It’s been nearly six years since EngagementHQ launched and we’ve been involved in supporting more than 1,000 (and counting) projects on the platform. And boy are we PROUD of this!

In this time, we’ve seen huge progress in the use of the platform to engage communities online – both from a technological and practice perspective. Out of this we have distilled some of the key elements that we think drive and support successful online engagement for an organisation.

I sat down for a chat with our Local Government Manager, Ray Scanlan, to tease out some of these elements, including:

• Strategically planning your consultations from a whole-of-organisation perspective
• Building your community database fast
• Organisational awareness of the broader engagement strategy
• Active participation in your own engagement space
• Effective sequencing of engagement tools to get the best outcomes

Below the video, we’ve included links to blog posts which outline some of the elements we discuss in the video. These came out of the collective thinking from sessions at our first Big Bang Conference.

We’ve also included some simple worksheets to help with your planning (click on their icons to download).

We’d love to know how you’ve gone about planning your own online consultations and what challenges (if any) you have faced in taking an organisation-wide approach. Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

MEASURING SUCCESS: a vital pre-consultation must do. This one-page worksheet provokes thought around setting expectations up front so you can measure the success of your engagement and have a clear idea about what tools would best suit your engagement objectives.

ANNUAL PLANNER: a worksheet that helps you to plan an organisation-wide approach to your engagement. It outlines, the details of your consultation. Provide these to each department to use in tandem with the Measuring Success worksheet to plan and propose consultations to your management team.

You might also be interested in these related articles:

The Practice of managing online forums

Managing consultation fatigue

Creating organisational buy-in and a culture of engagement 

Promoting online consultations 

Because Vines are so time limited they are very concise and could have all sorts of uses analogous to community photography exercises. It’s not always desirable to limit the length and detail of people’s input but if you are asking them to show you something this has all sorts of benefits in terms of being able to efficiently process the information.

By way of an example here’s a Vine I took on a recent family trip to the Dutch tulip fields. I’m not very gifted as a film producer but Vine enabled me to film my wife and daughter riding by and for them to then film me as if we were riding together – of course if you look at the background you can see the shift – I wonder if I can get a tripod for my iphone?

I put out a call on Twitter yesterday to see if anyone had been using Vine as an aid to community engagement. The ever alert Andrew Coulson of the City of Salisbury quickly discovered that Vine had been used by a number of councils world wide and he then promptly went out and made this Vine for Council’s draft annual plan consultation – that boy moves so fast!

Here’s the video, I’d love to see other examples of Vine used in community engagement.

So IT managers – time to remove those blocks!

It’s the season for top tens, so why not? Somewhat bewilderingly, we managed to publish 368 blog posts this calendar year. What tickled your fancy the most?

The Engagement Continuum

The Engagement Continuum set out some of our thinking about which feedback and information tools to use under different circumstances depending on your engagement objective. It is our attempt to recognise that not all of our client projects fit neatly into the framework provided by the IAP2 Spectrum (which we use as the basis for most of our thinking). This post ranked number one for the most unique readers.

16 tips for writing engaging forum topics

This post presented our “Writing Engaging Questions for Online Forums” infographic. The was our first go our turning some of our knowledge into an infographic and, based on the response, we’ll be doing more of the same in 2013. This post ranked number two for the most unique readers but streeted the field for average and total stay time. This was the post that readers read most carefully.

Online Consultation Guide Book

This post supported the release of our booklet – the Online Consultation Guide Book – setting out lots of learning from five years of practicing in the online community engagement space. The booklet was downloaded hundreds of times and has been distributed in hard copy across Australia. It’s great to see so much interest in the methodological elements of what we do.

A ladder of citizen participation revisited

This post entered fraught academic territory by revisiting Sherry Arnstein’s famous publication about the “Ladder of Citizen Participation“. The post author – me – had the temerity to suggest that it might be time to revisit the intellectual roots of community engagement and to explore issues beyond “power” such as group learning.

Picking the right online tools to meet your community engagement objective

In this post I built on our earlier work with the Engagement Continuum to explore the role that different online feedback and information tools play in relation to three critical community engagement objectives: (1) Decision Making; (2) Relationship Development; and (3) Capacity Building.

Online community engagement: transparency vs anonymity

In this post Tracey talks about the debate in the online world between those who believe online transactions can only be seen as “authentic” if they are owned by a real public persona, and those who believe that anonymity provides scope for far deeper and more expansive engagement by the public. It’s another fraught topic, hence the interest.

Six things to look for when selecting online community engagement software

In this post Matt presented six essential elements of any online community engagement application: (1) A user friendly interface; (2) Easy moderation and facilitation; (3) Meaning reporting; (4) Qualitative analysis; (5) Methodological flexibility throughout your consultation; and (6) Technical and strategic support.

