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Lock into an ongoing participation habit through internal cultural change management and leveraging these talking points across departments — because more engagement does not equal more work.

Achieve better outcomes for your community

Engaging the community across channels and devices helps you lock into an ongoing participation habit and drive better critical outcomes: greater trust, met or exceeded budgetary goals, reduced risk of public dissatisfaction, and increased employee morale, to name a few.

Yet, the idea that 'more engagement equals more work' continues to plague the public sector. Without a high-level sponsor to help bridge department silos, it can sometimes feel like pushing water uphill.

Turn engagement from a box-ticking exercise into a core strategic pillar with these five talking points and tactics:

1. Cultivate a community-centric culture

When a community member uses a service, participates in a consultation, or simply interacts with your organisation, ask the question, "How did we do?" with an EngagementHQ poll or survey.

It's one step you can take towards developing an engagement ecosystem and provides a "pulse-check" that will help teams become deliberate in focusing finite resources. People are resistant to change for multiple reasons, but excess uncertainty and the perception of more work are two big ones.

The beauty of ongoing "pulse-check" engagement is that it enables greater insights (or 'knowns') which means less time and money spent in vain and more shared, measurable outcomes.

2. Personalise follow-ups

If the community answers "How did we do?" and you find something lacking, ask for more information. One of the many benefits of having a dedicated Engagement platform is that you can leverage our sentiment analysis tool, automated replies, participant tagging, and newsletters to segment and personalise responses.

A single negative experience has four to five times greater relative impact than a positive one, organisations should focus on reducing poor experiences, especially in those areas in which community members come into contact with the organisation most often.

3. Embed feedback into the community journey

The more "pulse-check" data becomes a part of the team lexicon, the clearer gaps in the community journey. Suddenly, it's easier to ask:

• Did we use enough formats and channels to help participants feel informed?
• Were there too many barriers to contribution?
• Was our language accessible?

With three or more channels used to interact regularly, you'll begin to see touchpoints and tools as missed opportunities rather than another siloed tool in the toolkit. You can leverage our MessageMedia partnership, Project Finder, or our brand new feature Engagement Embeds.

4. Provide consistent experiences

Helping community members understand what they can expect when interacting with you means that reliability and simplicity become synonymous with your organisation.

Consistency is an important predictor of overall community experience and satisfaction, with 30% more likely to trust organisations that provided consistency.

By implementing engagement across touchpoints and departments, you lock into an ongoing and natural participation habit externally while building a framework internally to optimise and structure community interactions.

5. Benchmark recurring engagement

Once an ecosystem is established, recurring planning becomes straightforward. You now have the insights to benchmark community satisfaction and sentiment, identify gaps and make the most of opportunities. Couple this with site reviews and trends, and you have everything you need to plan for progress.

Adopting an online community engagement platform isn't just to add more tasks to your plate, it's to achieve better outcomes for your community more efficiently. Reach out to us to learn more.

If the COVID-19 pandemic has made anything clear, it’s the importance of online communication. It has become pivotal to public consultation, representing a trend that won’t disappear. As online public consultation increases in significance, we learn more about it. This is a guide to good practice regarding preparing for online consultation and informing and broadening participation.

How to prepare for gathering community insights

Online public consultation requires the same core ‘ingredients’ as engaging communities through face-to-face means. As Jonathan Bradley explains in his recent webinar:

‘Making consultation meaningful has always been about involving the right people, at the right time using the right methods, the right questions and providing the right feedback.’

None of these factors are any less significant when generating online public consultation than they have been for offline, or traditional face-to-face engagement.

In fact, it is important to bear in mind the fact that consultation has not, and probably will not, moved entirely online. Rather, we see a trend toward a blended approach to engagement combining traditional and online methods. Online consultation requires investment into effective digital platforms that provide for public meetings and discussion planning to ensure that participants remain engaged. Furthermore, it is critical to record meetings and make them available later. This not only allows anyone who couldn’t make it to your online engagement activities to see what was said but also provides opportunities for people to continue the consultation conversation afterwards.

