How does government know if it is succeeding in achieving its mission? How does the public know? What exactly constitutes effective and meaningful delivery of government service, anyway? Local governments have made increasing efforts in recent years to measure their performance. Usually, these measurements are based on inputs and activities rather than on outcomes and citizen satisfaction.

In "Listening to the Public: Adding the Voices of the People to Government Performance Measurement and Reporting" Barbara Cohn Berman of the Fund for the City of New York's Center on Municipal Government Performance makes a compelling case for performance measures that reflect the public's needs, concerns, and perspective.

The voices of average citizens—captured in focus group and interview research—illuminate and drive this book's analysis. Throughout these pages, the people who are government's "customers" emerge as knowledgeable, eloquent, and discerning in their views on service delivery. Again and again, they demonstrate that listening to the public is not only a responsibility of government, but a valuable, illuminating, and productive exercise.

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About the Author

Barbara J. Cohn Berman has worked in government, nonprofit organizations and in the private sector. She is Vice President of the Fund for the City of New York and founding director of the Fund’s Center on Municipal Government Performance which has brought the citizen’s perspective to government performance measurement and reporting and captured the interest of cities across the nation. She also serves as Vice President of the Fund’s sister organization, the National Center for Civic Innovation, where she heads the National Government Performance Reporting Demonstration Grant Program. In government, she helped design New York City’s first Housing and Vacancy Survey with the U.S. Bureau of the Census and oversaw many subsequent surveys. She led efforts to computerize rent computations and reduce major backlogs in New York’s vast rent control operation when she was Deputy Commissioner for Rent Control. As Deputy City Personnel Director, she formed a new bureau to link human resource development of city employees with productivity improvement. She has been a management consultant to business, non-profit organizations and government, has served on advisory committees of governmental organizations and boards of nonprofits, is asked to make presentations about the Center’s work at national forums and has taught graduate courses in public policy and public administration. She is the author of two volumes of a study, How Smooth Are New York City’s Streets? As a post-graduate, she was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.