How Belfast City Council brought consistency to their public consultation
The challenge
Belfast City Council's approach to public consultation was inconsistent, with different departments running consultations in slightly different ways. Most were hosted through the council website, either asking for responses to a document via email or linking out to a separate survey tool. This made consultations hard to find, contributed to lower response rates, and created an accessibility problem for anyone responding on mobile or using assistive software. The lack of standardisation also made for a confusing experience for citizens who engaged with more than one department. Belfast wanted to overhaul their approach and bring everything together in one place.
The approach
Citizen Space gave Belfast a single, branded platform through which all departments could run their consultation activity, with no limit on the number of users or departments that could access it. Centralising everything in one place made it far easier for site administrators to monitor activity and maintain consistent standards across the organisation. Features like saved questions made it straightforward for different teams to reuse standard elements such as demographics questions, while the platform's support for embedded documents, fact banks, images and video meant consultations could contain everything a respondent needed without requiring them to download or open separate files. Being WCAG 2.1 compliant also ensured consultations were accessible to people using screen readers and other assistive software.
The results
Belfast were able to create well-designed, engaging consultations that were easy to navigate and pleasant to respond to, helping to increase response rates and giving citizens greater confidence that their input was welcomed and valued. The shift to a centralised model also brought meaningful operational benefits, giving administrators a clear view of consultation activity across the whole organisation and making it much easier to raise and maintain standards consistently.
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.