Finally, when preparing your online consultation, it’s important to realise that people won’t automatically appear. Creating an outstanding platform for public consultation with multiple channels of communication isn’t enough. You also need to let people know about it. It’s crucial to map your stakeholders (see next section), email the right people with the right information and strategically build awareness of your consultation through a range of social media channels.

How to meaningfully inform stakeholders

Stakeholder mapping is very important as it enables you to understand how best to meaningfully form them. Divide your stakeholders in terms of influence level and degree of interest. Once you have done that, look at those whom you have said have both high influence and high interest. These are the stakeholders who will require more intense dialogue and detailed information - which is difficult if not impossible to achieve with an online survey alone.

That doesn’t mean that other stakeholders should be ignored, but it is a method of being more time and energy-efficient. For any stakeholders and participants, it is critical to provide people with the right information to enable them to give your proposals intelligent consideration. This will allow you to ask the right questions and, more importantly, gain insights that are valid and useful to your consultation.

Rather than the 100-page consultation documents of the past, it is suggested to give snippets of useful, shareable information. Providing bite-sized chunks of more digestible content is much more appropriate now when people are accustomed to digitisation and quick reads. Equally significant is giving information through a broad range of media, including videos, podcasts, infographics, and document summaries. Your information needs to be accessible; both in terms of it being easy to find, and it being easy to read or understand. This will allow better informed, therefore, more useful consultation.

Additionally, the traditional 12-week consultation window isn’t necessarily suitable for the online model. It is better for people to be able to dip in and out of consultation at times that suit them, in an asynchronous manner, with multiple touchpoints. Participants should also be able to contribute wherever they choose; “Netflix and contribute” — a phrase Bradley coined — refers to the idea that people can sit in their living room and add to your consultation conversation at their leisure.

How to encourage and broaden participation

97% of households in the UK are now online, which is the highest proportion ever. However, this doesn’t mean that everyone can access the internet in the same way. Affordability and quality of internet connection both mean that an online approach isn’t suitable for everyone, further emphasising the importance of a blended approach to public consultation.

Nonetheless, with 75% of people afraid to speak out in public, using online tools is more inclusive than only providing face-to-face opportunities. That said, it can still be challenging to allow people to feel safe to share their opinions online, particularly over social media. This is why it’s important to offer a variety of ways for people to take part in order to encourage and broaden participation. Surveys are, of course, an excellent online tool, but alone they are insufficient. Online, one can also use webinars, discussion forums, ideas board, etc.; by having this range, as well as face-to-face participation, a consultation can ben maximised.

There has, historically, been an argument in favour of the anonymity of participants in public consultation, due to a suggestion that this makes people feel more secure when giving their perspective. However, it is critical to know who is taking part, meaning that registration is important. This allows the consulters to quality control the responses that they receive, ensure that the views of different societal groups are represented in an equal manner, and manage the safety of the consultation and its participants. Thus, contrary to previous thinking, having participants register for public consultation actually makes the work safer and the conversations more reliable.

Online public consultation has grown substantially, particularly over the last eighteen months. The trend for the future is a blended approach, albeit with more focus on online tools than their offline counterparts. For successful, valid online public consultation, people need to be informed not only about the process but regarding the details as well. However, this should be in small chunks of easily digestible information, provided in a range of formats. Moreover, there needs to be a range of ways in which people can offer their opinions, instead of relying exclusively on a survey.

If ever a case could be made to “think globally and act locally”, it would be for climate change. The topic and associated actions and solutions are mind-numbingly vast and daunting, leaving the average resident wondering what they themselves can do to make a difference.

A study by Pew Research Center in October 2019 found that 62% of US adults say climate change is having at least ‘some’ effect on their community, and 22% say it’s having a ‘great deal’ of effect.

People want to be a part of the solution. They have ideas and opinions about those solutions. It’s up to local government leaders to not only take climate change seriously based on the very real risks that face every local community but also to provide a platform for the collective stakeholder voice.

