How Edinburgh Council created meaningful feedback loops on women’s safety
The challenge
In June 2022, Edinburgh Council launched a consultation on women's safety in public places, a vital issue for communities. Billed as "the start of much wider work required to make Edinburgh 'safer by design' for everyone, particularly women and girls and people with protected characteristics", the project needed to collect views from hundreds of people who live, work, study or socialise in Edinburgh, providing the council with essential data and real-life experiences to inform decision making.
The council knew that to ensure real change, this couldn't be a one-off consultation. They needed an approach that would allow them to gather meaningful feedback, feed back to communities on what they'd heard, and launch follow-up engagement that demonstrated they valued people's responses and were willing to take action. They also needed to reach diverse communities across the city, making accessibility a key consideration.
The approach
Edinburgh Council, who have worked with Delib since 2015, used Citizen Space for the initial three-month consultation, combining focus groups with an online survey. The platform's tried and tested capabilities made it the natural choice for their work on next-generation consultations.
When they launched phase two in March 2023, they took full advantage of Citizen Space's capabilities to build an inclusive, easy-to-use survey that guaranteed quality feedback. Alongside multiple choice and open response questions, the survey used Citizen Space Geospatial to enable respondents to drop a pin on a map when marking areas where they feel safe, then add further details if they wanted to.
This visual approach gave the council crucial, location-specific insight with more easily readable data than if the survey had required residents to provide long-winded or vague text descriptions of locations. To further heighten accessibility, the survey was made available in Polish, Arabic, simplified Chinese and Urdu.
The results
Through their extensive use of Citizen Space's capabilities, Edinburgh Council gained meaningful insight on an issue that impacts everyone who spends time in the city. The activity collected views from hundreds of people across Edinburgh, providing real-life experiences and location-specific data to inform improvements to public safety for women and girls.
By feeding back and following up on the initial activity with a second phase, the council demonstrated that they truly valued people's responses and were willing to take action on them, a key factor when it comes to legitimacy and encouraging public engagement in future activities.
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.