I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how

“I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.” - Bill Gates

“The two words ‘Information’ and ‘Communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.” - Sidney J. Harris
    
Have you ever been part of a conversation where someone brought up information regarding the city or another entity, and you think to yourself, “why didn’t I hear about that,” or “is that really true,” or “how did I miss that one?” You might search to find an answer to your question and it is possible, that in getting an answer you get something misleading or inaccurate.

Here at the City, we have always been concerned about getting out key information to our residents through each of our social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter and our city website. We do this so that residents have accurate and insightful information. While we work diligently at providing the most up-to-date information on a weekly basis, we realize that not everyone gets or utilizes social media and therefore misses useful information from the city, and possibly draws inaccurate conclusions.

In an effort to provide up-to-date communication to all of our residents, we have added a new communication vehicle, “Darien Connections” a print newsletter, to the mix. We mailed out our first issue last week. We believe that our city benefits from resident engagement, and with this new newsletter, we are now hopefully getting our message out to a greater number of Darien residents whose thoughts and concerns we have been missing strictly with our social media communication vehicles. As the quote above implies, it is one thing to get information out, versus communicating and getting our message through, so that a dialogue can take place.

My hope is that you will peruse our “Darien Connections” and spend a few minutes in order to provide us some feedback on how well we presented city issues/concerns; the more feedback we receive the better we can serve our Darien community. Please send feedback to City Administrator Bryon Vana. Please know that we are examining other tools such as our new community calendar, which I will be presenting to you next week in my next Mayor’s Message.