the region. Seven stages need to be passed to create the comprehensive plan.

• Updating the baseline data
• Conducting phase one of engagement
• Land use chapter
• Reviewing and updating the planned chapters
• Conducting phase two engagement
• Preparing a plan document
• Conducting approval and the adoption process.

The second quarter of 2017 includes task two, “conducting phase one of engagement.” To complete this part of the process, Mound needed to encourage residents to participate in the interactive plan. To do so, Mound needed to find a way to encourage and ensure all community residents had a way to contribute.

The City of Mound engaged Hoisington Koegler Group inc. (HKGI) a planning, landscape architecture and urban design firm to develop the comprehensive plan and Social Pinpoint outreach tool, designed to help:

Create a vision for the 2040 comprehensive plan:

The mapping tool created a platform for community members to discuss their needs and aspirations for the City’s future.

Improve commercial areas:

The project helped guide the future of the City’s commercial areas. The inclusion of the detailed side-bar survey helped understand consumer patterns and needs.

Identify resident’s needs for the parks, open spaces & recreational systems:

Social Pinpoint allowed the community to “like,” what they love about the current parks or add “needed park improvement” to areas of concern. The sidebar survey also gave greater market research into how often residents use the park.

Complete a SWOT analysis to assess where the community is today:

The SWOT sidebar survey gave greater, in-depth knowledge about the city’s current position and the opportunities for the future. The project’s sidebar survey allowed for in-depth open-ended questions to extensively analyze the public’s thoughts and feelings towards certain aspects of the city.

Overall, Social Pinpoint gave The City of Mound an easy-to-access place to interact with their community. The combination of the project map and the survey tool meant residents could effortlessly join discussions and talk about aspects of the project that mostly matter to them.

The City of Mound needed to gain community participation to pass task two of the 2040 Comprehensive plan. Social Pinpoint provided an easy-to-use interactive mapping platform to communicate with the City’s residents. The project mapping tool was conveniently developed to include surveys so the City of Mound could gain more through market research into citizens’ thoughts and opinions about the current landscape, city and recreational areas.