The potential uses of QR codes in Citizen Space

Posted on November 4, 2011 by RowenaF

Following on from a recent post on the Delib blog I thought it would be useful to look at some uses for QR codes for Citizen Space clients.

So what are QR codes and how are they relevant to Citizen Space?

Quick Response codes (QR codes) allow smartphone users to gain immediate access to what is relevant to them. The codes can easily be used with Citizen Space to link straight through to a relevant consultation record, allowing stakeholders to immediately access a consultation of interest and relevance to them.  QR codes are dynamic and exciting and can help increase participation when used well.

Ofcom recently reported that over a third of UK adults now have a smart phone and given that Citizen Space is usable on a smart phone, a member of the public can scan the QR code and participate in the consultation on their phone.

How can QR codes be used to promote Citizen Space consultations?

Here are a few ideas on how Citizen Space users can use QR codes to help promote their consultation records:

  • Use QR codes in places where local stakeholders will have time to sit and engage in a consultation (such as on bus stop posters in a local library or in patient waiting rooms).
  • Use local businesses to display QR codes for neighborhood consultations.
  • Use QR codes on areas subject to budget cuts. For example posting them on items subject to budget cut backs or consultation.

Examples of using QR codes in practice within Councils currently:

One last thought on QR codes and place making

Interestingly QR codes can also be used to allow individuals to get information on their surroundings. Meanwhile in the US, Port Townsend are using QR codes and Microsoft Tags as a way to enhance place making and to help residents become familiar with their surroundings.

For more information on how to use QR codes in conjunction with our awesome suite of apps or for a Citizen Space demonstration please contact Rowena or Ben on 0845 680 0575

Posted in Citizen Space tips & tricks, Digital democracy news, News about Citizen Space | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

Seven interesting pieces of news about UK councils working with the community and voluntary sector

Posted on October 17, 2011 by BeccyB

There’s currently lots of really interesting news and reviews about the UK voluntary sector, local councils and local commissioning. We’ve picked out some of the best links we’ve seen recently ;-)

1) Community Development Foundation – ‘Community First’ funding stream
The aim of the fund is to ‘encourage people to do more to help each other out and give them the tools they need to make a difference.’ ‘Funding will be handed out by panels of local people so communities decide what’s important to them.’

2) Community budgets
‘A Community Budget gives local public service partners the freedom to work together to redesign services around the needs of citizens, improving outcomes and reducing duplication and waste.’

3) Best Value Guidance – duty to consult
Setting out the expectations of the way Local Authorities should work with voluntary and community groups, something that Citizen Space helps facilitate.

4) NCVO + councils + OPM
A piece from the National Council for Voluntary Organisation on best practice. Always good to hear suggestions on ways to make things better.

5) Pathways through participation – active citizenship
A great report from NCVO, IVR and Involve, which helps to answer the million dollar question ‘How and why people participate with society’.

6) Cabinet Office open letter
A letter from the Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, putting the impact of policy changes on charities and social enterprises into context.

7) Transforming Communities – Success stories
Nice to finish with some good examples :)

Does Citizen Space fit in with this?
Yes. Citizen Space is great for local community engagement and consultation.

With no limitations on the number of users, departments or consultations, local authorities can open up Citizen Space to local voluntary and community sector organisations, providing them with a platform to engage, consult and involve people.

For more information on how Citizen Space can be provided to voluntary and community organisations get in touch with Gill Crea or Ben Fowkes on 0845 638 1848, who can arrange a free online demo for you.

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Using remote working in the public sector to save costs

Posted on August 31, 2011 by BeccyB

Considering new ways of working? It’s not news that the UK public sector is under pressure to cut costs, and where possible to find ways to cut costs without cutting jobs, and without reducing quality of service.

Many people I’ve spoken to in the public sector recently (especially local authorities) tell me they’re looking at flexible working.

Flexible working can include reduced hours, job sharing, sharing desks and working from home. Benefits can include:

  • Preserving knowledge and skills but also reducing costs by retaining people on reduced hours.
  • Reducing office and support costs, including mundane but practical things like heating and lighting, as well as the need for travel and parking (which has an environmental benefit).
  • Remote working and flexible working can also be a great way to fit job and life together better, making it easier for those who have families and other commitments.

This seems sensible in principle but what about the practicalities of it?

From speaking to people it’s become clear that there’s a frequent limitation on working at home: not being able to get work done due to software packages having to be installed on certain computers that are tied to an office network.

Web based software like Citizen Space can be accessed from any computer without the need to install anything. As there are no limitations to the number of users or departments, this also means colleagues across the council and partnering organisations also get to experience the benefits too. This way the important work of community engagement is not hindered in any way.

