Engaging with your community and stakeholders is crucial for the success of any organization, and a legislative requirement for many, but it can often come with a hefty price tag. Today, there are innovative ways to streamline and optimize your engagement efforts while cutting costs. Here are 10 effective strategies to help you achieve this goal:
10 ways to cut the cost of your consultations
1. Utilize a Dedicated Engagement Platform
Investing in a dedicated engagement platform, such as an Engagement Hub, can significantly reduce costs associated with community and stakeholder engagement. These platforms offer a centralised and efficient way to manage interactions, gather feedback, and communicate with your audience. At a minimum, they save you from paying multiple subscriptions and needing to use multiple platforms to complete your engagement project as it can all be achieved via one platform. However, not all platforms are the same or offer the same level of integrations and benefits.
Engagement Hub is an easy-to-use web builder and content manager, full of 38 different informative and feedback widgets, offering multiple ways to create your consultations. Plus, with inbuilt reporting, built-in communication tools like email newsletters, an integrated SRM and in-depth analytics and reporting – it is a complete system, replacing the need for multiple subscriptions. For more information, visit our Features page here
2. Don’t just use surveys
While a survey or questionnaire is a well-established method of engagement, there are other ways to ask questions that might work better to get your stakeholders engaged.
Engagement Hub has 38 innovative informative and feedback tools, including interactive maps, ideas walls, message boards, and budgeting tools, as well as more traditional surveys, polls and submission forms.
Your engagement site can be a repository of all your public consultations, to build trust and inspire engagement. Keep your historical projects visible and update with the outcomes, as this will inspire trust from your community that their feedback does have value. Show that you are paying attention, and explain the decisions and how the feedback impacted the decision as it will pay dividends for future consultations.
With Engagement Hub it’s easy to update projects. Your site can easily segregate projects into their different stages; you can easily update a project page with findings without needing to completely redesign the page. Our built-in editor lets you edit each tool individually 24/7 and even schedule when you’d like these updates to go live.
If you use a survey, ensure it has different ways of asking questions; if you are going to use a map, use an interactive map with multiple layers, and the ability to drop pins and have a public conversation. Survey fatigue is real so be creative in your approach!
3. Centralise Information for Analysis and Reporting Efficiency
A significant benefit of an online engagement platform is easier analysis and reporting of feedback to quickly inform decision making. Having all information in one place and being able to compare feedback against different milestones, as well as instant analytics and reporting are key benefits for developing a deeper understanding of your stakeholders and your engagement process.
In addition to capturing all online feedback related to your consultations, Engagement Hub builds rich user profiles and uses segmentation to analyse your stakeholders to better enable the creation of meaningful lists for future targeting. You can additionally add any offline communication to these profiles and link to related projects, giving a complete picture from the macro or micro level, depending on which report or analytics dashboard you choose to use.
With Engagement Hub’s real-time analytics dashboards, you can immediately see how your engagement is going on a range of important indicators. The extensive reporting systems enable you to run over 600 different reports to meet your reporting and governance requirements. Having been designed by an engagement professional, the whole platform is designed to collect and easily extract useful insights to quickly inform and assist decision making. Find out more here.
4. Boost Productivity
Productivity and savings in time and costs are essential elements of moving to an electronic engagement platform. Not all platforms are equal and it’s important to get a platform that is designed for productivity, has a solid understanding of consultation processes, keeps up with the changes in online security and the trends in social research.
The synergy between the core parts of the Engagement Hub platform streamline the engagement process, saving you valuable time and money. Engagement Hub has inbuilt productivity features like automatic approval and notifications, scheduling, workflow tasks and automatic moderation. If you choose to remove a comment, you can email the person as to why, thus building a relationship and a more detailed user profile of that individual which will be useful for future consultations. You have complete control over the content and access to the site to manage in real time.
Additionally, the platform provides in-built analysis with over 600 reports, allowing you to gather insights and track the effectiveness of your engagement efforts and provide valuable insights on your population for fast decision making. The unchangeable Governance log means you can guarantee the results are based on actual feedback.
We have a rigorous development program and are constantly updating our overall offering. Clients input into our development roadmap and every month new updates and features are released – many based on client feedback and requests. See our Latest Features page and Changelog for full details.
5. Leverage the Power of an SRM
Are you still creating new stakeholder lists from multiple spreadsheets and spending valuable time attempting to merge fields with different names and different levels of detail into a single workable list? Or are you attempting to use a CRM system in place of an SRM? While a step up from dealing with multiple lists, the design of a CRM as to deal with the linear sales process which is at odds with the relationship-building nature of an SRM. Find out more in our article comparing CRMs with SRMs.