Dialogue, discussion and debate in online public policy forums

This is my personal favourite from the year. It’s easily my longest post, and certainly the one I thought about hardest before publishing. This post dealt with the nature of the exchange that takes place within online forums, which runs the full gamut from deeply deliberative dialogue through to divisive bickering.

Participation numbers versus participation quality

This post came about because of the series of Round Tables we have been running around Australia in the later half of the year. The issue of traffic volume versus dialogue quality came up repeatedly. It is something that has concerned the minds of community engagement practitioners for decades. The post presents a simple model setting out the inverse relationship between the time it takes to participate and the relative number of participants you can expect to get involved in a consultation process.

750 ways to engage your community online using forums

I put this post together in response to concern about things I have been both seeing and hearing. I keep seeing consultation sites going live that make limited use of the methodological possibilities provided by online forums. And I kept hearing on my travels that EngagementHQ is all about forums, when the reality is that the feedback tools can be combined in so very many different ways depending on the project requirements.

Promoting your online consultation

Consultation promotion to drive up traffic numbers has been a perennial issue for us for six years. We have been writing about it more or less from day one. This post, however, came about as a result of the thinking from a group of our clients at the inaugural Big Bang conference on the Gold Coast back in May. We asked participants to think hard about their best practice advice around eight big issues – Promoting your Online Consultation was number 1!

Christmas is a funny time of the year. A few hours of good times opening presents and over indulging is surrounding by extraordinary levels of anxiety and stress as we rush around trying to get everything done that seems so very important.

The good news is that there is one thing you should take off your list.

That consultation you think is really urgent. That just has to go live by 5PM on Christmas eve. It doesn’t.

Why? Because nobody cares.

Well, perhaps not nobody, but close enough for it to be an academic argument. And perhaps it’s not that they don’t “care”, but that they are just far too busy, or that they are unaware of the project.

To prove the point I’ve put together this graphic showing the combined traffic across all of the sites we manage on behalf of our clients. That’s around the 150 mark just at the moment.

It’s pretty self explanatory.

The red line represents traffic in the 2010/11 financial year, while the green line represents traffic last year. Nice to see that this year’s traffic is significantly higher than last year’s.

The line bobbles along, up and down from week to week throughout the year. Visitation depends on a combination of how many consultations are live and how interested people are in them.

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that there are giant plunges downward smack in the middle of both graphs. It is like a massive erosion canyon from the fastest flowing river you can imagine through soft sandstone.

This is the Christmas – New Year period. It’s pretty clear that people have better things to do than think about public policy – eating, drinking, sunbathing, BBQing, open presents, finding batteries, returning unwanted and broken gifts, arguing with relatives…

Interestingly, the depth of the plunge has increased markedly from one year to the next, indicating that it is the same very small proportion of people who are browsing around looking for things to have their say about over the Christmas – New Year period.

So, the long and the short of it is, don’t consult over Christmas – New Year. No one is listening.

This year we launched well over 500 projects across two continents, three countries, and one hundred and fifty odd clients. But Which projects stood out from the crowd for the Bang the Table team. We did a quick poll around the office and these are the top ten that stood out for us.

National Disability Insurance Scheme

This project was a clear standout for the BtT team for a few reasons. It is clearly a critically important piece of social policy and in my mind the most important consultation we have ever hosted. From a “practice” perspective it is a lovely demonstration of the value of combining discussion forums for detailed conversations around specific policy issues, and story gathering using the Guestbook, to allow people with a disability and their carers to share their stories without those stories turning into a debate. The nature of the feedback has clearly demonstrated that given the chance people will embrace the opportunity to share emotionally rich and complex stories.

Montreal Olympic Park

This project is one of Anthea’s favourites and a personal favourite of mine because it demonstrated that all of the hard work by our development team to translate the application into French was worthwhile. While I can’t understand a word of the discussion, it’s clear that it was passionate and reasoned.

Celebrating the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s 80th birthday

This project is a team favourite because it was the first to demonstrate the value in gathering stories using the Guestbook. It’s also unusual in that it is a celebratory site rather than a debate about public policy. The community generated stories, including being carried across the bridge during its opening as a three year old, are a pleasure to read.

Light Rail to Randwick

This project is a particular favourite of Ray’s. It generated good conversation in the discussion forums, but perhaps more noteworthy was the 6,500 people who downloaded 14,500 documents about the project. Think about the days before the internet? Can you imagine 6,500 people rocking up to Council Chambers of the library to get a copy of the project documentation? Maybe, but very unlikely. This in one very well informed community.