Bringing a varied audience together for meaningful conversation

Climate change causes visceral, and varied, reactions in many. It brings up anger and sorrow; yet inspires passion and hope. Local government agencies who are embarking upon climate change-related projects in their community should aim to hear all of the perspectives of their citizens because more people working together results in potentially viable solutions.

Many agencies are engaging their residents in climate and sustainability action plans on their digital engagement sites and reaping the benefit of effective and efficient public involvement. Find out how you can do the same with your key projects.

Tips for tackling local climate change projects through digital engagement

It’s estimated that around 75% of people don’t like speaking in public meetings. Digital engagement creates inclusion that you wouldn’t otherwise get.

The following are tips and EngagementHQ tools that will aid your agency in building your climate-related local projects into your engagement platform.

1. Allow space for members to socialise. The social side enhances the experience for the participants and can also improve deliberation and engagement.
2. Share an opening statement on your platform that states what the space is for, the rules of engagement, and the call-to-action for participants. Set the tone with a positive and encouraging message about what can be accomplished there.
3. Use open dialogue wording such as “let’s have a conversation”.
4. Offer different methods of participation through tools that allow people to share stories, post their ideas like a sticky note, take a poll, submit a question, or drop a pin on an interactive map.
5. Include a list of organisations in your community that are taking action against climate change.
6. Share tips on how residents can save energy, money, and reduce carbon.
7. Use the EngagementHQ Places interactive mapping tool for climate-related projects, for example, participants could drop pins to indicate where they would like trees planted.

Examples of Online Engagement Around Climate Issues

Below we’ll dive into real-life examples of how communities like yours are using EngagementHQ to activate key conversations around climate in their cities.

Residents choose level of involvement

The City of Boulder, CO uses their site, Be Heard Boulder, to discuss their Climate Mobilisation Action Plan with residents. Online engagement is about bringing many people to the table and giving them a variety of ways to engage.

Following this concept, the City offers a call-to-action that states: “Tell us how you would like to participate in the Climate Mobilisation Action Plan process”, and links to a form with multiple topic categories. For example, one of the categories is ‘Ecosystems’ and the multiple-choice options are for the resident to have ‘no engagement’, or to ‘be informed’, ‘be consulted’, or ‘be involved’. The level of engagement for each choice ranges from simple email updates to participating in pop-up education efforts. This gives the participant full control over how they engage with the topics that they care about most.

Clear timeline provides understanding of process

For their Climate Action Plan, the City of Burlington, Ontario, Canada, created a page on their EngagementHQ site, Get Involved Burlington, dedicated to involving the community in the Plan. They provide a timeline that is always visible on the page outlining the process, what stage they are currently in, key dates, as well as links to relevant reports and documents that have been finalised and released. It provides residents with an easy way to see the progress of the Plan.

Q&A for all

The City of Cupertino, CA uses their digital engagement platform called Engage Cupertino! to communicate about their Climate Action Plan Update. They encourage citizens to ask questions, and the answers from City staff are visible to everyone on the platform. Some of the topics that participants have asked questions about include the City’s plan to reduce plastic usage, the creation/expansion of their carbon sinks, and the City’s carbon neutrality goal.

Going beyond the traditional survey

The City of Chicago started a three-year planning initiative and launched an engagement site, We Will Chicago, to host the conversations in one place. The Environment, Climate, and Energy portion of the site encourages participants to take a survey about shaping future design policies.

The questions dig much deeper than is typical of traditional surveys. Each question allows for long, written responses as opposed to surface-level multiple-choice options. One question asks: “How do we incorporate environmental justice principles and resource distribution to reverse historic disinvestment and environmental degradation in underserved communities?” By giving residents the opportunity to share their in-depth ideas and perspectives, the City receives valuable and actionable ideas.

Educational video content

If content is king, then video content is queen. Many people prefer to watch videos to learn about new things. When the Town of Halton Hills in Ontario, Canada developed a low-carbon transition strategy for their area they communicated about the initiative on their site, Let’s Talk Halton Hills. On the main page, they share a video about the strategy and suggest that participants watch the video before completing the survey. Additionally, they make recordings of virtual open houses available, allowing citizens to engage with the information, when it’s convenient for them.

