Bringing consistency to the consultation process

Our approach

Winchester City Council generally conducted consultations well – but they were dissatisfied at a lack of consistency in their internal processes. They wanted to ensure that the same methodologies were being deployed across the organisation and to be confident that the quality of engagement remained high.

Moreover, a new Council leader was elected, whose key challenges included the delivery of a new Council Strategy. One of the core principles for delivering this strategy was insight and engagement from residents and businesses to better understand their needs. So Winchester wanted to adopt a system to support and facilitate excellent public consultation.

The Council chose to adopt Citizen Space, as it was seen as an ideal way to standardise processes across the organisation. The platform allowed them to manage all their consultation activity in one place, and also came with several features that would enhance the Council’s engagement.

This included the ‘We Asked, You Said, We Did’ (WAYSWD) section. One of the Council’s biggest priorities was to support teams to develop a consultation process from its planning stage right through to the feeding back of results (rather than just a focus on survey stage itself). WAYSWD is a really practical way to help institute this mindset and approach, getting everyone running a consultation into the habit of setting out the process for participants and reporting back once decisions have been taken.

The platform is already proving successful with staff. Nadine Fox, Engagement and Insight Officer at Winchester City Council, asked people who had used Citizen Space for their feedback:

“It is an easy way to set up an online consultation. There are a variety of different question styles to use so we can design the consultation as we would like it to look.”

“…Citizen Space has been popular with respondents. And the support team have worked with us to ensure the consultations we put together are how we want them to be.”