This is just one of the many benefits to Citizen Space, so for more information on how it can help improve engagement for you and your colleagues, please get in touch to arrange a free online demo: rebecca@delib.co.uk | 0845 638 1848

Footnote – some useful links on remote working
Remote working has many benefits, but needs to be well managed and supported. Here are three useful links about remote working

Equality in teams who work remotely: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2360-equality-and-remote-teams

Blog from Marieke who works remotely as part of a community outreach team: http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/

Nice tips for working from home http://www.susiebmag.com/archives/1248

Posted in Citizen Space tips & tricks, Cost saving | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment |

An updated feature tour + other tweaks to this site

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Andy

We’ve put together a much-upgraded tour of Citizen Space. Simply we want to make it easier and quicker to see the features Citizen Space offers for public consultation and engagement.

The tour is organised into easy-to-navigate sections which explain the features clearly, illustrated with elegant screenshots and diagrams.

We’ve also improved the layout of our Citizen Space case study page, and made some tweaks to this tips & tricks blog – both again with the aim of making them easier to use. The goal with these kind of improvements is that you shouldn’t really notice them, you should just have a better experience using this site :)

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Stockport PCT choose Citizen Space for Online Health Care Consultation

Posted on July 20, 2011 by RowenaF

Stockport Primary Care Trust go live with Citizen Space online consultation system.

To see their live site and view their current consultations: Stockport PCT Citizen Space

» Case study of how Stockport PCT are using Citizen Space for patient engagement

Posted in News about Citizen Space | Tagged , , , , , , , |

How to add an Eventbrite consultation into Citizen Space

Posted on July 15, 2011 by JoannaH

I recently blogged on why Eventbrite is a brilliant tool to organise offline consultations (it’s also free!). If you’re convinced by its usefulness as I am, here’s how to integrate your Eventbrite consultation into Citizen Space:

In your Consultation Hub click ‘Consultations’ in the manage bar and then ‘Add Consultation.’

Then add an external link consultation, like so:

After you’ve submitted it, the Consultation Dashboard will appear. Click External link to add the URL of your Eventbrite event as the consultation.

Simple, eh? ;)

Posted in Citizen Space tips & tricks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

Getting the most from ‘Featured Consultations’

Posted on June 22, 2011 by AdamC

Citizen Space is a cloud-based web application, which means when we introduce upgraded features they’re available to you automatically, with no need to install or upgrade anything yourself.

The latest upgrade to Citizen Space included the very simple (but very effective) new feature of being able to feature a consultation on the consultation hub. Although it might seem like a small-step in terms of the benefits,  featured consultations are of more use than it may first appear:

1. Drive traffic to increase response

Its the obvious benefit, but worth stating. By giving a consultation a more prominent place on the hub you can influence the number of people who will come across it.

If you’re part-way through running a consultation and the response rate is less than you were hoping for, you can quickly get it up on the featured consultation section to increase its traffic. Alternatively, if one of your featured consultations has hit the number of responses you were hoping for, you can swap it with another without needing to take the consultation down.

2. Show what’s important to you

Different organisations have different interests in different things at different times. If your current focus is on making your area green, then featuring consultations to do with recycling makes complete sense.

The featured consultation area enables you to convey to your stakeholders what’s important to you and show how they can influence that issue.

London Borough of Barnet use Featured Consultations to show how they listen

3. Demonstrate how you listen

In the past, we’ve experienced that some people don’t get involved in consultation because they don’t think their submissions feed into decision-making.

Citizen Space is designed to demonstrate the whole process of not just people submitting their ideas, but displaying how those ideas influence high-level decisions once a consultation is closed. You can then feature a closed consultation to drive people’s attention to a record of what you consulted upon, what the public said and what happened as a result of it.

With the ability to embed an image and specific introduction for the featured consultation, Citizen Space gives you flexibility in making your consultation tool work best for your organisation.

If you have any other ideas on how to make best use of the featured consultation in Citizen Space, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Posted in Citizen Space tips & tricks, News about Citizen Space | Tagged , , , |

Wondering how we deal with customer support on Citizen Space?

Posted on June 21, 2011 by JoannaH

The Delib blog has provided an insight into our support process for clients using the Citizen Space app, including our techniques to improve efficiency. Learn more about our strategy here.

Posted in How we work | Tagged , , , , |

Why RSS Feeds are invaluable in consultation and engagement

Posted on June 3, 2011 by AdamC

One of the things I get most excited about when I demonstrate Citizen Space is the ability to create RSS feeds from the consultation hub.

This might sound a little bit geeky, but on a simple level its a sure-fire way to ensure that your consultations can be shared further than simply the place you create them. This helps you (and other interested parties) place consultations where it counts, rather than just your online consultation hub.

BBC Trust use RSS Feeds from Citizen Space to embed into their full website

Things really start to get interesting when you create custom RSS feeds from advanced searches in Citizen Space, introducing filters based on departments, audiences, wards/areas, issues and keywords.

