There are so many benefits to an online platform for community engagement. Read our in-depth article below to learn more.
Digital transformation was already well underway before COVID-19; however, the pandemic has heightened the need for many organisations to increase the scope and capacity of digital resources.
Community engagement has undoubtedly suffered during the pandemic with the traditional public meetings, focus groups and panels being closed to the public or shared online with no available feedback channels.
An online platform for community engagement can transform how you engage and ideally merge the traditional formats with digital to create a hybrid model that works for all audiences and keeps data collection in one secure place.
Benefits of an online platform for community engagement
There are numerous benefits to an online platform for community engagement. If you are considering the value and benefits you are likely investigating the number of tools, the front-facing design of the platform, cost and what support is available to your organisation in implementation and ongoing training.
The value of reports
However, it’s often the reduction of the administrative burden that brings the greatest benefit to your organisation internally. Online platforms provide robust, audit-ready reports of all activity, demographic data and collated results by project or as a whole. At a glance, you can get great insights into your community’s feedback and download instant reports to share internally. These reports save valuable time and enable you to make changes to your project based on the data in real-time, rather than waiting to collate everything at the end. They also provide complete transparency for decision making
Stakeholder Management
Engagement Hub is the only platform to include a built-in Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system. This powerful part of our software allows you to see individual profiles of your stakeholders, what activity they have undertaken, what emails they have received and read and their feedback. You can also segment your database by numerous variables to help you understand your community by demographic, geographical location or any filter you create. Our software also allows you to create graphic email templates and send them out to individuals, segments or your whole database – keeping a track of everything in one place. No messy integrations are needed.
No other platform provides this level of stakeholder management and flexibility. You can learn more about the SRM in our quick video here.
Your branded platform
An online community engagement platform can be easily custom-designed to suit your brand, promote your latest consultation and share in-depth information about your organisation and projects. Use a custom URL to link to from your website or use your platform as your main website with additional information pages fully customisable.
Each project can take advantage of multiple tools for informing your community such as a document library, videos, images, FAQs, timelines and the latest news. Engagement Hub has 15 information tools, almost double many of competitor platforms.
We also have 12 participation tools such as ideas walls, mapping tools, Q&As, participatory budgeting, surveys, polls and interactive images. These can be used creatively to engage your community
Your home page can also display upcoming events, the latest news, social feeds and links and become a hub for everything you are consulting your community upon.
Here are three examples of platforms with multiple projects to give you an idea of how you can select which information and participation tools you need for each project and change instantly as you go through the lifetime of the project:
- City of Cumberland – https://haveyoursay.cumberland.nsw.gov.au/
- Fraser Coast Regional Council – https://frasercoast.engagementhub.com.au/
- National Parks, South Australia – https://engagementhub.parks.sa.gov.au/
Fully supported
Unlike paper-based or excel collation of data, all your community feedback and details are housed in your secure platform and fully backed up daily to reduce the risk of data loss. Engagement Hub is one of the only software providers owned and hosted in Australia and all our client sites are backed up daily to our servers in Sydney.
We also work closely with all our clients to answer any queries or issues at our 24/7 helpdesk, directly with a dedicated engagement specialist or through our online knowledge centre. It’s vital you feel supported through both the implementation phase and ongoing through training, regular deployments and a relationship with the platform provider’s team.
As engagement and communication specialists ourselves, we also support our clients to maximise their engagement potential through tailored advice and support. The level of support you receive is critical in taking advantage of the most your platform has to offer
User permissions
A lesser-discussed benefit of online platforms for community engagement is the delineation of roles internally. Engagement Hub’s standard and premium licences offer unlimited project admin roles so you can give ownership of projects to staff throughout your organisation so they can manage their consultation, view all the data and directly correspond with stakeholders. As the super admin, you can set what level of permissions each user has, see a log of all activity undertaken on the site and send out tasks to be completed. This allows you to delegate responsibility, provide organisation-wide ownership and further broaden the scope of community engagement through your organisation.
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There are many benefits to an online engagement platform. You can read here our specific webpage discussing these in detail or contact us to receive our platform analysis showing what each of the major platforms on the market provides.
View the Engagement Hub platform in action on our demo site here or book a virtual demonstration directly in our calendar here and we can show you the value of the SRM, Reporting and show you how customisable our software is to your needs.
