The Review of the Funding of Political Parties Webchat

URL

http://chat.partyfundingreview.gov.uk/

LESSONS LEARNT

Strengths

• The webchat followed on from the online forum, allowing participants to respond to interim assessments based on the previous engagement activity;
• Forum registrants received direct invitations to participate in the webchat;
• Every question submitted received a direct, personal response from Sir Hayden Phillips;
• Participants could follow up on the responses from Sir Hayden Phillips;
• There was a sense of the webchat being an event;
• A touch typist was present to allow quicker upload of answers;
• There was no need for the users or the managers to download or install software to take part;

Potential for improvement

• It was hoped that a greater number of participants would have been attracted to the webchat than who turned out in the event;
• Rather than a isolated event, more than one webchat could have been held and at different times to accommodate different types of user lifestyle;
• Pre-submitted questions could have been encouraged ahead of the webchat for those not able to participate in actual event.

OVERVIEW

See the Review of the Funding of Political Parties Forum case study.

POLICY PURPOSE

The webchat was held following the publication of an Interim Assessment from the Funding of Political Parties Review. The Interim Assessment set out core issues and choices that face the public and political parties.

This online question and answer session was designed to provide stakeholders, members of the public and participants in the online forum with an opportunity to put questions to Sir Hayden Phillips questions about the Interim Assessment.

MODEL

‘Real time’ webchat based on blog/instant messaging hybrid (third-party build and hosted on external servers).

The webchats were readable by anyone, but registration was required to contribute. Registration was restricted to those who had participated in the online forum.

This webchat was run on a ‘question and answer’ format. Participants could post a question and follow up on the response from Sir Hayden Phillips. There was no technical limit to the number of questions a participant could ask. Participants could not respond to questions posted by other participants, or to Sir Hayden’s response to these questions.

The site was real time but pre-moderated. Moderation was carried out by the Party Funding Review team. Moderators checked each question against the terms of the site before publication. Moderators staggered submitted questions to ensure that all participants had at least one question published and answered.

DURATION

October 30, 2006, between 13:00 and 14:00.

PUBLICITY

Those who had taken part in the online forum were contacted directly and invited to participate in the webchat.

The Party Funding Review website linked to the webchat.

It was also publicised via press releases and through contacts with stakeholders.

OTHER METHODS

Participants could contribute to the review by letter, email or via meetings that were held following the publication of the Interim Assessment.

USER PROFILES

13 people registered with the webchat. All the participants were male.

All evaluation survey respondents (n=5) said that they were frequent internet users – the majority accessed the internet from home.

A high proportion of webchat registrants were politically engaged – 4 had voted in the last general election and 2 were members of political parties. Around half of the respondents had participated in deliberations online in the past (note that not all the webchat participants participated in the Review’s forum); 2 said that they had participated in webchats previously.

USAGE TRENDS

13 registrants submitted nine questions and four follow-up comments. Sir Hayden Phillips made nine responses and posted two comments.

The event attracted a high number of spectators and the website attracted traffic in the months following the webchat:

USER FEEDBACK

User feedback was limited. Those who did respond said that they found the webchat useful and that they believed that the online process could make politics and deliberations more accessible to the public. All said that they would participate in a similar exercise in the future.

DETAILED FEEDBACK

One factor about this webchat that stood out to the Digital Dialogues team was that the Review team were very clear on the functions they wanted this exercise to perform. It was to allow forum participants the ‘right-of-reply’ on the Review’s interim assessments; and to allow the Review team to clarify these responses. This clarity of purpose was sometimes lacking in other case studies.

An invitation to participate in this webchat was open to all those who had registered with the Review’s previous online forum. In the event, very few people took up the opportunity to submit a question (although a significant number of spectators did visit the chat as it took place). Those who did participate appreciated having the opportunity to discuss party funding and the Interim Assessment Report with Sir Hayden directly.

The informal and interactive dynamics of a webchat allows for a more fluid type of participation but only where the moderation and software permits it. It is important to maximise this by enabling a faster turnaround of questions and answers to prevent participants from wondering about the status of their submissions. This could have been achieved here by allowing a live question and answer session without pre-moderation by the consultation team on the basis that participants were registered and had been involved in previous engagement activity. However, it should be noted that in the case of this webchat, the intention was not to vet questions; it was to stagger questions to ensure that participants had at least one question answered.

FOLLOW UP

The Party Funding Review has now been completed and its final report was published in March 2007.