Setting sports priorities with Simulator: Alberta Sports Plan
The challenge
The government of Alberta, Canada needed to renew the Alberta Sports Plan – a comprehensive strategy setting the government's priorities on amateur sport in the province for the next 10 years.
The administration wanted to involve the public in this key decision-making activity. They were also keen to ensure that the process was open to a broad audience, genuinely engaged citizens, and was cost-effective.
The approach
Simulator allows citizens to explore for themselves the difficult choices involved in a major budgeting process. To most accurately reflect the decisions facing Alberta, we customised the platform into a Priority Simulator – with citizens required to 'spend' a set number of points across the various choices in the Sports Plan.
Users could adjust sliders to balance different options, with more detail provided via embedded YouTube videos. People could only submit their preferred configuration once all the points had been allocated. This draws residents into a deliberative process, carefully evaluating the possible options before submitting their considered preferences.
The results
By the end of the two month consultation window, Alberta had garnered more than 4,500 responses from residents across the province.
Budget Simulator was an outstanding resource for us during our consultation. While not using it for a budget purpose, the tool did allow us to obtain priorities around a given set of parameters. The platform was all that we could have asked for and even more...it was outstanding and met all of our needs.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.