Broome 2040

Another favourite of Ray’s is Broome 2040. Ray loves the site because it demonstrates the capacity of a small community to achieve excellent consultation outcomes using surveys. Personally, I like the site because I think it is perhaps our prettiest.

Transforming George Street

The Transforming George Street consultation is a bit of a crowd favourite around the office. There is lots to love about this one. The site uses three feedback tools in wonderful combination. The Guestbook to gather stories about what George Street was, is and might be; the Q&A to receive and respond to community questions; and a simple feedback form to collect historic images of the street. It is also a site with lots of colour and movement. The team behind the site have sourced lots of great pics and video.

Southern Rivers Catchment Management Authority

The Southern Rivers Catchment Action Plan site is one of our favourites because of the thoughtfulness with which it has been used by the SRCMA team. Surveys and discussion forums have been used in combination nicely with a clear eye to the rigor behind the methodology. The most compelling aspect of the consultation though, has been the team’s openness, responsiveness and thoroughness in addressing issues raised in the discussion forums. They have not been afraid to join the discussion; to respond and to ask follow up questions.

Return to Royal Park

The Return Royal Park consultation is a personal favourite of mine for for two very different reasons. It is relatively rare to work with my better half at all, particularly on such a nicely put together project, and even more so on a project that produces such complete and compelling outcomes. I particularly enjoyed this consultation because of the development of the discussion forums; the grew from “position taking” through a period of quite fraught “debate” and finally evolved into something approaching “dialogue”. The team also used the surveys remotely and face to face, gathering responses in the field using iPads to ensure data integrity. Finally, this project introduced me to the phenomenon that is Swordcraft. What could be more fun than dressing up in fake amour and garotting a friend on a Friday night?!

Wyndham East Kimberley

This is another one of mine. I love this site not because it has had high levels of activity, because it hasn’t, but because it is so wonderfully improbable. The Shire of Wyndham East Kimberley is one of, if not the most, remote local government area in Australia. It has one major centre, Kununurra, which itself has a population of under 4,000. Kununarra is surrounded (at great distance) by many much smaller settlements of just a few hundred people along with remote cattle stations. The distances make face to face community engagement impossible, so the Council is trying a new strategy and giving online engagement a go. I love it.

Transmountain Pipeline

And finally, last but certainly not least is the Transmountain site for our Canadian friends. This site makes it onto the favourites list for any number of reasons. It is a lovely example of a deep rebrand, and kudos goes to our dev team for doing a great job on this. It was also the project that prompted the dev team to build out our API, which now allows data to travel from EngagementHQ to BOTH the project stakeholder tracking system, StakeTracker, and the client’s own project website. Finally, from a methodology perspective, the site is an excellent demonstration of the use of the Q&A tool for transparently responding to questions raised by the community.

And that’s it for this year. There are many more that could have made it onto the list, so if yours isn’t here don’t sweat it!

To answer this questions I’ve looked at the total time spent by all comers looking at the most popular consultations.

The North West Rail Link project for Transport New South Wales was far and away the most popular consultation topic of the year reflecting the large number of people affected by the project. Visitors spent more than 252 hours on the home page alone and more than 529 days on the site in total learning about the project.

Maintaining the transport theme, the NSW Government’s long term transport master plan came in in a clear second place, again reflecting the large number of people affected by the project and the broad territory covered by the plan. Visitors spent more than 211 days on the landing page alone.

Heading the list of local government sites was a dark horse in South Australia’s Alexandrina Council. Visitors spent a total of 160 days learning about and contributing to local issues.

Proving that not all popular issues need to be sexy, the NSW Government’s strategic regional land use policy consultation rocked up in fourth place, with visitors spending 36 days on the landing page…

And proving that transport is an issue all wherever you are around the world, number five on the list is Vancouver City’s discussion about Transportation 2040, with visitors spending 27 days learning, thinking and contributing.

Number two on the list of Councils and sixth on the list overall was Western Australia’s City of Mandurah site with 14,000 visitors spending more than 51 days mostly learning and contributing to the 20 year Community Strategic Plan.

In seventh place another surprise was the NSW Government’s Local Land Services consultation about land management administrative arrangements for rural and regional NSW. Visitors spent 22 days or 520 hours thinking and talking about how best to manage rural lands.

In another surprising result eighth on the list was a single document. The inner city community of Sydney spent more than 20 days downloading the Green Square plan by the City of Sydney.

The Sunshine Coast community spent 15 days thinking about the Sunshine Coast Planning Scheme and more than 86 days thinking about a host of other local issues.

Strictly speaking it shouldn’t be on this list, but the National Disability Insurance Scheme is too important to leave off. So far visitors to the site have spent 59 days reading, thinking and contributing to this most important of issues.