Session One: Leveraging Technology, Thursday 1 May, 2014 Robyn Cochrane, Fergal Coleman and Sarah Bishop

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New Voices, Better Communities Leveraging Technology to Enhance Community Consultation and Engagement

With an ever evolving demand for service provision at the Local Government level and the

continued push to do more with less, there has never been a more critical time to engage the

community in decision making.

Community engagement professionals recognise that effective consultation is often labour-

intensive, involves substantial costs and presents a variety of challenges. However,

advances in technology over the last five years have provided the sector with opportunities

to engage and consult faster and broader than ever before – and reach the people beyond

just the ‘loudest’ voices.

Traditional public meetings and written submissions alone are becoming less and less

relevant to communities today that are digitally enabled, time-poor and increasingly mobile.

The convenience of technology provides more opportunities to participate at any time, from

any place.

The community’s expectations are changing…

The private sector is leading the way when it comes to harnessing the power of digital

innovation, for example Michael Hart, CIO of the Commonwealth Bank has been quoted

saying that the CBA now conducts 95 percent of its transactions over the Internet.1 Similarly,

sites like Amazon.com allow people to buy and sell anywhere, anytime, make user-specific

product recommendations and provide 24 hour online assistance. Services are constantly

evolving to meet the expectations of their customers.

As a result, people now expect to have the same online experience with their Council,

whether it is customer service, program and service delivery or community consultation.

This presents challenges for Local Government trying to keep up with the community’s

changing expectations, the pace of technological change and how to manage and get the

most value from the large volumes of data now being generated.

“In the past we (local government) told the community what we were doing, we have now

evolved to engaging the community in what we propose to do, but the expectation of the

community today is that not only will they be engaged but they will directly influence and will

have control over what happens. This is not an unreasonable expectation.”

– John Nevins, CEO, City of Kingston.

How do we use technology to effectively reach our community, harness their insight

and use it to enhance productivity and deliver ongoing value?

Experience with the LivingKingston2035 project demonstrates three ways technology can

enhance consultation and engagement:

1. To create broader awareness about issues or consultations;

2. To increase reach and opportunities for participation; and

3. To manage, draw meaning and derive ongoing value from data.

1 Malcolm Turnbull, Minister for Communications. AIIA Speech: Navigating Analytics Summit, 20 March, 2014.

Session One: Leveraging Technology, Thursday 1 May, 2014 Robyn Cochrane, Fergal Coleman and Sarah Bishop

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Case Study: LivingKingston2035 Throughout 2012, the City of Kingston undertook the most significant community consultation in its history to inform the development of a shared vision for the municipality of Kingston (located in Victoria) looking towards 2035. The project, Living Kingston 2035, involved a 12-month staged consultation period from 1 January to 31 December 2012. Key goals from the outset were to work in a genuine partnership with the community to create a shared vision; embrace best practice public participation principles - inform, consult, involve, collaborate and empower; and to embed technology throughout the entire consultation. Creating awareness and increasing participation

Technology was utilised to enhance the consultation at every stage:

By the end of the project over 6,000 community

members had participated. In total over 13,500

individual Like, Improve and Wish ideas were

submitted.

The use of technology in the consultation period significantly increased the level of awareness and participation, but also presented the challenge of how to manage and draw meaning from all the data.

Session One: Leveraging Technology, Thursday 1 May, 2014 Robyn Cochrane, Fergal Coleman and Sarah Bishop

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Deriving ongoing value from the data Using technology, a special data-management software called NVivo, every one of the 13,500 ideas were accurately recorded and coded. This allowed the data to be sorted and analysed by a range of segments and demographics. Not only did this inform the development of the

25 year vision narrative and four-year Council

Plan, but now provides the City of Kingston with

ongoing access to an interactive community

knowledge bank.

Today this resource is still being used to inform other operational and planning processes

thereby maximising the organisational return on investment in the consultation.

Using the technology, a series of reports with varying levels of detail were also generated and released to the community, as is best practice in the public participation sphere. Making the data publicly accessible empowers individuals, government agencies, local service providers, private industry and community organisations with information to develop products and services that the community wants and needs. This is in line with State and Federal Government open data initiatives (e.g. http://data.gov.au).

