Further to my post last week about delivering the BBC Trust’s online consultation system, here’s a pleasing example of it in action: the Trust are currently running a consultation on the BBC’s on-demand services and have been promoting it through iPlayer.
We like this for a few reasons:
- as big iPlayer fans, it was just exciting to turn up there and see something we’d been involved in!
- as fans of online consultation, it’s great to see such prominent promotion. One of the advantages of running consultations online is that it’s comparatively easy and affordable to reach huge numbers of people. Often, though, there’s a hesitancy to take full advantage of that because of the perceived problems of handling that volume of feedback; that seems to me, though, to be both counter-productive and counter-intuitive. I reckon the BBC Trust will get much better value from their consultation because of their willingness to drum up as much participation as possible and then figuring out how to meaningfully process that large volume of information.
- as fans of effective consultation, it’s great to see dots being joined – it seems so simple to flag up a consultation about on-demand services alongside one of the most well-used of those on-demand services but it’s amazing how often things like this get missed.
This last point in particular is often an easy win and an example that anyone running an online consultation would do well to follow:
join the dots – if you’re running an online budget consultation, can you include the URL in people’s council tax statements? If you’ve set up a website coordinating your consultation activity, why not add it to an existing ‘do it online’ section of your main website or similar?
By the way, you can take part in the BBC Trust’s consultation about on-demand offerings at http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consultations/departments/bbc/bbc-on-demand-offerings/consultation/consult_view
