Amongst the different public sector organisations, PCTs are very often responsible for decisions that affect huge numbers of people and cover issues that people feel strongly passionate about.
These issues and decisions are often difficult. This makes it all the more important to consult on them, but at the same time all the more daunting a prospect.
We’ve been running online consultations since 2004, frequently around difficult or contentious issues. Particularly relevant to PCTs, we worked with Barnet, Enfield and Haringey PCTs on a shake up of health service provision across that area, and with NHS London on their ‘Capital Idea’ project, again looking at a wide range of healthcare provision issues. We learned a lot from this work, so here are some of our top tips, gleaned from these and similar projects.
1) Have a transparent process
Trust and credibility are crucial to managing a successful consultation on a difficult issue. Getting online shows that you’re not afraid of asking the question to anybody.
2) Own the conversation, don’t have it own you
If it’s controversial, people will make their feelings known somewhere whether you like it or not. It’s better to be involved and active from the off. After all, the absent are always wrong.
3) Provide lots of channels for participation
Show a real desire to hear from people in any way that may suit them, online, exhibitions, emails, phone calls, even faxes! These should never be just one channel for response, although you can put more into those that are more cost-effective per response, such as online. When we worked on the Lewisham ‘Picture of Health’ project, we managed multiple response mechanisms, with people able to contribute by leaving voicemails, sending faxes, attending in-person meetings and returning paper forms as well as being able to complete the online survey.
4) Set up background information
Provide as much detail as you can, ideally in different layers so people can read as they want to. Provide topline information to engage, more detailed background to inform, and every document you can release around the process to show openness.
5) Provide the consultation in different languages and formats
The message should match the audience, so consider using media such as pictures and videos as well as the more traditional multiple language approach.
6) Set out clear options where possible
If you’re consulting on a decision, present the actual decision and all of its alternatives as options, not some vague questions related to it with free text answers. Otherwise, people assume that you’ll just interpret responses to match what you want to hear.
7) Provide ongoing updates and news
A consultation typically takes three months, but should have a middle, not just a start and an end. Use the consultation to build an engaged community, not a black box into which responses fall, never to be heard from again. Community engagement at this stage makes later implementation of decisions much easier.
8 ) Accessibility
People have different access needs, be it through the internet or offline public meetings. Don’t let access barriers even become an issue, they’re a potential distraction that you can easily avoid from the start.
9) Incorporate real-time input and feedback
If you have an event, post some photos and a short report about it online the next day. If you’re encouraging conversation online, then summate it and your thoughts on it from time to time.
10) Engage with people where they are
Don’t, for example, insist on them coming to your offices to inspect a document hidden in a filing cabinet in a disused basement. Identifying your key audiences from the start can help greatly with this.
11) Talk to bloggers, forums, news outlets
You don’t have to engage every respondent yourself. Find out who the key influencers in your area are, both online and offline, and send them information and updates that they can share with people. You’d be surprised how happy they may be for you to keep them ‘in the loop’.
12) Conduct clear, appropriate communication
You know it’s important in your documents, flyers, meetings, etc, and you’d get experts in all those disciplines to prepare your material because the best intention badly presented will be harmful. So make sure you do the same online – writing for the web is a distinct skill; just copying text from printed documents and putting it online is very rarely successful.
13) Make time for a multi-phase consultation process
If you know a difficult decision is coming up, start a broad ideas-gathering or discussion process early, and use the information from it to inform and strengthen the content of the later formal consultation. For BEHFuture, we ran a two phase process, with Phase 1 gathering ideas to inform the formal Phase 2 consultation.
14) Deal with frequently asked questions
If you’ve done your early discussion work well, and have an ear to the ground, you should know what people’s common concerns and arguments are up front. Include this information in your formal consultation itself, answering clearly and simply all of the points that have been made.
15) Audit trails and reporting
Make sure you can demonstrate that you have been open and honest about the entire process if it’s ever challenged. Online consultations make it easy to store all the information and responses centrally for future reference. Perhaps even publish online all of the responses submitted in an anonymised form, so people can carry out their own analysis and see that you came to the conclusions you did in an open and honest manner.
There are clearly some key themes running through the points above, which can be distilled down to openness, opportunity and clarity.
