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Modern democratic society uses various tools to address the challenges of everyday life, also with the help of citizens’ engagement in the planning process (Day, 1997). Whether at the urban or national level, involving citizens in planning processes has been considered crucial for decades (Chassin et al., 2022). State or local authorities require to obtain feedback from citizens on the current state of public services, planned changes, and policy measures, which help to make policies more transparent and effective (Tosh, 2014). Such citizens' involvement can shift from providing information to the co-creation processes, which leads to designing and implementing better public services (Torfing & Siebers,2018; Siebers et al.,2019). Nowadays, the citizens have many options on how to participate or engage. Over the last decade, there has been evidence of an enormous increase in the usage of digital technology and tools in cities and citizens' agendas (Figueiredo et al., 2016). Through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), public bodies, research institutions, and other organisations obtain data but also give a voice to citizens to decide about important issues related to their lives, e.g. to reduce their dissatisfaction with public services (Pathmanathan & Poulier,2017; Shahid,2021). Several authors pointed out the use of citizens' applications focusing on various civic problems and engaging citizens in some steps of e-planning (Desouza & Bhagwatwar,2012). Currently, these applications are becoming part of the Smart City concept (Simonofski,2021).
One of the key areas in which data and information obtained from the population are essential inputs in planning is transport. In this area, various types of applications (web, mobile) have been used in recent years to collect data as well. These applications are mainly used to obtain data on the use of transport modes, the improvement of transport systems or the introduction of new ones (Inacolo,2019). However, the use of this type of data collection tool does not ensure the required sample size. Nevertheless, in this case, it is possible to gather data using a mobile application as a product and use the available marketing tools to promote it (Prelipciean,2018) and increase people's interest in participating in research. Therefore, this article seeks to find an answer to whether the use of marketing tools such as social media, online advertising, event marketing, etc. can increase interest in participating in the data collection process implemented using a mobile application.
The article brings new insights into promoting a new type of research mobility survey that combines elements of traditional travel surveys (paper surveys, face-to-face interviews, computer or phone interviews) with automatic data logs gathered from a smartphone with a personal evaluation of personal travel time from each user. Users were asked to evaluate their travel time from the perspective of the worthwhileness of their travel time, activities performed during their trips and positive and negative factors influencing their perception of travel time while all trip characteristics (travel mode, distance, time, etc.) were recorded automatically. That represents the main difference between surveys and apps, which are just based on tracking and tracing (Harrison,2020). In the article, various promotion channels and approaches to reach potential participants are compared in terms of their effectiveness in bringing active users to the project's data collection. In addition, the findings presented in this paper can be used in e-planning or future activities and research which depend on citizens' engagement.