Engagement Hub is the only dedicated engagement platform that includes a Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system as a core feature, working synergistically with all other elements. Bulk import your stakeholder lists and start creating rich user profiles that capture your individual stakeholders’ interactions and feedback. Develop your own bespoke segmentation to create meaningful lists for targeting and to analyse the data, send newsletters, invitations and updates in areas of interest.
The inbuilt registration form reduces the amount of information you need to ask in subsequent consultations and increases the completion rates in your consultations by reducing duplicate questions. Understand the reach your consultations are having and how representative your responses are to your overall population and make adjustments in real time or learn to improve your future consultations. All this information is at your fingertips in the Engagement Hub SRM. Watch our quick video to understand more about the SRM.
6. Harness the Benefits of an Electronic Direct Mail (EDM)
Sending newsletters or other updates is a normal and time-consuming part of any stakeholder engagement. Moving to bulk email communication reduces the expense of printing but does not remove the associated costs of licences and list management, not to mention compliance with the SPAM act for bulk electronic communication.
Do you wish you could communicate with your stakeholders individually at the click of a button? Do you want to build relationships by instantly replying to their online survey response with a personalised thank you? Online engagement software will enable you to communicate with your stakeholders, at the minimum with emails that give them project updates, confirmation of receipt of feedback and replies to their online comments so they can participate in public forums.
Engagement Hub is unique in having built-in Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) capabilities. Working synergistically with the SRM, the internal EDM means you can automatically create a bespoke list and send bulk newsletter communications to your community, and have this linked to the relevant profile/project. Make significant productivity savings by sending automated thank you and other updates to any stakeholder who provides feedback, and keep them aware of areas they are interested in. Multiple reports and analytics can be quickly printed to see your reach. Learn more about the integrated communication tools in Engagement Hub.
7. Ensure Security and Privacy
With the benefits of online interaction, comes the downside issues of security and privacy that need to be managed. It’s imperative you seek a platform that keeps this front of mind and regularly updates their systems. Consumers are simultaneously going more online but also being more aware of the personal security implications of their data.
Engagement Hub prioritizes the security and privacy of your data and interactions. By utilizing a secure platform, you can build trust with your community and stakeholders. Robust security measures protect sensitive information and ensure compliance with data protection regulations, enhancing the overall engagement experience.
Our registration form keeps you compliant with Australian SPAM and privacy legislation; emails must be verified, and 2-factor authentication is an option for end users and administrators. We have the option to monitor IP addresses and use the latest cybersecurity systems and protocols to keep our proprietary software safe. Request our security statement here.
8. Gain Insights into Your Population and Improve your Reach
One of the significant advantages of using an online engagement platform is the insights you can gain compared to just sending a survey out or holding a town meeting. The amount of information you can collect, the multiple ways you can collect information that caters to different sub-groups, and the ways you can manipulate this data enables your organisation to gain valuable insights into the population providing feedback. An online platform will collect all of this information and from this, you can understand your audience better and tailor your future engagement strategies accordingly. This deeper understanding allows you to make informed decisions and strengthen relationships with your community and stakeholders.
Engagement Hub offers stellar information collection and management. The combination of comprehensive feedback tools, the EDM, the SRM and the analytics/ reporting, allow you to easily and quickly identify your population and sub-groups, know who is represented in your feedback and who is missing and plan how to mitigate this.
9. Leverage experience
Your Engagement platform needs to provide initial and ongoing training and support from experienced Engagement Professionals to guide you to get the best use from the platform and maximise the outcomes of your engagement activities.
Engagement Hub offers extensive training and support, including a well-stocked online knowledge centre for self-learning and experienced engagement professionals via phone or email during business hours. We run regular webinars and have an Information exchange where our clients can learn from each other. Find out more about the various levels of support we offer our clients.
10. International Engagement Standards
Using the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) principles, we need to be able to inform, collaborate and engage with our community on projects and activities that are important to them.
Engagement Hub project pages can be quickly built to meet the published principles of The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2), with 38 project widgets allowing you to build an engagement page to meet the Core Values to Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate and Empower your community and stakeholders. Read more about this and see the IAP2 table of consultation in our Ultimate Guide to Community Engagement article.
Conclusion
By using an online engagement platform to centralise your stakeholder and community engagement you will make significant time savings and cut the cost of your engagement as well as overall improving the quality and outcomes from your consultations. Not all engagement platforms are alike. Engagement Hub was created by an engagement professional and will ensure you can implement these 10 effective strategies to cut the cost of community and stakeholder engagement while maximizing the impact of your efforts.
Remember, effective engagement is not just about communication—it’s about building meaningful relationships and fostering a sense of community. By incorporating these strategies into your engagement approach, you can create a more connected and engaged community while optimizing your resources.
Visit our demo site to see the 38 tools in action and our Client Showcase to see how our clients innovatively use these tools to maximise their consultations.