Lessons from LivingKingston2035: Tips for Conducting a Successful Technology Enabled Consultation

1. Think people first, just in new channels

Design the consultation approach to suit the people you want to hear from. It’s no longer realistic to expect people to come to a physical meeting or use a single online tool of your choice. Find the online channels they are using and develop a technology plan in tandem with the overall project plan to align online and offline activities to broaden participation.

2. Personalise for your community, take them on your journey

Use branding, language and images that appeal to your community and consider the use of community ambassadors to give a local face to the consultation. Video content works well to add a more personal and conversational tone and can significantly improve understanding. Relentlessly market the project via a broad range of communication channels through every stage of the project to keep momentum.

3. Take time to plan and scope each step

Carefully consider each step in the online consultation process, take the time to map the journey from the users perspective, is it easy to understand and simple to use? Ensure security of personal details and privacy and use analytics to measure and understand what works. Carefully investigate technology suppliers, open source or industry standard solutions are preferable.

4. Make data central to every consultation

Plan how you will collect, store, analyse and use the data. Capture participant demographic data to describe and profile participants (online and offline), re-use the consultation data for other planning and decision-making purposes, and adopt a practice of ‘open data’ by making the data publicly available.

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5. Prepare for the future: open source, open data, open standards

The open government world is growing worldwide. It can save your organisation a lot of money and allow you to harness the skills of a worldwide community for the benefit of your stakeholders. Make sure you start developing your understanding of open source, open data and open standards within your IT and communication departments.

Questions to consider How well is your organisation leveraging technology in consultation to enhance productivity?

How much will your organisation spend on community consultation in 2013-14? Do you

have an organisation-wide online consultation model?

Are your consultations reaching enough people and providing a mix of participation options? Are you gathering a broad range of views and confidently making decisions based on solid community evidence?

Is data central to every consultation with the community? What happens with the data– how are you collecting, analysing and storing it? Are you deriving ongoing value internally or releasing it to the community?

Further information and resources Detailed information about how technology was embedded in every

stage of the LivingKingston2035 project is available in the working

paper “Best Practice Community Consultation: How to embed

technology in consultation to broaden participation”.

Further information about how NVivo was used to manage, sort and

generate reports from the LivingKingston2035 consultation data is

available in the working paper “LivingKingston2035: Creating an

informed vision with NVivo”.

Please contact Robyn, Fergal or Sarah for a copy, or connect with us on

LinkedIn.

Other useful resources

Living Kingston 2035: www.livingkingston.com.au

Australian Government (open public datasets): www.data.gov.au

Idea Scale (online crowd sourcing): www.ideascale.com

International Association of Public Participation (IAP2): www.iap2.org.au

NVivo data analysis software program: www.qsrinternational.com

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Contact us

Sarah Bishop was the Communications and Public Affairs Manager at the City of Kingston during the LivingKingston2035 project. She is now Director of Activate Consulting specialising in strategic communications, community engagement and reputation management. Sarah is passionate about helping organisations achieve their objectives by improving communication with their people, key stakeholders and community.

Contact: sarah@activatepeople.com au.linkedin.com/in/sarahbishopau/ 0403 214 449

Dr. Robyn Cochrane led the City of Kingston’s Living Kingston 2035 project. Robyn is Lead Researcher for Cochrane Research Solutions, currently works with Monash University and has a background in local government, vocational education and training and community sectors. Robyn’s strengths include: qualitative and quantitative research; online and traditional community consultation approaches and employee engagement.

Contact: robyncoc@bigpond.net.au au.linkedin.com/in/robyncochrane 0438 072 280

Fergal Coleman is a Director of Symphony3, a Melbourne based IT Consulting Firm. He specialises in digital strategy and communications and is passionate about helping his government clients to create successful digital strategies and develop social media strategies that deliver community outcomes. Fergal has extensive experience facilitating workshops and delivering training on digital strategy, social media and online business.

Contact: Fergal.coleman@symphony3.com au.linkedin.com/in/fergalcoleman/ 0423 198 184

Acknowledgment We would like to acknowledge the City of Kingston for granting permission to use its material in this paper and commend the community inspired leadership shown by the City of Kingston in undertaking this project. For further information about the ongoing implementation of the LivingKingston2035 vision, please contact the Performance Planning Department at the City of Kingston on 1300 356 653.