In recent years, community engagement practitioners have embraced the power of digital participation tools such as online forums, surveys and social media polls.
It's easy to see why. With digital participation tools, we can create a flexible engagement strategy with easy access to instant reporting.
But there are drawbacks. Not everyone can, or will, engage online. For some people, face-to-face interactions are essential.
That’s why a hybrid approach is worth considering.
What's a hybrid consultation?
A hybrid consultation incorporates online and offline practices, for example:
- gathering feedback via online surveys and a door-knocking campaign
- hold a town hall community forum with an interactive livestream option
- running a quick poll on social media and via a vox pop at a local shopping centre.
In this article we'll take a look at why hybrid community consultations are important and how digital engagement platforms can best support them.
Let's jump in!
Capturing diverse voices
Every community supports a diverse mix of individuals, age groups, abilities, work schedules, care-giving responsibilities, and language and cultural backgrounds.
If we want to engage with such a diverse group of people we need to cast a wide net!
That's why a community engagement strategy must offer a lots of opportunities for participation. By including online and offline consultation tools, our consultation can capture more diverse views, and is a better representation of the community.
Empowering different demographics
Different demographic groups will prefer different ways of engaging. For example:
- Regional and rural communities: online engagement can be more convenient when time and distance is a factor
- Culturally and linguistically diverse communities: may require an interpreter or translation services
- Youth: prefer to engage on digital platforms and social media
- Older generations: prefer face-to-face and traditional consultation methods.
To be inclusive, an engagement strategy needs to accommodate everyone, including shift workers, people with disabilities, and those in marginalised communities.
Hybrid consultations are a way to ensure everyone can participate and share their feedback, giving us unique insights and a rich source of data for informed decision-making.
Analysing consultation data
An engagement platform like District Engage streamlines digital community consultations, and give engagement managers instant access to reporting and analysis.
But what about the data from offline consultations? How does this get reported? Unfortunately, for now, data collected from offline consultations such as face-to-face engagements, community events, and public meetings still needs to be manually processed before it can be effectively analysed and reported on.
For a hybrid consultation to be effective, it's important to make sure the data from online and offline engagement tools are incorporated into a single source of truth. By collating all data into your engagement platform, your reporting will be an accurate representation of the entire community.
How digital platforms can support hybrid consultations
While community engagement software continues to evolve, there are ways to ensure your engagement campaign can support a hybrid consultation. Here are some things to consider:
- Facilitate offline feedback: Consider the best way to extend the reach of surveys, polls etc, to capture offline feedback. Consider door knocking, postal campaigns, pop-up booths, QR codes, and town hall forums.
- Integrate offline feedback: To ensure a single source of truth for data analysis, always input offline feedback into your online system, including survey responses and general feedback.
- User-friendly interfaces: Make it easy for offline participants to provide feedback with simple, user-friendly interfaces.
- Seamless communication: By uploading offline data into the digital platform, you can provide community notifications and communications for all participants. This will keep everyone up-to-date with the project's progress, and close the feedback loop for all participants.
Embracing hybrid consultations will help you design inclusive engagement strategies that reach out across diverse communities. While there are still limitations to the role that digital platforms play in hybrid consultations, their valuable reporting and analytic capability plus their notification system, makes it worthwhile to use their engagement tools and integrate offline feedback into the online system.
At District Engage, we're excited by the opportunity to work with community engagement practitioners to harness the power of technology to empower communities. If you want to find out more about running a hybrid consultation, reach out to us to find out more about our platform, tools and resources. You can also request a demo, or register for a free trial. Have a chat to our team today.
