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Regional councils exist because critical challenges don't stop at city or county lines. The DC Metro system doesn't halt at the District border. Housing affordability in Phoenix affects Maricopa County. Economic development in Dayton impacts neighboring communities.
"In the DC area, the metro system and roads don't stop once you leave DC,” said Ann Link, Chief Operations Officer at NARC, who helped implement Roundtable at NARC. “The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments covers the DMV, planning across the borders of DC, Maryland, and Virginia. That's what regional councils do — they help different states, counties, or cities work together to develop solutions that benefit everyone in the area for transportation or housing or economic development or waterway and sanitation issues, for example.”
NARC represents 450 of these regional entities — organizations with different challenges than a typical county or city. As a membership association, NARC needed to connect communications professionals in Seattle with their counterparts in Atlanta, housing planners in Columbus with those in Phoenix, and fiscal officers across the country facing similar budgetary challenges.
But for years, this coordination happened primarily through email chains, social media posts, and occasional in-person meetings.
“Doing things through email or social media” was becoming increasingly difficult, explained Matthew Leder, NARC's Program Manager, Policy and Communications. Blasting out social media posts provides no guarantee that the people who need to see information actually receive it.
And because NARC works extensively with partner associations and maintains numerous working groups for different professional roles — from fiscal officers to communications professionals to executive directors — the traditional approach wasn't working. Long email threads became difficult to track. Resources got buried in inboxes. New members couldn't easily access institutional knowledge. And critically, members couldn't easily connect with peers facing similar challenges in other regions.
“I don't want to know what that looks like,” said Luxe Langmade, NARC's Program Manager, Membership and Policy, imagining coordinating that many people via email. “Thankfully I've never had to deal with coordinating with that many people via email.”
About a year ago, NARC deployed Roundtable with a straightforward vision: create a space where members could share resources and ask questions of their peers.
“The original thought was, there are similar collaboration tools, and we were hoping it would be a place for people to share things and ask questions,” explained Link. But what emerged exceeded their expectations.
“My feeling is it's become a good way for us — which we weren't expecting — to organize and expand working groups,” Link said. “It makes communication that much easier.”
Critically, Roundtable allowed NARC to segment its audience in ways email never could. The platform enabled them to create targeted groups for major metros (regions with populations over 1 million), rural councils facing different challenges, and specialized working groups for housing, transportation, communications professionals, and area agencies on aging.
“Roundtable allows us to segment our audience,” said Leder simply. “It's so much easier, a huge help for the working groups.”
What makes Roundtable particularly effective for NARC is how member-driven it's become.
“The way the platform works, the members do that themselves,” explained Leder. “So if we have folks post a crisis communications plan, later a member needing the information can quickly access it. They can gain best practices from each other.”
An unexpected example emerged from the housing working group. “Something that came up is every regional council has dashboards for housing, so they were talking about putting it in a Word doc, and I proposed that we start uploading links into the resource library and have a collection, people can put them in as they please, make it a resource hub for specific groups,” said Langmade.
This pattern repeated across topics. Natural disasters and emergency planning resources. Human resources best practices. Board governance approaches. “They all have human resources, they all have a board, how they do that, they can share those ideas,” noted Link.
And now the members themselves want those resources available in Roundtable. Langmade explained, “When we have meetings about topics that aren’t on the platform, there is a tendency to want to make a Civic Roundtable group,” explained Langmade.
For Langmade, the vision is clear: “I see this as, we have various different groups, the biggest is NARC members, and I see it as a good way to keep the NARC network interconnected and expand that so it's being used every day and someone can tap someone else every day for help.”
The goal extends beyond occasional resource sharing to daily collaboration. “I think it reduces a lot of the bureaucracy of communications for a membership platform,” Langmade explained. “Instead of finding someone, it empowers them to build relationships themselves. The biggest part is the network, and two, as a file sharing platform, many different organizations use Google or Microsoft or something else, which makes the entire thing a mess, so it’s an easy place to access information.”
Today, NARC has a platform that matches that reality — connecting professionals across thousands of miles to tackle shared challenges together. Tomorrow? We’re excited to work with the NARC team to find out together.
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