Category Registration   Show all

• Online Community Engagement: Small Tweaks to Increase Participation

  Share Online Community Engagement: Small Tweaks to Increase Participation on Facebook Share Online Community Engagement: Small Tweaks to Increase Participation on Twitter Share Online Community Engagement: Small Tweaks to Increase Participation on Linkedin Email Online Community Engagement: Small Tweaks to Increase Participation link

  Do you ever find yourself at the bottom of a rabbit hole of TikToks or YouTube videos? Do you ever go to Amazon looking for one book, and realise you have two books, a stapler, an air fryer, and a set of dog toys in your cart?

  This is by design. Tech companies invest huge sums of money into making their platforms addictive. Online businesses spend extravagantly on tools that make more people buy their products. These huge companies increase engagement in a few costly ways. They hire the best web and graphic designers to make their platforms beautiful. They pay people to play around with their apps and discuss them in focus groups. They do rigorous user testing, seeing if a larger font or different design will make 1% more people buy their product or scroll 1% longer.

  In local government, you are competing against these exact platforms when trying to get more residents to engage with you. This puts you at a disadvantage because you don’t have the same resources to splurge when you launch your online community engagement project. The good news? It’s possible to learn the same universal principles the tech behemoths use and apply them to whatever platform you use for community engagement – at no cost.

  Here, I will share one basic principle, one technique, one tweak, that, if applied to your community engagement work, can boost participation overnight.

  One principle: Don’t make me think

  If you structure your information in a confusing way, your residents will leave. Not because they’re dumb, but because they would rather spend their time somewhere else. The book “Don’t Make Me Think” expands on this idea, with a pretty self-explanatory book title.

  
  

  

  
  

  The picture above shows two variations of the same menu. Same information, same level of detail, same prices.

  If you walked up to a restaurant with the menu on the right displayed, would you eat there?

  No? Why not?

  You know how to read. None of those words are too difficult. What’s the big deal?

  The menu on the right doesn’t sync up with how the human brain processes information. We constantly seek out patterns in the world around us, cluster them, and organise them. If you’re looking for shareables, your brain knows to look for bolded text with some words like “Appetizers/Shareables/Starters” and then review the options in that box. That takes so much less energy than reading the entire menu.

  Heuristics are mental shortcuts that we take to solve problems more efficiently. By employing basic rules of thumb, we can make decisions without having to stop and analyse everything. Everyone from web designers (the three horizontal lines is the menu button) to grocery stores (the fresh food is on the perimeter of the store) to Amazon (if it has a 4.5-star rating or above it must be good quality) takes advantage of our brain’s need to find shortcuts.

  Applied to community engagement:

  • If you are engaging populations with low tech proficiency, don’t rely on virtual meetings. They have the highest learning curve of all online engagement methods. Your residents will choose something easier.
  • Structure and arrange your information in a visually coherent way.
  • Ask yourself: Will this make sense to someone in seven seconds or less?

  One technique: Present one logical next step at a time.

  The best user experience in the entire internet comes from your least favorite activity: filing your taxes. TurboTax has invested tons of money into making your tax filing process easy and understandable.

  When you file your taxes on TurboTax, you are presented with one step at a time. Press one button, or type in the answer to one field, then hit continue.

  
  

  

  Here’s the fascinating part: Unless your tax situation is complicated, the dozens of screens you click through on TurboTax might add up to more clicks and keystrokes than filling out the original IRS form online! But because TurboTax asks you one question at a time, often with user-friendly inputs like emoji buttons, you feel like you’re in the drivers’ seat, making measurable progress toward a goal. This is much less mentally taxing than filling out a smaller, but more confusing, form.

  For community engagement, the application is easy: Whatever your call-to-action is, make it clear. Don’t bury it at the bottom of your email or the last paragraph of your press release. When someone lands on your community engagement project, your email, or your social media post, they should know what to do. When they finish contributing, have a system or process already in place that can close the loop and follow up with residents afterward.

  One tweak: Simplify your language.

  Most people have heard advice like this before, but don’t know the stakes.

  I recently ran a quick experiment on readability. I found blocks of text from two of our clients’ sites: one high-performing, one low-performing. I copied and pasted them into Readable.com – a tool that scans your writing for readability. Here are the results, side by side.

  
  

  

  Can you tell which is which?

  I won’t tell you who the underperforming client is. I can tell you that their content broke Readable. A grade level of 16.9 means you need a college diploma to understand their project information. A reach of 33% means that it is unreadable for 67% of residents.

  I can also tell you that they galloped into community engagement with three of the Four Horsemen of the Planning Jargonpocalypse:

  

  
  

  I’m not the first person to advise you not to use jargon. It’s honestly kind of a cliche these days. But the most common mistake I see is when subject matter experts (planners, engineers, analysts) hear “don’t use jargon” and interpret that as “use jargon and then use up a whole paragraph to define and explain it in an attempt to clarify the jargon.”