Here’s a few ideas on how different stakeholders (both internal and external to your authority) can use RSS feeds to further the reach of your consultations:

1. Embed consultations from a particular department

Citizen Space allows you to have as many departments as you wish at no further cost. Therefore you could create an RSS feed for all open consultations run by the Planning Department. Your Planning Department can then embed this code into their section of your website to display all consultations relating to Planning at that moment in time.

2. Embed consultations where it matters

Sometimes people will have a desire to give their views when they might not have set out to do so. An example of this being when a person goes to the section of your website that deals with council tax information. By simply embedding an RSS feed of consultations relating to a ‘Budget’ keyword, you’re giving stakeholders the ability to give their views on how the money they pay in council tax is spent on an appropriate part of your website.

3. Embed consultations on Councillors’ blogs

Many local councilors run well-visited blogs these days. A very simple way for them to empower their local residents to engage with the council is for them to embed all consultations relating to their local ward(s). This is easily done by running an RSS feed of all consultations linked to their ward from Citizen Space.

4. Embed consultations on partner websites

Most authorities are likely to work with smaller partners including the fire and police authorities who might not have the budget to run their own engagement hub. By giving them an RSS feed code of all consultations relating to their organisation, they can automatically keep their stakeholders updated on consultations through their own websites.

The next step in consultation and engagement is how to make the bridge of getting people to engage in a place that is convenient and appropriate to them. Citizen Space embodies this concept, providing you with one place to host all consultation activity and then providing the tools to spread the reach of your engagement as far as possible.

Posted in Citizen Space tips & tricks, Cost saving, Digital democracy news | Tagged , , , , |

Consult more effectively & save costs at the same time

Posted on May 26, 2011 by AdamC

Here at Delib we speak to local authorities in the UK and beyond every day, and one of the overwhelmingly common issues we find that councils encounter is that of running consultation effectively.

An extremely familiar scenario is that there is one consultation officer who coordinates consultations for all departments across the council. The departments go to that officer with their proposed consultation and (more often than not) need advice on the designing of the questions as well as requiring it to be built using a survey tool and reported upon once the consultation has finished.

Obviously this is extremely resource intensive on the consultation officer who in most cases have other functions they are required to carry out.

The reason for this occurrence can be seen as two-fold:

1. In an effort to save costs a council will purchase a limited number of licenses for surveying software

2. Many councils are still in the process of moving to a more efficient way of working – and consultation officers regularly take the hit on this.

Citizen Space has been designed to facilitate the new way local authorities need to be working and a new way of procuring ICT within government.

The system has no limits or extra costs for the number of users, departments or consultations you can create. This empowers departments to build their own consultations and analyse/report on them. Consultation officers can maintain visibility and control through the permission levels that we’ve built into Citizen Space.

Our clients are able to work more effectively by sharing consultation across departments. They also save costs by not needing to pay more for additional licenses nor do they sacrifice the quality of their consultation and engagement.

If you’d like us to take you through a free demo of Citizen Space, please get in touch.

Posted in Cost saving, Digital democracy news | Tagged , , , , |

Citizen Space 1.4 live!

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Alex

This week we have been very pleased to release the latest version of Citizen Space…. 1.4!  (While we agree that version numbers aren’t the sexiest of names we like the satisfying progression and it certainly helps us technically in managing the code.)

The updates included have been discussed previously on this blog so I won’t go into detail, great thing is you can now check them out on the Citizen Space demo.

Continue reading →

Posted in News about Citizen Space | Tagged , , , , , |

The hidden cost of in-house

Posted on May 6, 2011 by AdamC

Over recent years its been great to see innovative and engaging work from various authorities in the realms of consultation and engagement. In our contact with the many public sector organisations we speak to, we’ve encountered many good and many not-so-good self-built consultation systems.

At a time where cost-effectiveness needs to enter every aspect of how Government work, it can be challenging to demonstrate how purchasing a consultation system proves to be cost-saving.

Here’s just a few of the cost benefits of using a dedicated consultation system such as Citizen Space, rather than opting to develop a bespoke system in-house:

1. The capital outlay of building a system

Designing things properly takes time. Time spent in meetings costs money and it took Delib (along with our colleagues at the COI) a lot of meetings to produce Citizen Space.
Furthermore, if you want a system up and running within (at the very least) a few months, it pays to look at already-built solutions.

2. There’s a cost to getting left behind

Most good software suppliers will provide regular updates to constantly improve the system and keep it competitive within the market.
The cost of going back to the drawing-board on a regular basis means that an in-house solution will either end up costing far more to upkeep than you had anticipated, or it simply won’t be upgraded and fall behind.

The goal-posts have changed slightly from where they used to be – the duty to engage remains, but all work must now carry the low-cost flag.

Citizen Space is constantly being improved-upon to ensure our clients are at the forefront of engaging effectively.

If you’d like a free demo of our Citizen Space, built in collaboration with the UK Government, please get in touch.

Posted in Cost saving, Digital democracy news, News about Citizen Space | Tagged , |