There will always be a role for face-to-face consultation, despite the current distancing required due to the pandemic. However, it’s a continual challenge for governments and organisations to reach people and secure attendance at consultation events.
Citizens of today’s world?
Using online citizen software, branches of local government, public sector organisations, and major infrastructure projects can develop a live and proactive relationship with many more than would ever attend public meetings. Such gatherings can often be largely unchanged in their composition, and can regularly fail to offer a fair representation of your diverse community.
Working online, not only in terms of numbers reached but in providing methods of understanding a much more diverse yet inclusive demographic, the chance exists to powerfully interact with your citizens through a multi-channel vehicle of communication.
Online citizen software at work
Using a comprehensive and changing engagement toolbox facilitates the building of such a relationship in a secure environment. This allows government, in all its local and national guises, and other organisations and companies, to achieve a range of outcomes.
They might choose public consultations, through idea walls, polls or surveys. Creative input and responses to ideas can be sought, from specific proposals to potential allocating of budget resources. Interactive media can deliver information on key projects, from initial stages, through progression, and then on to completion. Communication can be encouraged through invitations and online gatherings; citizens can feel a genuine part of a collaborative effort.
For governments, and companies, collected data that’s available through public access on-demand can even be carefully used to counter the increasingly harmful social media blight of ‘fake news’.
All these areas are part of delivering an end-to-end public service, one that can be accessed conveniently by all parties to it. This can be achieved much more cost-effectively than has been true in a world dominated by physical contact engagement.
Talk to our Engagement Hub team about online citizen software
For your organisation or company, the opportunity to engage more intimately and usefully with a wider audience – allowing them to appreciate that their voice is being heard and their concerns recognised – offers enduring value.
Working with streamlined, evolving, proven yet flexible tools, and delivering fully-integrated engagement in one place, can be a powerful step forward.
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To find out how this could be the case for you, contact us for an obligation-free discussion with a member of our highly-experienced Engagement Hub team.