  Good writing, in the lens of community engagement, is less about spelling or grammar. It’s all about readability. The underperforming client’s site checked all of the traditional boxes. Perfect grammar. Zero spelling errors. Explained all of the acronyms. Regurgitated the scope of work of the project in excruciatingly accurate detail. Check, check, check, and check.

  You need to remember that you’re talking with humans. The golden rule applies here: write for others the way you would like to read. You probably don’t enjoy reading through long, technical, and formal writing. Neither do your residents.

  Don’t think this is possible? This article is about how to leverage the fundamentals of user experience design for online community engagement processes in local government (phew!) and here are my stats:

  

  Notice you got all the way to the bottom of this article. Coincidence?

  Small tweaks to apply to your community engagement project to increase your reach:

  • Shorten your sentences.
  • Humanise your language. Write like you talk.
  • Cut, cut, cut. Pretend each word costs you money.
  • Shoot for an eighth-grade reading level. Use Readable.com to check your work.

  Putting it all together

  Did you like this article? I hosted a webinar that pulls the curtain back even further.

  Learn the principles of psychology, persuasion, and user experience design to engage more residents. See the tactics the most advanced tech companies use to increase participation on their own platforms. Then, learn how to apply these to your community engagement project for a fraction of the cost.

  
  

  Jeremy Shackett

  EngagementHQ

  
  

  
  

• Why “Register Here” Matters for Online Public Consultation

  Share Why “Register Here” Matters for Online Public Consultation on Facebook Share Why “Register Here” Matters for Online Public Consultation on Twitter Share Why “Register Here” Matters for Online Public Consultation on Linkedin Email Why “Register Here” Matters for Online Public Consultation link

  Unlike social media, an online consultation platform should create safe places for public participation. A place where participants can get involved and have their say on important matters without fear of being harassed or trolled. Whilst anonymous participation has some benefits, anecdotal evidence suggests when people “sign up” they make a subconscious decision to treat others with respect and deliberate issues in a productive manner.

  Making people register before they contribute to a public consultation also helps because:

  • People feel they are part of an inclusive group of individuals who are investing in a project or topic, with considered contributions, which is what community participation is all about.
  • Demographic questions help consultors to understand who has and has not taken part and therefore helps promote inclusive engagement. Managers can take action before it is too late to encourage more diverse participation.
  • Updates can be sent to participants, to encourage them to take part in more discussions within a project.
  • Project owners can close the loop and provide feedback to people about the outcome of the public consultation.
  • When people complete a registration process it helps to ensure they are authentic, real people. This can help managers to quality control their projects and reduce the potential for participants to manipulate the consultation process.
  • It allows you to build communities of place and interest. These are people you can invite to participate in consultation projects time and time again, which makes participation more continuous, representative, and cost-effective.
  • You can establish groups that can be assigned to protected and citizen panel projects where their deliberations can take part in private.

  So let’s hear it for participant registration and help to create safe*, inclusive, and meaningful online public consultation!

  *Further information about which EngagementHQ tools are NOT, SOMETIMES, and ALWAYS moderated see here.

  Want to discuss more online community engagement tips with us? Let's chat.

• Is registration a barrier to participation?

  Share Is registration a barrier to participation? on Facebook Share Is registration a barrier to participation? on Twitter Share Is registration a barrier to participation? on Linkedin Email Is registration a barrier to participation? link

  One of the most common questions about participation in online engagement, is whether the signup or registration process has negative effects on participation rates.

  To answer this, we looked at our Google Analytics traffic data for all sites over 2016 and analysed user behaviour. Here's what we found;

  • 80% of people who reached the signup form page completed registration or continued browsing
  • Participants who didn't sign up straight away were likely to revisit the signup during their 2nd and 3rd interactions after visiting project pages
  • Participants who landed on sites via the login page spent 3 times longer engaging with projects and had a longer overall session duration
  • A sites homepage was the greatest factor influencing participation. i.e. bounce or through traffic.
  • Returning users spent longer on average engaging with client sites

  This analysis shows that a registration processes in isolation isn't a massive barrier to participation. It does however, tell us that home pages are far more important to participant engagement than almost any other factor.

  This reinforces what we have always known about human behaviour and engagement - that a decision to take part in any engagement it is far more influenced by desire to engage and relationship to the project than anything else.

  In essence, capturing attention, communicating clearly, having a range of projects available and creating a value proposition for your community is more likely to have a greater impact on participation than a registration process.

  We highly recommend you use Google Analytics tracking on your own site to monitor your community behaviour and do further analysis on your projects and user journeys.

