Digital can reach a far greater audience. Social media is great way of gauging people’s views, responding to enquiries and letting your community know what you are up to.
Digital options can reach a far greater audience. Social media is great way of gauging people’s views, responding to enquiries and letting your community know what you are up to. Below are some of the key channels to focus on.
Over recent years local authorities have made increasing use of online consultation, in some cases as an additional strand to their offline activities and in others as a replacement. The much lower costs, both in terms of time and money, makes online consultation an attractive option for councils facing tough financial pressures. Read our LGA guidance on some of the different video conferencing tools on offer through which to deliver engagement work.
Online consultations can certainly play an important role in engaging residents and stakeholders, enabling participation by a much larger and more widely distributed pool of people. However, it is not without its risks, particularly when it comes to ensuring that every relevant group is consulted. Not everyone has access to technology or is capable of engaging with an online consultation, this is particularly true of more vulnerable or hard-to-reach demographics. In tackling this issue, online consultation at the very least needs to be advertised offline and have an accompanying paper-based mechanism for groups and individuals to feed-in.
Even when every demographic group appears to be included in the responses, systematic biases can still remain. Consultation online is highly self-selecting and the groups which choose to engage can contain underlying similarities, such as an active interest in local politics, which results in their views being different from those of the general public.
Online consultation is a powerful engagement tool, but it must be used with both eyes open. This is especially true given that, for many of the residents who are least engaged or most hostile to change, new technology is seen as the problem, not the solution. Vulnerable or disillusioned individuals may not be online, and those who are online often still prefer to speak to a human. While tech platforms should be seen as mechanisms for better connecting with residents on their terms, there is a risk that this means less engagement, not more.
So, how do you avoid this pitfall? Like many of the prerequisites to good engagement, the factors which determine the success of digital consultation are often the decisions made beforehand.
Deciding whether to use digital engagement at all, and if so which channels, is vital in ensuring that your online consultation does not fall flat. In particular, it is important to satisfy yourself that you are not choosing digital engagement channels for their own sake – and to ensure that everyone running the consultation is happy with the choice. A half-hearted digital consultation can feed suspicion of a ‘tick box’ approach, and lead to platforms becoming ‘white elephants’ which do not get used.
Likewise, be sure that you are not choosing digital purely as a cheaper option. It is true that online channels can be more cost-effective in reaching larger audiences. But they must be properly staffed, resourced and designed, with coherent offline alternatives provided. Good strategic decisions at the start will provide clarity about why you have chosen the precise digital channels which you have as your engagement basis, and about the value you are hoping to add by choosing them.
Useful resources within New Conversations include:
Guidance: Using the key channels and platforms
The guidance below describes the possibilities and limitations, for some of the different channels available.
Individual councillors are unlikely to attract more than a handful of followers to their profile, groups or pages, many of which are likely to be based more on party political affiliation than locality.
- To engage effectively using Facebook you need to identify where residents congregate – official pages, like that of a local newspaper, the council or a residents’ association, or a less formal group, such as one based around local nostalgia.
- Facebook advertising is a paid service that enables messages to be directly aimed at people based on a range of criteria, including locality and demographic
- As with Facebook, Twitter offers a potentially global reach but requires people to actively engage with you.
- If you follow local news sources, it is a good way of keeping up to speed with what is going on in your area in almost real time
- It provides an efficient way of making a public statement on an issue
- It enables you to directly contact key figures who may be able to help spread your message wider
Street life
- An attempt to bridge the gap between the global audience the internet offers and the local issues people often want to raise
Google Alerts
- Once you’ve put a term into Google Alerts, you will receive an email whenever a new story relating to it is published online. This allows you to keep on top of issues that are important in your local areas for example a supermarket development
FixMyStreet
- Users submit problems to the relevant local authority and councillors can respond with a comment
NextDoor
- An app for neighbourhoods where local people can exchange local information and get updates from public services
Surveys
- There are various ways of running a survey or a poll online for free, including on Facebook or Twitter, but one of the most commonly used is Survey Monkey
- Platforms for running petitions include change.org, but before using one of these free systems check to see if there is an official petition system run by the organisation you’re seeking to lobby
- Much like petition.parliament.uk most councils now have their own petition system with rules requiring a formal response, or even a council debate, once a certain number of signatures has been received
Always think before you post or share something online. Representatives can find themselves held to account years later for a misjudged comment made in a moment of madness.