How to make your engagement activities more inclusive

Most consultation processes are designed by people who are good at consultation. That sounds obvious, but it has consequences. The default formats, long PDFs, dense surveys, multi-page response forms, suit the people who design them. They don't always suit the people meant to respond.

The result is a familiar pattern. The same kinds of voices come back time and again. Confident writers. Engaged citizens. Stakeholder organisations with the resources to draft formal submissions. Meanwhile, the people most affected by a decision, those with less time, less confidence, fewer formal skills, or less digital fluency, are quietly filtered out.

Making consultation more inclusive isn't about adding accessibility features at the end. It's about designing for a wider audience from the start. Here are eight things you can do to widen participation in your next engagement activity.

1. Start by asking who's missing

Before you design anything, look at who responded to your last consultation. Was the response demographically representative of the population it affects? If not, who was missing, and why? People with lower literacy? Younger or older respondents? Specific communities? People with disabilities? Carers? Knowing where the gap is tells you what to design for.

If you don't have demographic data on past responses, that's a finding in itself. Building demographic questions into your activities, with care and proportionality, helps you understand whose voices you're hearing and whose you're not.

2. Write in plain language

The most common barrier to participation isn't disability or digital exclusion. It's complexity. Policy language, legal phrasing, and acronym-heavy text exclude people who don't have the time or confidence to decode them.

Some practical principles: aim for shorter sentences. Use everyday words where you can. Define jargon when you must use it. Read drafts aloud. If you can't read a sentence comfortably without stumbling, your respondents will struggle too.

The Plain English Campaign and gov.uk's content design guidance are both useful starting points. Across the OECD, around 26% of adults score at the lowest levels of literacy proficiency. In England the figure is 18%. These aren't fringe audiences. They're a substantial share of the public your consultation should be reaching.

3. Show, don't just tell

Where a concept is hard to explain in words, use images, diagrams, or short videos. Maps are particularly powerful for any consultation involving geography, like planning, transport, or local environment, because they let respondents engage spatially rather than having to translate place names and grid references into a mental picture.

Visual content also helps people who read in a second language, people with cognitive conditions that make text processing harder, and respondents who are simply scanning rather than reading word by word.

4. Offer multiple ways to respond

Some people are happy to type. Others prefer to talk. Some find it easier to mark a point on a map than describe a location in writing. Others want to upload a document, draw, or attach a photo.

The more response mechanisms you offer, the more inclusive your consultation becomes, as long as you don't overwhelm respondents with too many options at once. The right mix depends on the question. A factual question might just need a checkbox. An open-ended one might benefit from offering both a text field and a voice option. If you're using Citizen Space, our recent Participation Plus+ add-on includes speech-to-text functionality that lets respondents speak their answers instead of typing them, which we'll come back to at the end of this piece.

5. Make the journey clear

Long, structureless surveys are intimidating. Respondents don't know how much they have left to do, what's coming next, or whether their time investment will be worthwhile.

Some practical fixes: keep activities short where you can. Tell respondents up front roughly how long it will take. Use clear progress indicators. Group related questions into chapters. Use skip logic so people only see questions relevant to them. End with a clear submission step and a confirmation that their response has been received.

6. Use Easy Read for accessibility, not as an afterthought

Easy Read is a recognised format originally designed for people with learning disabilities. It pairs simplified language with supporting images, larger typography, and a clearer visual structure. It's also useful for people with lower literacy, people reading in a second language, and anyone who finds standard text difficult to process.

The most common mistake organisations make with Easy Read is to treat it as a downloadable PDF buried at the bottom of a page, separate from the main consultation. That puts the burden on the respondent to find it, download it, fill it in, and post it back. It's better than nothing, but it isn't real inclusion.

If your platform supports it, run Easy Read versions as live online activities, just like any other consultation. That way respondents can take part on the same terms as everyone else, with the same submission process, the same confirmation, the same sense that their voice counts equally.

7. Test with real users, not just colleagues

Internal testing with colleagues is useful for finding bugs and broken links. It's much less useful for finding inclusion gaps. Your colleagues are professionals who do this for a living. They'll glide past the things that trip up real respondents.

Where you can, test with people who reflect the audience you're trying to reach: people with lower literacy, people with disabilities, older respondents, people who don't speak English as a first language. Even informal testing with two or three people from outside your usual networks will surface things internal testing won't.

8. Promote where the people are

Even the most inclusive consultation will fail to reach people if it's only promoted through channels they don't use. Social media, council newsletters, and government press releases reach a particular subset of the public. Reaching others may require partnering with community organisations, charities, libraries, schools, GP surgeries, or local advice services.

Think about who has trusted relationships with the people you're trying to hear from, and ask how they can help spread the word.

Where Participation Plus+ fits

These principles apply to any consultation platform, on any topic, in any sector. They're about how you design and run consultation, not which tool you use to do it.

That said, the right tool makes inclusive design dramatically easier. Citizen Space has been built around accessibility from the start, tested against WCAG 2.2 AA, screen reader compatible, and continuously developed in partnership with accessibility consultants. Our recent Participation Plus+ add-on goes further, adding two features built specifically for inclusive design: a new Easy Read activity type, co-designed with Easy Read specialists, and speech-to-text functionality that lets respondents speak their answers in the browser.

You can read more about Participation Plus+ in our overview guide, or speak to your Customer Success Manager about adding it to your subscription.

But whether you use Citizen Space or another platform, the underlying principle is the same: better consultation starts with hearing from more people. Designing for that, deliberately, is the most important thing you can do.