It's a hugely exciting time for the city, but also one that's going to involve a lot of change.
Context
The people who live and work in Leeds are a vital part of that change and we wanted to make sure that they had the chance to have their say on the developments being proposed. We have been consulting with people for the past few years but this year really marked the last chance for people to get involved with shaping our housing, retail, employment and green space plans. We wanted to harness the local knowledge of our residents by encouraging them to share their thoughts on what issues we needed to consider or overcome during the building and development phase and get them excited about what the future of the city could be.
What we did
As we already had a strong history of consulting with our residents we continued with many of the straplines and branding we had used in earlier consultations. This helped us to emphasise that this was an initiative that people could genuinely get involved in and have their say and made the most of branding that we already knew worked well.
We wanted to make our consultation as integrated as possible so we used a mixture of low and no cost advertising along with some paid for advertising. We created electronic and paper-based-mail outs for our 3000 citizen panel members and provided all of the council departments that have contact with the public with information about the consultation, so they could help us to cascade the message. We also arranged staff briefings for those employees working directly with the public so that they could answer questions people might have about the consultation or help them to complete the form.
As Leeds is a major business centre we briefed our chamber of commerce, Business Improvement District and local enterprise partnership on how businesses could have their say, and used their channels and networks to get the message out. We also did some targeted communications for young people. With our development plans spanning 12 years we wanted young people to have a say in what sort of city they wanted to grow up in. We promoted our consultation message through our voice and influence team, who work directly with youth and school councils. We also shared the consultation details via social media, mainly Twitter.
Previous consultations had a relatively low turnout for our community-based drop in sessions so we made a concerted effort to promote those opportunities in this consultation. We used a number of street talk sites, which were essentially phone box wraps to promote drop in sessions happening in the local area. We then supplemented this with billboard and targeted online advertising in the weeks leading up to the drop in sessions to encourage attendance.
The impact
More than 3,000 people came to our drop in sessions, whereas previously we'd struggled to engage people on a local level through this kind of opportunity. We had 10,000 responses to our consultation as well as 45,000 individual representations (responses to one or more sections of the plan). We saw our website click through rates triple in the final two weeks of the campaign, which very obviously linked to our increase in consultation and communications activity and countdown as we headed towards the closing date.
Why it worked
I think a key part of the consultation's success was the fact that we got out into the community, bringing the opportunities for people to engage directly to them rather than focusing on getting them to come to us. We integrated our channels extremely effectively, which helped to maximise our reach and get more value from our content and I think we had a strong digitial strategy which made it easier for people to get involved. The council's geographic information systems team created an interactive map for the consultation which allowed people to go straight to the area of the city they wanted to look at details for and then linked straight to the corresponding bit of the consultation form.
Lessons learnt
This round of consultation activities definitely showed us the benefits that can come from integrating channels and working closely with partners. I think that we would like to have had some longer lead in times with our briefings for some of our partners but overall it worked very well. With more time we would also have liked to have focused more on making sure the language within the plans was as accessible as possible for people.
Want to know more
For more information on this campaign please contact Danielle Clayton.