Digital engagement listens to many voices

When you engage with the support activist, the scientist, and the policymakers, these diverse opinions and perspectives help to bring about effective change for climate-related issues. The critical conversations are already happening online, however social media algorithms create micro-tribes and propaganda bubbles. Rational and productive debate is greatly affected.

By providing an alternative for productive debate, a digital engagement platform, you create a hub for the public to come together, build consensus, bring about change, and strengthen society.

“I appreciate the City's recognition that at this point our climate response must be more radical, and take the form of enabling residents to do radical things, as well as civic programs. We need a vision to move toward, not just an apocalypse to move away from.”

- Resident comment from Be Heard Boulder

Reach out to us if you want to learn more about how EngagementHQ can help fight climate change locally.

Now that we've more than a year to examine exactly how governments are doing in a time like no other - let's take a moment to unpack our most burning question: "How has the community engagement landscape changed?" with help from Deloitte Insights and our very own data and analytics guru Nishant Seth.

Increased investment in citizen connectivity

The pandemic has been an inflection point in the digital maturity of governments, with many looking to adopt a cohesive approach to transforming their digital capability. To do this, they’ve needed to embrace operational change, invest in flexible and scalable infrastructure (like EngagementHQ), and create intelligent workflows to get them from point A to point B.

• Committing to fully digital services: With Governments taking up EngagementHQ at double the rate of pre-pandemic.
• Designing proactive and seamless services: With more than 130 early adopters using Engagement Embeds for things like customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey at the end of new bin requests.

More employees empowered and engaged in decision making because of the distributed and virtualised work model

Many government leaders have adopted new strategies to stay connected with employees and make sure team members have the necessary tools wherever they are. Instead of managing projects, they now need to manage project teams and cost savings from real estate can be redeployed toward infrastructure, training, education, and flexible arrangements.

• Technology has helped reduce the time needed to complete a task by up to 70%.
• Online interactions cost around 25% less than face-to-face interactions.
• Real-time data has meant a shorter time to value for policy and process updates, with up to a 34% reduction in project turnaround time.

Heightened drive to institutionalise design thinking for better inclusion, equity, and diversity

While the concept of inclusive design is not new, expanding this concept beyond physical infrastructure and accessibility needs is. Governments seek to make their services accessible to every community member; they’re rethinking program structures, communication platforms, and digital capabilities. In addition, they are looking to accommodate those with physical limitations, learning and language differences, and mental health disorders.

• Governments have been diversifying their use of community engagement tools, increasing the use of Questions and Ideas by 1.7x.
• Many governments have used an equity lens in their COVID-19 responses leveraging tools like EngagementHQs Sentiment Analysis to detect, anticipate and address misinformation in more than 3,000 projects.

And while many leading organisations have made significant headway in acting on these measures, more needs to be done to sustain forward momentum; a notion Mel Hagedorn, Head of Client Success ANZ, spoke to at this years IAP2 conference:

"Lead with empathy; if you're feeling burnt out with information overload at the end of a day and can't imagine taking in another piece of 'data', assume that is how your community feels and do everything within your power to meet them where they are."

Across industries, companies are betting big on customer experience. It’s time for governments to do the same.

Reach out to learn more.

In the context of community engagement, we’re sometimes asked how to deal with hostile communities. As with so many things, prevention is better than cure: it’s unlikely that the community was hostile before the issue was imposed on them. Rather, the community – or at least some members of it – are reacting with hostility.

So what do we mean by hostility, and are communities becoming more likely to react hostility?

The most common components of hostility are cynicism and mistrust. Reciprocity is also a feature of hostility, which can result in escalating conflict, both in how people communicate and how we behave. Hostility is cognitive; that is, it’s about what we think rather than what we feel (angry) or how we behave (negatively). Of course, it’s behaviour that is most visible and has the most impact on other people. Hostility can be contagious across a community when people share information infused with cynicism and mistrust, resulting in escalating anger and negative behaviours.

