Community consultation in Australia has a trust problem.
According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, Australia’s overall institutional trust index sits at just 49 out of 100, technically in distrust territory. 62% of Australians believe government and business serve narrow interests rather than the public good, and 64% worry that government leaders are lying to them.
That’s the environment organisations are walking into when they open a public or stakeholder engagement process, and it is what we see every day.
When you run engagement across scattered tools, a survey in one platform, emails in another, feedback tracked in spreadsheets, things fall through the cracks. Stakeholders feel unheard and teams cannot report clearly on what they did or what they learned.
In this post, we walk through seven tools for engagement, why they matter and the difference they make in practice.
- Surveys
What it is: A full survey builder with 13 question types, logic branching, rich media support and draft-save functionality.
Most surveys used in stakeholder engagement are too long and generic and ask almost everyone the same questions regardless of who they are. Engagement Hub’s survey tool fixes this with logic branching. A resident near a proposed development sees different questions than a business owner two streets away, and a community member sees different questions than an industry stakeholder.
The ability to embed images, audio and video directly into survey questions also matters more than people realise. When seeking feedback on a design concept, including the proposal within the question yields far more useful input than relying on a text-only description.
In practice: Agency in New South Wales running a regional infrastructure project used separate surveys for residents, local businesses and freight operators, all within the same project. Response rates were higher because each group only answered questions relevant to them. The data came out clean and segmented from day one.
- Advanced Mapping
What it is: An interactive map tool where community members drop pins, submit ideas tied to specific locations and vote or comment on each other’s submissions.
Location-based feedback is notoriously hard to collect well. Open-ended questions like ‘where do you feel unsafe cycling?’ produce answers like ‘near the shops’ or ‘on the main road,’ descriptions that mean different things to different people.
The Advanced Mapping tool removes that ambiguity. You define the map boundary, set what you want people to do and stakeholders do the rest. Every pin is geographically accurate and carries the submitter’s context with it.
In practice: A client consulting on a new shared path network used the mapping tool to collect over 400 location-specific submissions in three weeks. The project team could see exactly where demand was concentrated without a single phone call or in-person session.
- Interactive PDF
What it is: Upload a PDF or image and let stakeholders comment directly on specific sections. Others can respond, like or dislike existing comments.
Most organisations publish their concept plans as static documents. People download them, read them (or don’t) and then submit feedback that’s disconnected from the document itself. The project team then must manually link comments back to the relevant section.
The Interactive PDF tool collapses that gap. Feedback is anchored to the exact part of the document it relates to, which makes analysis significantly faster and makes stakeholders feel like they are engaging with the material rather than submitting into a void.
In practice: A Victorian government agency uploaded architectural renders for a proposed community facility and received 280 comments pinned directly to specific design elements. The project team could filter comments by section and identify which parts of the proposal needed the most attention before the next stage.
- Ideas Wall
What it is: An open submission tool where community members post ideas and others can vote or comment on what’s been shared.
The Ideas Wall works best at the start of a project, before you have formed options or narrowed your thinking. It is a genuine listening tool rather than a feedback tool, you are not asking people to respond to a proposal, you are asking them to tell you what they want.
Votes and comments create a natural prioritisation signal. By the time the consultation closes, you have a ranked picture of what the community cares about without having to analyse every submission individually.
In practice: A local council used the Ideas Wall at the start of a town centre revitalisation project. Over 180 ideas were submitted in the first two weeks. The top-voted themes directly shaped the options that went into the next phase of the project.
- Budget Tool
What it is: A participatory budgeting tool where community members allocate a fixed budget across a set of options by dragging and distributing funds.
This is one of the most underused yet most revealing tools in the platform.
Standard feedback questions ask people what they want. The Budget Tool asks people what they are willing to trade off to get it. Those are very different questions, and they produce very different answers.
When stakeholders must distribute $500,000 across ten potential improvements and they cannot give everything full funding, you find out quickly what matters to them. The results tend to be more honest than any open-ended question can produce.
In practice: A government agency in South Australia used the Budget Tool as part of a public space renewal project. Participants were given a hypothetical $800,000 to allocate across options including infrastructure, amenities, lighting and shade. The results showed overwhelming priority for lighting and shade, two things that had not ranked highly in the open survey responses from the same project.
- Community Chat
What it is: A forum-style tool where stakeholders can start threads, ask questions and respond to each other in an open discussion environment.
Surveys capture structured feedback. Community Chat captures the conversation that happens around a project, the questions people have, the concerns they share with each other and the context behind their formal submissions.
It also does something that most engagement tools cannot: it lets stakeholders talk to each other. When one participant explains to another why they support a proposal, that’s more persuasive than anything the project team can publish. Community Chat creates the conditions for that to happen.
For project teams, the unstructured data from a forum often surfaces issues that no one thought to include in a survey.
In practice: A utilities organisation in Western Australia running a service consultation found that the Community Chat thread on a specific service change generated more engagement than any other part of the project. The discussion revealed a practical concern about a particular customer segment that the team had not considered and that shaped the final recommendation.
- Stakeholder Relationship Manager (SRM)
What it is: A built-in CRM for stakeholder management, including individual profiles, offline engagement logging, team task assignment and database filtering.
This is the tool that separates Engagement Hub from every other platform in this category. No other engagement software includes a dedicated Stakeholder Relationship Manager at this level.
Most consultation tools are project centric. The SRM is relationship centric. It treats stakeholders as ongoing relationships rather than one-time respondents. Every submission, every interaction, every phone call or meeting your team logs, it all sits against a stakeholder profile that carries across projects.
If you are running multiple projects each year, this matters enormously. You stop re-introducing yourself to the same stakeholders with every new project. You can see which hard-to-reach groups you have not yet heard from. You can track whether your engagement with a particular stakeholder resolved their concern or not.
The SRM also handles the governance side. Every team action is logged, tasks carry deadlines and the audit trail is complete and uneditable, which matters when a project outcome gets challenged.
In practice: A New South Wales client used the SRM across twelve projects in one financial year. By the end of the year, they had profiles on over 3,000 stakeholders, could identify their most engaged participants and had a clear record of every commitment they had made and whether it had been followed up o
In our experience, the quality of any stakeholder engagement process comes down to two things: whether people felt genuinely heard and whether the project team had the data to make a defensible decision.
We built Engagement Hub to deliver both. If your current process is harder than it should be, we would like to show you what’s possible. Book a free 30-minute demo with one of our engagement specialists at engagementhub.com.au to click through the tools yourself before committing to anything.
