Engage Victoria
One of the world's leading platforms for community engagement
Introduction
Engage Victoria is a whole-of-government community engagement platform that empowers the Victorian community to participate in the development of government policies and programs.
With more than 1 million visitors each year, the platform provides surveys, polls, maps and online forums to enable the community to share their ideas and opinions on a range of topics and issues, helping to shape better policy and project outcomes for all Victorians.
Innovative features
Engage Victoria is a whole-of-government engagement platform that supports the public consultation process for 25+ government departments, and 1200+ administrators, as well as millions of Victorian citizens.
The platform provides customised approval workflows and granular permissions to enable cross-collaboration across government departments and teams, while maintaining strict security and accountability.
For engagement managers, the platform provides the tools and resources to build a compelling consultation project, including timelines, events, updates, notifications, hotspots and advanced mapping tools, as well as providing sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities.
Coupled with an innovative suite of engagement tools including surveys, polls, ideation tools, discussion forums and Q&As, Engage Victoria is designed to enhance community consultation, strengthen stakeholder engagement, and reduce the administrative burden of public engagement projects.
- Surveys
- Quick polls
- Discussion forums
- Q&As
- Map feedback
- Open & closed consultations
- Events
- Timelines
- Updates
- Notifications
- Custom approval workflows
- Granular permissions
Our approach
When the Victorian Government looked to replace their existing engagement platform, they chose our SaaS engagement product, District Engage.
Beginning with a collaborative, co-design process, our team worked closely with Digital Victoria to understand their specific needs, and integrate their feedback into the design of the platform. This led to innovations including a customised export schema to enhance engagement consultation reporting and feedback for all Engage Victoria users.
By utilising District Engage as a foundation, we could focus on developing bespoke enhancements to improve the user experience, workflow and reporting capabilities of the platform's 1200+ administrators.
Large scale migration
The migration of data from Engage Victoria’s previous platform was one of the most complex processes undertaken in this project. Over 50 GB of data was moved, involving the untangling of complex project data relationships and significantly simplifying the underlying database structure. The number of data tables was reduced by a factor of twenty.
Our team meticulously crafted migration scripts over several sprints, enabling continuous data updates. Regression testing was conducted on each incremental data migration to ensure data integrity and performance gains.
In total, we migrated over 15 million records to the new platform, including thousands of projects, administrator accounts, and historical submission consultation data. The simplified database structure facilitates easier data maintenance, quicker integrations, and improved performance.
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A bespoke frontend
One of the requirements of the new platform was an improved application of the Victorian Government’s front-end design system, Ripple. Using the decoupled architecture of District Engage, the District team applied a custom theme to the engagement website, utilising visual components from Digital Victoria’s Ripple front-end library.
This ensured a cohesive design and user experience across all Victorian Government websites.
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Key product features and benefits
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Co-design is key Co-design workshops with key stakeholders to enhance user experience for all Victorian Government department administrators. |
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Engaged community Represents the Local Government Act 2020, which stipulates robust community engagement practices. |
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Intuitive toolkit The development of a suite of intuitive participation and reporting tools to simplify the process of community engagement. |
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Large scale migration Over 50GB (15 million records) moved from the previous platform in a complex process. |
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Onboarding and admin experience Onboarding of 25+ departments and 1200+ admins, enhancing their experience with bespoke features and clear documentation. |
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Continuous Improvement An iterative approach to design and development to constantly improve user experience and build new features. |
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Bespoke front end Rigorous application of the Victorian Government Design System (Ripple) to frontend elements, ensuring platform alignment within the Victorian Government digital ecosystem. |
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Security Implementation of best-practice security protocols across all environments and administration functionalities. |
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Simplification Simplified data structure for ease of maintenance and future migrations. |
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Clear navigation Simple, consistent presentation of information and participation tools to ensure usability, making it easy for the public to engage with projects. |
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Improved workflows Improved workflow for website administrators reduces the burden on the core team for engagement consultation approvals. |
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Clear documentation Improved documentation delivery through a modern in-app overlay interface. |
Continuous Improvement with Statewide Collaboration
As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, District Engage runs quarterly improvement sprints with each guided by a co-design process that ensures new features are tailored to the needs of our users.
We work closely with Digital Victoria to collaboratively design, define and build features that are fit for purpose and informed by subject matter experts. This partnership is strengthened by Digital Victoria's dedicated working group, which includes representatives from various state government departments.
This working group plays a crucial role in shaping the development of new features by providing valuable insights into functionality and user engagement. Their input helps prioritise the feature requests that best meet the state’s requirements and the needs of over 1,200 platform administrators.
Summary
Engage Victoria is a platform that facilitates stronger engagement with the Victorian community, simplifies engagement creation for administrators, and ultimately fosters a better-connected community, driving improved policies and programs for all Victorians.
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