Even before the pandemic, a Gallup poll found that people in the US were experiencing increasing levels of stress, worry and anger. Anger can also be contagious, in what psychotherapist Aaron Balick calls ‘an anger-bandwagon effect: someone expresses it and this drives someone else to express it as well.’

We can’t leave social media out of this discussion as it is such an easy and instantaneous way to share both information and anger. Anger is a stimulant, and like any stimulant can be addictive so people look for reasons to be angry. We go online and down rabbit holes, getting angry about things happening in places we’ve never heard of, to people we’ve never met.

As community engagement professionals with the analytical tools, we have access to, we can see that the reach of project information often goes far beyond our target audience. I once worked on a project in Australia where we received formal submissions from as far afield as Canada. This wasn’t because people in Canada were impacted, but because local residents shared the project through social networks along with a call to action, to object.

So how do we handle anger and hostility? At best, we can apologise and start again, attempting to rebuild trust and reach the planned outcomes of our project. At worst, the community becomes divided, hostility overcoming basic neighbourhood decency and destroying relationships within the community as well as with us.

Let’s look at prevention first and then response.

Components of Outrage

You’ll be familiar with the importance of thorough stakeholder analysis and may already undertake risk and opportunity assessments as part of your engagement planning. Typically, a community engagement risk assessment should follow the organisation's overarching approach to risk assessment. This is likely to include elements such as danger to people and property, financial and reputational risks, and traditional time and budget project delivery risks. There is also the option of taking a positive slant looking not just at risks but also identifying opportunities for the project and engagement. You can then develop strategies to leverage those opportunities to maximise positive outcomes of the project while simultaneously mitigating risk.

There are two further steps you could take to bolster traditional engagement planning to reduce the risk of a hostile reception: social impact analysis (SIA) and outrage assessment.

Using a participatory social research approach often employed in development contexts, SIA can identify deeper, richer information about the community than a traditional stakeholder analysis. SIA includes the understanding that ‘social, economic and biophysical impacts are inherently and inextricably interconnected’. This lens helps us to view the community multi-dimensionally and to consider impacts that are:

• intended and unintended
• positive and negative
• short term and residual.

Extending from and dovetailing with thorough stakeholder and risk analysis, a rigorous SIA will open up more, and more meaningful, opportunities to mitigate potential negative impacts and leverage potential positive impacts.

Undertaking an outrage assessment will inform each of the above elements of strategic engagement planning. Peter Sandman is best known in community engagement circles for his expertise in responding to outrage (more on that later) but his 12 components of outrage are also an excellent tool for assessing the potential for outrage. Where that potential is found to be high, invest more in engaging early and sensitively.

Those components of outrage (you could assess them on a sliding scale between each of these absolutes) are:

• voluntary / coerced
• natural/industrial
• familiar / exotic
• memorable / not memorable
• not dreaded/dreaded
• chronic (ie slow-moving) / catastrophic (ie sudden)
• knowable / not knowable
• controlled by self / controlled by others
• fair/unfair
• morally irrelevant / morally relevant
• coming from a trustworthy source or proponent / untrustworthy source or proponent
• responsive process / unresponsive process.

Community outrage assessment

Can you remember the first time you used the term ‘outrage’ with a project manager or other non-engagement professional? Did they think you were kidding? I clearly remember sitting down to discuss potential engagement strategies around changing the source of a community’s drinking water. The project manager laughed when I suggested we do an outrage assessment, he thought I was exaggerating. We were talking about the water coming from a different catchment – it would taste and smell different.

As we went through Sandman’s components of outrage in the context of a parent running a bath for a baby, or an elderly person filling the jug for a cuppa, my colleague stopped laughing and agreed to invest some time and effort into an upfront engagement. This investment would easily offset costs to the customer service and media teams in dealing with the fallout if people had been left to notice the difference for themselves.

