As part of Citizen Space, we offer training to clients who use the system to show them how to use it of course. But having run a training session on the system for two large government departments yesterday, it struck me that we’re actually offering far more than that, so here’s a brief rundown of what that line called ‘training’ on an invoice means to Delib.
- We don’t just want to show you how to use Citizen Space, we want to show you how to use it to its maximum potential. We’ll show you how to integrate the whole system with your existing website yourself with little to no effort. We’ll give you ideas for how else to generate more traffic to, and so participation with, your consultations. We’ll show you how to run consultations that include images, videos and sound files without having to bother your IT team for help.
- We’ll teach you how best to stop people responding to your consultation multiple times to skew the results, and why user registration is pretty much useless at preventing this.
- We’ll help you understand how consultation works best on the internet, understand the ways in which it differs from other forms of consultation, and how you can build one consultation to appeal to a wide range of different participants all in one place.
- We’ll demonstrate how tracking participant activity can help you understand which engagement and promotion activities are working, and which ones are a waste of time and money.
- We’ll explain how web accessibility is more than just saying ‘W3C AA’ then changing the subject, why making sure your consultations are accessible is important from both legal and consultation points of view, and how simple it is to make sure you’re meeting your requirements
- We’ll show you how to get the most out of the responses you receive using the analysis tools in Citizen Space, and advise you on the best way to construct consultations to make sure you’re getting the most out of your respondents.
- We’ll teach you how running consultation online isn’t just another string to your bow, it’s an important process that can be used to improve all the processes and procedures that go on in your consultation activity already, including offline.
- Finally, we’ll teach you anything else you want to know whilst we’re there, just ask. So far, we’ve covered how to run consultations in multiple languages, even ones that have no written form, how google works, why social media isn’t necessarily the most important thing to worry about, and how to turn consultation into real conversation of value to both sides.
We think this approach adds real value for our clients, above and beyond just showing them how to work the system. If you just want that, you can do it with the comprehensive free user guide, running as it does to over 100 pages long already.
Don’t just take our word for it though, here’s some of the feedback we got from clients at yesterday’s training session.
“The trainer was very knowledgeable and the pace of the course was good. It was also great to get to do it ‘hands-on’ rather than just being talked at.”
“The course was well organised and hands-on, rather than a lecture, which was great.”
“The session was very useful. I have learnt how to create an online consultation from start to finish and think it will be easy enough to share learnings with other members of my team.”
