Why should I take my Budget Consultation online?

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Speaking to people about budget consultation all day, I hear a lot of different reasons as to why people are hesitant to make the move to online. I thought that it might be useful for me to post up some of my typical response to the most common questions I get asked.

1. Isn’t putting budget consultation online more expensive than offline?

People have a perception that online is automatically going to be more expensive than offline because its high-tech and looks good. However, a well promoted online consultation can quickly turn in to the most cost-effective option to engage on the budget. With online, the cost of scalability is low – so gathering responses from 100 or 1,000 people costs the same amount of money. This wouldn’t be the case in terms of printing costs for a postal survey or hiring out a hall for a budget debate.

In terms of non-monetary expense, online can be seen as the low-cost option. Online solutions, such as the Budget Simulator, are designed to be easy to use and quick to deploy. No need to spend hours organizing and getting people to an event just for bad weather to mean that no-one turns up and all your effort goes to waste. When it comes to  online budget consultation, its quick to set up and easy to use – therefore a cost-effective use of your resources.

2. Won’t it be hijacked by interest-groups?

As my colleague Gez remarked on a previous post on this blog, no matter how you consult, there’s opportunity for this to happen. You wouldn’t cancel a public meeting because you thought someone with a particular gripe would be turning up, and therefore it doesn’t make much sense to let this stop you taking your consultation online.

I can only reiterate the great point that Gez made regarding embracing those interest-groups, rather than trying to exclude them. There’s nothing to gain in attempting to beat them because keeping them out of the conversation will only enliven their desire to make their thoughts known. Rather, get them involved and use the benefits of online consultation to keep check that they’re not attempting to skew the results.

Many people are surprised at how great online tools have proved in engaging new sectors of the population who wouldn’t normally respond to traditional consultation methods, thereby avoiding the ‘Usual Suspects’ and including the ‘Hard-to-Reach’.

3. But online consultation is not demographically representational, right?

The demographical representation question is dependent upon how you structure your consultation and what the aims of your consultation are. Sure, a workshop with the right number of people from the right mixture of backgrounds will provide you with some answers, but with a well thought-out approach to online consultation can achieve the above without missing out on the most beneficial aspect of the dialogue – providing the opportunity of engagement to all.

It’s perfectly possible to design an online budget consultation and send it to a pre-selected group of demographically representational people. Judging from the earlier point about scalability, it won’t cost you much more (if anything) to create a separate online questionnaire / tool that you can use and collect results exclusively from this set of people.

When considering the aims of your consultation, I see many authorities battling with the ‘Should we gain a proportional representation of our population’s priorities, or, try to engage the largest amount of people possible about the budget?’. It’s a tough one, but using advantages of online, you can easily achieve both of the above aims – plus your residents will thank you for opening the dialogue up to them on the whole too.

4. Won’t I be excluding people who don’t have access to a computer / internet?

This could be said for any consultation technique. The fact is that almost everyone has access to a computer in this day and age. Whether it be at home, work, or even a local library, there’s ever-increasing opportunity to have a computer at your disposal.

It’s much more likely that people have less opportunity to engage using other means of consultation. It would be fair to say that public meetings on the budget are not always well attended and tend to see the same types of people turning up to each event. Telephone surveys are a thing of the past, and with the increased levels of cold-calls people receive each day on the increase, their willingness to speak to people through this medium has decreased.

One of the biggest advantages of online consultation is the convenience factor – people can respond when they wish to at a time or place that they deem appropriate.

5. I thought you could only go into enough detail by using offline techniques?

Not always the case – a poorly planned postal survey or interview won’t yield much detail to residents’ thoughts on the budget. Yet a well planned budget consultation (regardless of the medium used to carry it out) will provide a comprehensive insight into the views of your residents. Furthermore, a well planned online budget consultation offers the opportunity to gain this insight en mass – providing detail and depth in numbers.

We’ve seen many Councils in the UK use the Budget Simulator to consult on the budget in a way which is relevant to the particular climate they find themselves in. For instance, Exeter recently asked their residents to set their priorities whilst making a 5% decrease in spending using the Budget Simulator. It would have been very difficult for them to consult in this way using a questionnaire without giving the individual responding a headache and gaining a less than relevant response.

It’s fair to say that in the past face to face interviews might have offered detailed insight on the budget. Yet as we move forward and technology develops, it seems clear that online has already emerged as the best way to gain a deliberative and relevant response to your budget consultation.

I hope this is of use to those who might be thinking about taking their budget consultation online. If anyone has any more questions that I might be able to help with or if you have anything to add to the points raised, please feel free to leave a comment below.