Budget engagement for local government

Ask people what they'd do —
not just what they think.

Weigh In runs resident budget engagement end to end for cities, counties, and districts. We put residents in the same seat as the people who build the budget — same numbers, same constraints, same hard choices — and hand you back what your community would actually fund.

Why it matters

Budget decisions deserve better than a survey.

Surveys tell you what people want. Hearings tell you what the loudest residents say. Neither tells you what your community would fund if they faced the same decisions leadership does.

Residents see the real numbers

They confront the same budget your finance staff work with. They can't ask for more of everything — every dollar added has to come from somewhere, and every choice has a real consequence.

You get input you can actually use

Not a list of preferences. A clear, defensible picture of what an informed community would fund under real constraint — the kind an executive can take to council and a finance director can stand behind.

The budget conversation changes

From wish lists to working through it together. When residents have balanced the budget themselves, they become problem solvers — even when the answer isn't the one they wanted.

What you get

Not software you log into. A budget engagement we run for you.

Weigh In delivers behavioral data on what residents would actually do under real fiscal constraints — not just what they think in the abstract. We run the engagement end to end, so your office gets a defensible, professional public-input process on the budget without having to staff the strategy, the setup, or the analysis yourselves.

1

Understand

We learn the budget issues you're facing, your real constraints, and who you need to hear from.

2

Strategize

We design the engagement and recommend which tools fit the question at each stage of the process.

3

Build

We configure each tool on your jurisdiction's actual budget — your funds, your line items, your numbers.

4

Monitor

We watch participation while it's live and keep it healthy.

5

Report

We deliver a clear summary of what an informed community chose — ready for council, the board, or the public.

The tools

Four tools, one for each phase of the budget year.

Strategic planning, the big fiscal decisions, the budget release, the new fiscal year — each tool meets residents at the moment its question is live.

The Weigh In annual cycle — four tools across the budget year: Shortlist for strategic planning, Tradeoff for the big budget decisions, Pulse at budget release, and Your Share at the start of the new fiscal year.
Identify priorities and strategies

01 / 04Shortlist

Residents rank programs, projects, or strategic options against one another. The most flexible tool in the suite — it sets budget priorities early in the cycle, and extends beyond the budget to any decision where options compete.

  • Drag-and-drop ranking with rich context cards
  • Outputs a clear collective ranking, not vote counts
  • Works for capital plans, strategic plans, and council or board priorities
Shortlist — ranking Weightown's budget priorities by dragging the cards
Choose under fiscal constraint

02 / 04Tradeoff

The forced-choice budget simulation, and the heart of what we do. Every dollar added requires a corresponding cut or new revenue. Residents balance a future budget the same way your staff do — and you find out what they'd actually fund.

  • Live deficit/surplus gauge with your real targets
  • Adequate context on every line item — the Three C's
  • Forced balance — every submitted budget actually adds up
Tradeoff — balancing Weightown's FY26 General Fund, where every choice spends or saves
React to the proposed budget

03 / 04Pulse

A lighter, late-cycle tool designed to accompany a draft. The budget is mostly set; residents respond within bounded ranges. Confirms what lands with the public and surfaces what doesn't, before the final vote.

  • Graphic depiction of each category
  • Bounded response — no rewriting the budget from scratch
  • Fast turnaround between draft and adoption
Pulse — Weightown's $212M General Fund shown in proportion, every department to scale
See personal impact

04 / 04Your Share

A personalized taxpayer receipt. Residents see where their actual tax dollars went, by service category and income bracket — the honest starting point for any budget conversation.

  • Per-household receipt by income & filing status
  • Breakdowns per year, per month, and per day
  • Embeddable on your website and tax-bill mailers
Your Share — a Weightown resident's $1,799 city tax receipt, broken down by service
Where you'd use Weigh In

Built for budgets — and wherever options compete.