In spite of our best laid plans, we can still find ourselves engaging with a hostile community. Or possibly because of poorly made or executed plans were asked to enter a project when a community is already hostile.

The outrage may look like:

• the phones are ringing hot with complaints – they are also coming in by letter, email and at the front door; there’s a protest picketing outside the building or a sit-in starting inside the building
• the media is calling for resignations
• your online engagement platform is being swamped with what appear to be automated submissions
• your scientific report is being held up next to photographs of something you’ve said isn’t happening
• community members have started their own website, taking petitions door to door, leafleting the neighbourhood and holding meetings in the park
• another set of community members have done the same things but they are seeking the complete opposite outcome.

I could go on, but I expect most engagement professionals are already adding to the list and perhaps feeling triggered!

Empathy and minimising hostility

It’s time to talk about response.

First, opt for maximum empathy. Chances are that if a project has resulted in outrage it’s because decision-makers at some level have forgotten that the community is made up of human beings. It’s essential to remember and acknowledge this, both to ourselves and to our community. This should come from leaders in the organisation as well as officers; it should come directly and personally, as well as through official statements.

Empathy is ‘implicated in many aspects of social cognition, notably prosocial behavior, morality, and the regulation of aggression. In other words, it’s an almost direct antidote to the cognitive trait of hostility and associated feelings of anger and antisocial behaviours.

Empathy isn’t just a useful response, it’s an appropriate one. The community really is human and there is no point undertaking whatever the project is if it does not ultimately serve humanity (including benefits to the environment as it is critical to the survival of humanity).

It’s now generally accepted that community outrage arising from organisational failures should be met with public acknowledgement of and apology for mistakes. This can be difficult to implement, however, where political careers are at stake or there is a perception that an apology equates to legal liability for all associated impacts. If this is an issue for you, go back to Sandman for further advice, including the observation that pretending something hasn’t happened isn’t a great defence.

On a simply practical level, consider the following actions:

• Set up an internal working group; include representatives from, for example, the project team, your customer service people, and the media team. Share any new information with the group, problem-solve with them and run planned actions past them before implementing.
• Seek delegation of authority for decision-making to one executive and/or one elected member or board member. This will telescope approval processes to maximise agility.
• Have a single spokesperson who can be the face of the organisation with empathy and humility. In time, this person’s integrity and credibility will become established but empathy and humility must come first.
• Provide daily updates to other internal stakeholders to reassure them, provide them with accurate information and leverage their knowledge of the community.
• Have a single point of contact in your team or working group for all questions or ideas from the rest of the organisation so that they can be triaged and appropriately responded to without slowing you down.
• Establish a ‘single point of truth’ on your engagement project page. Keep this constantly updated and point everything else towards it (ie media, social media etc).
• Work with your engagement platform provider/website hosting service to mitigate any risk of denial-of-service attacks.
• Invite people in (in small groups - perhaps family groups, households – I’m not suggesting a town hall). Sit down and listen to them. Let them air their grievances without interrupting or judging.
• Don’t even judge them amongst yourselves.
• Consider your options for discontinuing the engagement.
• Start thinking about how you’re going to interpret and report on the feedback you’re getting from photocopied submissions to flaming Facebook posts.

A further and ongoing element of response is the long term undertaking to repair trust and rebuild relationships, both between the proponent and the community and within the community. This will take time and can only happen in an atmosphere of demonstrated integrity – follow through, close the loop, be present. Take a community development approach to communities where neighbourly relationships have been damaged.

Hostility is unhealthy – for individuals and for communities. Evidence links hostility and trait anger to increased risk of cardiac disease morbidity and mortality. US non-profit organisation, The Borgen Project, lists social hostility as one of the five critical global issues that are affecting the world in a catastrophic way.

Whatever our role or sector – engagement professionals, project managers, decision makers – we have a responsibility to minimise our impact and our potential to cause hostility. Let’s aim for prevention instead of response.

Being an agent of change isn't easy at the best of times. Add a backlog of policy decisions, lost institutional knowledge and a climate emergency into the mix, and it's easy to feel burnt out before the new year begins. So here are the top 6 agenda items to help you focus time and energy on what matters in 2022.

