Wollongong Goals
Entered by Wollongong City Council
Every place brand succeeds or fails on whether citizens recognise themselves in it, feel empowered to shape it and are willing to champion it. Traditional consultation methods can struggle to reach youth, culturally diverse communities, time-poor people, and those less confident engaging through usual civic channels.
In late 2025, Canva invited Wollongong to become the first city in the world to test its goal-sharing platform at city scale. Two years into the implementation of Wollongong’s 2035 Community Strategic Plan, this presented a unique opportunity to engage residents in a simple, accessible way and invite residents to co-create Wollongong's story: what people value, what they are proud of, and their aspirations for its future.
The opportunity was bigger than another survey. The challenge was to combine the reach and innovation of a global technology company with the trust, accountability, and credibility of local government. Participation needed to be voluntary, accessible online and offline, and underpinned by privacy, accessibility, and data stewardship principles.
The ultimate goal? To build a stronger, more inclusive sense of ownership over Wollongong’s future by giving a broader cross-section of the community a voice in imagining the city’s identity, aspirations and evolution.
Strategy
Wollongong City Council’s strategy was to broaden participation by making community engagement visible, accessible, and meaningful, inviting people to share the hopes and ideas that would shape Wollongong’s identity and future. After all, traditional methods can miss the diverse voices within your community.
The creative solution was Wollongong Goals: a city-scale goal-sharing initiative that asked one simple, optimistic question at three scales: community, Australia, and world. The team focused on meeting people where they live, work, learn, and gather, creating multiple pathways to contribute both on and offline.
Council and Canva designed a non-commercial pilot built on five principles:
- Mixed pathways: a dedicated digital platform was complemented by free postcards, seven highly visible public mailboxes, portable boxes, and assisted participation through libraries, community centres, and major events.
- Go to people: place-based activations, school outreach, staff champions, local community organisations, councillors - all extended reach beyond Council’s usual audience.
- Creativity, not bureaucracy: bold campaign assets, social storytelling, and explainer videos transformed goal-sharing into a personal, optimistic, and shareable experience, supporting civic pride rather than presenting engagement as a required exercise.
- Trust by design: joint governance and due diligence covered privacy, consent, child safety, moderation, security, accessibility, AI analysis, data use, and probity.
- Close the loop: aggregated themes will be reported accessibly, compared with the Community Strategic Plan, and translated into insights about Wollongong’s identity and future priorities.
KPIs focused on participation volume; diversity across age, location and channel; awareness and partner amplification; community ownership; digital and physical pathway performance; data quality and safe handling; transparent reporting; alignment with the Community Strategic Plan; and lessons for replication by other cities.
Success was measured not simply by participation numbers, but by whether the initiative broadened participation, built trust, strengthened civic pride, and generated insights capable of shaping Wollongong’s future.
Implementation
Implementation began with the uncertainty of a world-first initiative. A key risk was that residents might respond differently to this new approach than they had through past Council engagements, making it harder to compare insights with existing strategic planning. The team addressed this by developing simple questions at community, national, and global scales, and aligning the project with the Community Strategic Plan without it being a replacement for formal consultation.
Enabling participation from school children while meeting child safety, legal, and governance requirements presented another significant challenge. Through collaboration with education providers, Council established a dedicated pathway that allowed students to contribute safely and meaningfully.
Public rollout required significant coordination. On the 17th July 2026, the campaign launched through social media, local and national news, staff and community champions, digital submissions, postcards, portable collection and custom mailboxes. By the 31st July, Wollongong Goals had already recorded 2,000 goals.
Visible touchpoints made participation part of everyday life, but also required processes for responding to site constraints, replenishing materials, scanning responses, and moderating content.
A key lesson was that innovation can prompt questions from highly engaged community members. Some sought reassurance about the project's data use and relationship to formal planning processes. Transparent messaging and ongoing dialogue helped build confidence and highlighted that creative participation works best when innovation, public trust, and relationship management are designed together and refined in real time.
As goals flowed in, a richer picture of Wollongong's shared aspirations emerged. By capturing diverse voices, Wollongong Goals generated fresh insights to inform the city's identity and future. The core lesson was clear: citizen engagement can do more than gather feedback; it can strengthen a shared sense of belonging and pride.
Results
Wollongong Goals established a world-first partnership and transformed an abstract question, "What future do you want?" into visible community participation. It demonstrated that residents were not simply an audience for Wollongong’s story, but contributors to the ideas shaping its identity and future.
By 31st July 2026, around 2,000 goals had been recorded. More than 120 city champions extended participation through workplaces, community networks and events. Assisted engagement enabled participation from underrepresented groups, including 20 students and teachers from a specialist autism school.
Results to date reflect the project’s objectives: broadening participation and creating accessible ways to share goals. The results demonstrate the value of choice and visibility, with multiple ways to participate in familiar public places. This converts engagement into a shared civic moment, strengthening pride, optimism, and community ownership. The local government partnership established trust and credibility.
Wollongong Goals will continue collecting goals through late 2026. Council and Canva will then analyse the results, publish findings, compare themes with Wollongong's Community Strategic Plan, and document lessons for future engagement.
Wollongong Goals is a practical prototype for how cities can listen differently, build momentum around identity, and enable citizens to imagine a shared vision for their place and its future.