Budgets & financial decisions

All four tools, across the budget cycle:
  • General-fund operating budgets
  • Capital budgets & bond elections
  • Sub-department budgets — police, parks, public works, libraries, transportation
  • School-district & special-district budgets
  • Tax-rate elections & revenue ballot measures

Beyond the budget

Any decision where a community has to weigh competing options:
  • Strategic plans & council/board priorities
  • Capital-improvement prioritization
  • Facility & service-level choices
  • Program & project trade-offs

Whatever the decision, we choose and configure the right tool for it — you never manage software.

What's next

Built for budgets first — expanding from there.

Over the coming months we're rolling out tailored solutions for school districts, housing, and climate planning — bringing the same real-numbers, forced-choice approach to the decisions communities care about most.

The design

Why it's not a survey.

The constraint is what does the work. Three design principles separate these tools from a survey, a hearing, or a comment portal.

01 REAL DATA

Your jurisdiction's actual numbers.

Real budget, real revenue, real targets. Real numbers signal to residents they're being asked to help solve a real problem — and make the resulting input usable in actual budget work.

02 FORCED CHOICE

You can't add without giving something up.

Every dollar added has to come from a cut or new revenue. Working within a fixed total is what produces judgment, instead of another flavor of opinion.

03 ADEQUATE CONTEXT

The Three C's, plainly.

What each program does, what it costs, and what happens if you fund it, cut it, or change it — Context, Cost, Consequences. Enough grounding to choose with confidence, not to overwhelm.

If you already run priority-based budgeting or budgeting for outcomes, think of this as the resident side of that work — the same priorities, tested with the people who pay for them.

Go deeper

Add deliberation, and it becomes Immersive Deliberation.

The simulations tell you what an informed community would fund. Deliberation tells you what happens when those residents talk it through.

Small groups meet online, discuss the choices they made, hear perspectives they hadn't considered — and often revise their thinking. We measure how positions move before and after, so you see not just the outcome but where minds changed, and why.

This is the methodology we call Immersive Deliberation: simulation and deliberation together — the step from raw opinion to considered judgment.

James Fishkin's Deliberative Polling at Stanford finds it can produce depolarizing shifts of as much as 40 points on divisive issues, with effects that persist in how people vote about a year later. — Fishkin, Siu, Diamond & Bradburn, “Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on America in One Room,” American Political Science Review (2021)

Immersive Deliberation — a small group discusses the budget choices they made on a live video call A deliberation prompt — should the empty downtown lot become a playground, with arguments for and against

Engagement goes further when it's hosted by partners residents already trust. For interested communities, we can do an assessment to see whether the conditions are right for a local partner — a community organization or a newsroom — to take on a role, extending the engagement so it's community-wide, not just a government program. Colorado Tradeoffs is that model at statewide scale.

About Weigh In

Built on a decade of public budget engagement.

Weigh In is a public benefit corporation. It was founded by the creator of Balancing Act — the budget simulation platform used by more than 200 local governments and school districts across the US, Canada, and four other countries, selected for the GovTech 100 seven years running, and named to Fast Company's list of World Changing Ideas.

“
Most engagement asks people what they think. We focus on what they would actually do — and why. Better decisions start with better input.
In the field

Colorado Tradeoffs.

A statewide proof of concept — simulation, deliberation, and reporting, before the 2026 ballot.

Fall 2026

Colorado Tradeoffs is a partnership between COLab, the Colorado News Collaborative (a network of nearly 200 newsrooms), Weigh In, and the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs.

In 2026, Coloradans face ballot measures on tax restructuring against an $850 million structural deficit. Under Colorado's constitution, voters are the legal decision-makers on tax and spending questions — yet they typically arrive at the ballot without the tools needed to make such consequential decisions. Colorado Tradeoffs will put those actual fiscal choices in front of 50,000 residents, in English and Spanish, through interactive simulation and online deliberation before ballots are mailed — with a statewide results report before Election Day. COLab provides the reach and convening; Weigh In, the technology and methodology; CU Denver, independent evaluation and academic credibility.

50,000 residents engaged
70+ deliberation sessions
50+ participating newsrooms
Ready when you are

See what better budget engagement looks like.

We'll walk you through the tools, show how deliberation fits when the decision warrants it, and sketch what a deployment would look like for your next budget cycle, bond question, or tax-rate election.