Hijacking Consultations – Does It Actually Matter?

It’s something we’ve come across a lot over the years here, the worry that if you take consultation online, you’ll just open yourself up to campaign groups and special interests stuffing your consultation full of their unique take on the world, meaning your results won’t be representative or particularly accurate.

Its a fair worry, and one that applies across all consultation really, other than perhaps focus groups. If you put paper surveys in a library,  what’s to stop someone taking a pile of them and filling them all in under different names? Even inviting people to write letters and emails in response to a consultation can be wide open to ‘sock puppeting‘

We’re pretty proud of the work we’ve done in this area over the years. I’m not going to detail it all here for obvious reasons, but safe to say we’re confident that our consultations are as proofed against multiple respondents as they can be. Without relying on user registration either, which ironically just puts off real respondents more than it does campaigners.

But some feedback we had yesterday from a client who ran their budget consultation using Budget Simulator this year made me think about this issue in a different way.

In a nutshell, they were worried that the budget consultation results may have been skewed by internal teams trying to use the simulator to allocate themselves more budget. On the face of it, a fair worry, but less so when you think about it.

First of all, I wondered how this could be prevented, but it seems filtering and preventing these sorts of responses is nigh on impossible. If each person is responding once as an individual and from their own computer, then you can’t start filtering that without the risk of filtering ‘real’ respondents too. You could try email verification of the set or a sample once the consultation’s closed, but again the return for the effort is likely to be minimal.

So, if in essence you can’t beat them, then why not join them?

Why not openly state that you want staff to take part in your budget consultation, so much so that you want them to identify themselves as staff members in the demographics questions? Then once the results come in, report on the overall picture, then on what the public and staff member groups each said. The contrasts could be interesting and informative for one. Two groups of people, both wanting improvement, but with two different viewpoints.

Then report back to your staff about what they said and how it compared with the view of the general public, as well as what you’re going to do as a result of their comments. Do that, and you’ve turned what initially looked like a consultation problem into a definite employee engagement win.

But what if you just can’t trust your staff not to fight for their vested interests? Well, maybe it’s worth thinking about if your view reflects reality.

If you’re reading this, it’s fair to assume you work in the public sector or know a bit about what it’s like. So what are the two most common financial comments you hear from people who work in the sector then? I’d wager they’re “We just don’t have the money to do what we’re expected to do” or the alternative “So much money’s wasted round here isn’t it!”.

If true, then both of these comments show that your staff, just like your residents, want to see money spent in the most effective way, and won’t just be looking to fund  their own gold plated mouse mats and a cigar humidor for under their desk.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped worried about vested interests and campaign groups taking part in consultations, and instead encouraged them to get involved in the discussion out in the open. After all, the best way to deal with anger is to listen to it, and you never know what you might learn.