  It's worth noting these insights are taken as a collective of user behaviour across all sectors and projects and they will vary project to project.

  To enable traffic tracking with Google Analytics simply paste your tracking code on the advanced tab under general settings.

  You should also ensure that you are aware of our custom built Traffic Tracking tool for reporting on your consultations. This will show you referral data to your sites.

  
  

  Upload your Google Analytics code in the Site Settings section of EHQ

  
  

  
  

  How registration helps you utilise EHQ

  Central to EngagementHQ is our Participant Relationship Management tool, which allows you to capture information about your community.

  This database is used to assist you in effectively managing many aspects of online engagement with EHQ.

  Without investing in a registration process and building your community database you will limit your ability to do the following;

  Understand your community participation profile across projects

  By accessing EHQ demographics report you can filter and generate graphs to reveal the profile of your engaged community. This profile helps you identify whom you have talked to and where the gaps are in the reach of your activities.

  You can also use this report to filter via your sign-up form questions, aware informed and engaged metrics and also by first and last seen date. This means you can create a list of your most engaged community members, identify your least engaged and target people who haven't been seen since a certain date. All of these types of metrics are essential for, annual reporting and evaluation as well as ongoing promotion of your projects and without registration this data will be incomplete.

  To download a demographics report to uncover your community database go to Analytics>Reports.

  
  

  Creating protected project pages and community panels

  Your online community database also allows you to establish groups which can be assigned to protected and community panel consultations. For example, you might want to assign a special discussion space to a key stakeholder group made up of farmers from a certain town. Without participant information in your database to help you create this group you will not be able to assign people to the farmers to this protected discussion space.

  Creating protected groups and community panels are great online engagement tools, which can expand your methodology by securing projects for discussion, deliberation and transparent community panels. The creation of these groups requires that you have registered participants in your portal and again, your signup process is needed to support this.

  To utilise project visibility you need to create groups based on your community database. This requires registration.

  
  

  Sending newsletters and communicating with segments

  Communicating directly with your community utilising EngagementHQ Newsletters also requires you to have well managed and maintained community database. This again, can only be captured via registration or signup with your site.

  By having a carefully crafted signup process, you can better utilise this feature to promote your consultations. As the following section demonstrates, asking key segmenting questions on your registration form will also allow better targeting at different groups via EHQ Newsletters. Find our more about using groups to send newsletters here.

  Securing and verifying your community feedback

  For consultations that require rigorous decision making and reporting processes having each piece of feedback attributable to an authenticated person will be crucial. Moreover, for most formal submission processes you will be required to collect a full name, address, email and contact number anyway, so why not get your participants to register so you don't need to collect it every time they want to engage.

  This means you can report with confidence that your responses have been received from real people and reduce potential for participants to game your consultation process. This authentication can only be done via registration. In our opinion this is one of the most important reasons you would invest time creating and promoting a good registration process for your site.

  In summary, the whole purpose of engagement is to collect useful feedback data from real people and being able to back it up with confidence.

  Using a registration process instead of anonymous participation can also prevent participants hijacking discussion forums, and stacking results in surveys.

  With surveys in particular, many practitioners are inclined to have anonymous surveys, and simply capture demographic information about the participants as part of the survey. While this works to the same ends as verifying user data, we feel it becomes a burdensome task for participants over time to repeatedly have to provide their personal information when they could do it just once via registration.

  What does a good signup form include?

  Creating a signup form which is suitable for your organisation will be dependant on how you want to segment your community database and use personal information for decision making.

  While each organisation will be different, there are some common questions which make up a good registration form that strikes a balance between capturing data and not deterring your participants. Generally speaking these include key demographics like age, sex and location as well as relationship questions to help with segmenting.

  Beyond these, we recommend thinking about some non-compulsory questions which can assist you in decisions making.

  You can reduce the pressure on your participants by asking them to volunteer their information instead of demanding it.

  Using short descriptions and conditional questions are a great way to help explain to your participants why you want the data, how privacy will be protected and how it will benefit the consultations process.

  Below is an example of a well designed registration form. We feel this strikes a good balance between compulsory questions and voluntary questions.

  Good example of reassuring community about their privacy during signup.

  
  

  The next image shows a good way to ask conditional non-compulsory questions as part of a registration process.

  Example of using supplementary questions on a signup form.

  
  

  So as you can see from our traffic flow data, most people aren't deterred by the signup process on its own, instead a bigger influence on their participation is whether or not they have a desire to take part because the issue directly affects them. Once we realise this it's easy to see the benefits of utilising a good registration process to attribute and authenticate feedback data, segment and understand our community profile and better target segments through newsletter campaigns. If you're still in doubt, we highly recommend you conduct your own analysis on user behaviour to your site and we'd be happy to compare notes.