Community engagement is to inform, consult and/or collaborate with stakeholders who have an interest, influence or impact in a proposal, project and/or policy.
Traditionally, community engagement was undertaken in an offline environment where people met face to face, phoned and/ or submitted posted letters and surveys. This limited stakeholder reach. With everyone now adopting online community engagement, more people are able to participate in decision-making and have their say at their convenience.
Best-practice organisations use online community engagement software to ensure every stakeholder can have their say in a controlled and accessible environment.
Engaging your community online has extensive benefits, including:
- Building trust and a consistent dialogue with your community
When designing your consultative process it is important to look at all aspects of the proposal from all potential stakeholder group’s perspectives. Your collateral and content in straight talk should readily be digestible by your stakeholders and also address potential concerns. Online tools should be available to make it easy for stakeholders to submit feedback and they should have access to the feedback submitted. Sharing the right information, being transparent, using the right tools and undertaking 360-degree consultative processes will contribute to building ongoing trust and relationships. No more top-down information sharing.
- Better informed decisions
By offering people a platform that facilitates deliberative engagement, your stakeholders are able to readily provide meaningful contributions which lead to quality and informed data. Through listening to stakeholders, reviewing their ideas and feedback provides an outcome that is more powerful and sustainable.
- Your community will be more responsive and collaborative
Online community engagement software enables your stakeholders to have continuous conversations and participate in consultations that are of interest to them. Building these ongoing relationships increases the responsiveness of individual stakeholders.
It is important to recognize that not all online community engagement software is the same.
Set out below are the initial list for questions to have vendors address. If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, you should think twice before you zero in on that software:
- Can the visibility of a particular part of the project be limited to a certain set of people?
- Does support include advisory services from highly experienced stakeholder engagement strategists?
- Is their continual investment in ongoing development?
- Is a stakeholder relationship management tool included for really understanding your stakeholders, communicating with your stakeholders, and recording offline activity?
- Are the reports generated going to reduce your admin/analysis time?
- Are diverse informative and feedback tools included to support all different types of consultations?
- Is the software responsive or compatible with smartphones such that it allows reaching people when they are away from their desktop?
- Does the supplier offer 24/7 technical support for technical questions?
- Does the supplier offer training or demo to help know the working of the software?
- Can the application be modified to suit the engagement needs of your organisation?
Engagement Hub is one such software that has a ‘yes’ as an answer to all the above questions. You can find out more information on our website about all the features, 24 participation and information tools and built-in SRM and communication tools.
Book a demo to chat to us about your requirements and see the software in action.