1. Consult early on policy decisions

In the last few years, there's been an understandable reassignment of many key communication staff to booster public health campaigns, with few able to prioritise the essential task of updating (now painfully old) policy. But, whether it's supply-chain issues, energy policies or changes in transportation, many are scrambling to recover lost time on overdue consultations. Our tip: engage early to foster co-creation and trust with a public now acutely aware of their right to have their say.

2. Run a community advocacy program

For those of you preparing for local elections, now is the time to kick off your community advocacy program to ensure you access the necessary funds and meet the growing needs of your community.

3. Deliver on 'climate emergency' rhetoric

Local authorities, especially those who have proclaimed a 'climate emergency', are now under pressure to deliver radical solutions to a public that is far better informed and alarmed about the dangers of doing nothing. Maybe it's kicking off local traffic schemes that promote walking/cycling and reduce car dependency, an energy efficiency scheme, or a waste management initiative, but now is the time to 'make good'.

4. Take a chance to innovate

Traditionally, the people working to strengthen democracy have been caught flat-footed by the pace of new trends and innovations thanks to internal bureaucracy. One massive benefit of large scale operational and institutional change is the chance to innovate. Now is the time to advocate for the change you want to see. Maybe it's increased feedback points throughout the constitute journey, benchmarking community satisfaction or experimenting with your engagement toolkit. More on the trends changing community engagement here.

5. Make use of available funding

Whether it's technology adoption, community connectivity or innovation, funds are being made available globally to develop technological capability and systems of government. The PropTech Engagement Fund launched to support the widespread adoption of digital citizen engagement tools and services in the UK. The USA has passed a $1.2trillion infrastructure bill to ensure every American has access to the internet, here’s looking at you ‘smart cities’.

While in Australia, the Community Investments Stream offers $5000 to $1million grants to support new or expanded local events, strategic regional plans or leadership and capability strengthening activities that provide economic and social benefits to regional and remote areas.

6. Account for skills & experience shortages

We've seen a considerable shake-out among those who work in public engagement, and reliance on consultancies won't substitute in-house know-how. So if you're one of the surefooted specialists who know the difference between open, mixed and controlled engagement environments, now is the time to upskill internal teams. Document engagement strategy, create blueprints and build templates to streamline consultation processes to reap more long-term benefits like meeting or exceeding budgetary goals, reducing risk and increased trust.

With a tough economic backdrop and the inherent destabilising effect of the pandemic, it's easy to feel hesitant about moving forward with public engagement, but if the last two years have taught us anything, it's that we can no longer take the status quo for granted, change comes quickly and it's the relationships we hold with people (both internally & externally) that endure.

Want to discuss these trends further with fellow community engagement practitioners? Reach out to us!

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.

Here's a graphic showing cumulative traffic to all of the sites we manage over the past three years.

EngagementHQ traffic L-R 1 July until 30 June.

The starting point on the left-hand side is July 1st, trailing up and down through to June 30th on the right-hand side.

That canyon in the middle of the line... Christmas week.

The community hasn't suddenly decided NOT to take a break (just like you and me) over Christmas.

Everyone is putting their feet up. No one (well, almost no one) is checking your website daily to see if there are any new projects to talk about.

So, please, take a break over Christmas and please, please, PLEASE let your community take a break too.

If you are working, then take the time to plan for a golden year of community engagement ahead.

Things will get back to normal by mid-January and you'll be able to launch all of those projects that seemed so very important the week before Christmas.

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.

Do you remember the last time you completed a survey? I do. I wanted to express myself and give my opinion, plus I was able to complete it quickly. Unfortunately, I never received an update, nor could I find more information about the survey results or its impact. Sometimes, rarely, I see an update in a Facebook feed thanking petition participants, but that’s about it for feedback. How much longer will we share our thoughts, feelings, opinions and concerns without seeing the resulting effects or outcome from our participation? When will we tire of this one-sided conversation?

