Registration: Why users need to register to participate in your community engagement?

One of the questions we often get asked is, why users have to register to comment. In Australia, the Privacy Act requires any website that publishes comments to give the option to use a pseudonym and to get permission to publish, which we do via our Registration Form.

Much more than this, registration provides your organisation with selected information like location or demographics and starts segmenting your users into groups e.g. residents, business owners and investors. With Engagement Hub, you can build your own registration form and capture exactly the information you need as well as help you comply with the Privacy Act. No other platform provides this level of protection and benefit to the client.

Engagement Hub is the only platform to include a built-in, comprehensive Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system. This captures all offline and online engagement, builds individual stakeholder profiles and allows you to create unlimited segments. This allows you to filter your feedback results by segments and also create tags to assist you in analysing your feedback. For example, you may create segments like local residents, property owners, and investors and then have tags such as positive, neutral or negative – enabling you to produce instant reports about how each segment or group feels about your project.

Ten reasons that Engagement Hub’s registration form and unique SRM provide a superior engagement experience.  

Engagement Hub has 13 feedback or participation tools including email forums and ideas walls (which are fully public) to surveys and quick polls (where the feedback is completely invisible to the general population.)

While Engagement Hub provides the option for anonymous surveys and quick polls, there are real benefits to mandating registration and risks to not e.g. multiple responses from one person or a group skewing your results. Here are ten reasons you may not have thought of to mandate registration for any survey.

1. Reduce Friction – While you may think that requiring sign-in for existing users, or sign-up for new users adds to the friction of completing a survey, in the long run, it shortens the overall barriers to engagement. By ensuring surveys are only taken by registered users, your surveys can ask fewer questions, as you already have demographic information and don’t need to re-ask it. Shorter surveys have the added benefit of removing friction and increasing completions, which can happen either from the perception of irrelevant questions or time.
2. Reach and Representation – The Registration Form helps you to understand the reach your consultations are having. Whether you have a legislative requirement or it’s a core value of your organisation to consult and build relationships, it’s important to know that you are getting representation from the different groups that make up your community. The registration form starts collecting key information on your stakeholders, and ultimately, lets you know if you have a representational sample, and quickly identify which groups are missing.
3. Improve your Consultations – By knowing how representative your responses are to your overall population, you can plan where to look to equalize representation from your whole population. Using segmentation, you can also see how unique groups within your population respond to different aspects of your consultations. The SRM allows you to know instantly if you are reaching the desired population, and, allows you to make real-time adjustments as the engagement is happening.  Use your SRM to identify what works best for specific groups of people and improve your overall engagement over time.
4. Reputational Protection – Engagement Hub has robust security measures to protect sensitive information, enhancing the overall engagement experience beginning with the Registration Form. Before registration can be completed, your registrants are required to verify the email they have used. This provides you reputational risk protection as it prevents public comments from impersonators, i.e. someone who sets up an email masquerading as the Mayor hoping to slip through your moderation and act as a troll.
5. Legislation Compliant – Our registration form keeps you compliant with the Australian SPAM and Privacy Act. Your users can elect to accept bulk communication (default) or change this on registration or at any time via their user profile. When registering they have the option to create a pseudonym to protect their identity when publicly commenting.
6. Cyber Security – Users require complex passwords – a minimum of 8 characters, with a Capital, a number and a symbol, AND the email must be authenticated as belonging to the user before a profile is approved / the user is able to add public feedback. Additionally, you can offer Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). This is becoming increasingly important as the population at large sees many large organisations not taking care of their personal data. Demonstrate right from the beginning that the personal information they are providing to you is important and secure. We also offer the option of using Azure single sign-on (SSO).
7. Protection against Social Media Attacks – Brigading of social surveys is becoming a much bigger issue as fringe groups and sometimes business interests look to skew consultation results for their own ends. The increase in the use of VPNs makes it even more difficult to be able to confirm if respondents are a valid respondent. Using registration forms, while not 100% surety, provides the ability to interrogate your raw data to help determine the validity and reliability of your data and sample. (Brigading: How registration can stop the online trolls – Engagement Hub)
8. Familiar – Registration for online commenting is normal practice, well understood by the population at large. The only requirement is a valid email being confirmed. Engagement Hub has inbuilt productivity features like automatic approval and automatic notifications, but also the ability to moderate or undo anything. If you choose to remove a comment, you can email the person as to why, thus building a relationship and your user profile with that individual which will be useful for future consultations.
9. Build Rich Profiles – In addition to collecting personal identifying information and demographics, the registration form gives you the first opportunity to show your community of stakeholders that you are interested in what they are interested in. Use the registration form to let your users self-select the areas they are interested in using the SRM’s built-in segmentation tool. This will allow you to create instant lists for targeting, bulk communication and invitations that will quickly identify the topics most important to your stakeholders and build better relationships.
10. Productivity via Automation – You can elect to have automatic approval (after email verification) or to do new member approval manually. The built-in SRM allows you to change this at a later date and email them directly to explain your decisions. All of this is recorded in your unchangeable Governance log and email log.

Engagement Hub is the only online engagement platform that includes a built-in SRM, which is an essential part of maximising the benefits of online consultation. For more information, see more on our SRM in this quick video or book a no-obligation online demo to see the SRM in action.