As more organizations engage citizens and communities, the public will soon be solicited from all sides. At this point, it is important to consider crossing the border of engagement and venturing into the bond of trust.

"Trust, as defined by organizational scholars, is our willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of others because we believe they have good intentions and will behave well toward us. In other words, we let others have power over us because we think they won’t hurt us and will in fact help us." Sandra J. Sicher and Shalene Gupta

We begin with consultation as we open the door for comments from our community. Our next step is Engagement - using interactive tools to allow participants to view other people's comments and interact with each other. Developing a bond of trust is the third frontier. How do we ensure we are not just using participants as machines to provide feedback, but rather become partners in our decisions?

Trust develops in connection with four essential elements:

• Expertise: What are your special skills?
• Good will: What are your intentions? Are they positive?
• Reliability: Do you live up to your promises?
• Authenticity: Are you acting from a place of openness and vulnerability?

By acting patiently and concretely on these four elements, you will develop a bond of trust with your audience. For example, you demonstrate your skills by reporting your knowledge on the subject. Your intentions in working on the project are clear and benefit the community. You respect your deadlines and your promises of results. Finally, you are vulnerable enough to say that you do not have the answer to a question and to introduce yourself as a project leader or consultant.

The figure below presents points to consider for the four pillars of trust, in connection with an online engagement project.

Ref.: Inspired by S. Covey, Leading with Trust

Creating a relationship of trust will require an investment of time and resources. In seeking the trust of your community, you will no longer consider your consultations as just another step in the process, but as an opportunity to build long-term relationships with the community. Instead of thinking of a project linearly in an action sequence, you will think of it as a series of conversation loops.

Conversation loops can be difficult to maintain in the community when using traditional face-to-face communication methods. How do you reach people again after a public meeting or event? With good planning, creating conversation loops is easy and efficient when hosted online. With a variety of online tools available to help you gather and share relevant information, you are able to reach your audience easily as your project expands and develops.

You can also actively invite the participants back to visit your project to learn about the results (interim or final) of the consultation. Building trust by letting them know that their contribution has had a real impact on your organization. They will be more likely to participate again if they feel that they are partners in your decisions and not just a contribution tool.

Share information

• News Tool: This tool allows you to post updates about your project such as results after public meetings, an article in the local newspaper or the announcement of a presentation to the board. Keep your community informed about everything that goes into your project.
• Project Timeline: Describe the steps in your project as clearly as possible. Return to post more information as the project develops.
• Important Dates: Post events related to your topic in a calendar that is easy to read. Put a link to an online registration tool if available.
• Interim Report: Compile the results of your consultation and publish the preliminary results on your project. This can be very useful when you know that the next stage of the project (for example, the final decision) may take a long time. Thank your participants and provide as much detail as possible about the results. Repeat the exercise at each step if you publish different tools during your project. Try making a short video. It's effective!
• Who is listening: Be vulnerable. Introduce the people who will read the results and consider them in the analysis and reports.

Maintain the relationship

• Send an e-newsletter: Write an e-newsletter that you can email to all participants in your database. Remember that people don’t always come back to a page where they have participated, but appreciate receiving information about the impact of their participation. In order to grow your database, use as many of the feedback tools as you need to register on your site.
• Publish in your promotional and marketing tools: the promotional and marketing tools that you have put in place should not only serve to attract comments but also to report the results and impacts of the mobilization.
• Social Media: Publish regularly on social media about your different projects. Invite people to visit your project again when you publish an update or a report is available.

Pushing engagement to the point of developing a strong partnership with your community will require a plan, resources and time. But the payoff of gaining your community’s trust in your organization is well worth the investment.

To learn more on building trust with your community, join Stéphanie Beauregard, Practice Lead and Engagement Manager at Bang the Table, as she explores the differences between requesting citizen participation and building trusting relationships with continuous communication and always closing the loop. She helps us answer the important question on "How do we ensure we are not just participants as machines to provide feedback, but rather become partners in our decisions?"

This content was originally published by ELGL.org