Core Guidance

New technologies can be used to successfully promote democratic engagement throughout the policy cycle, enabling government to run consultations, inform and hear from the public, develop networks and build communities of practice. The various tools available are listed in Appendix A and this next section provides some core guidance that will assist organisations developing online engagement projects.

A key finding from Digital Dialogues is that online engagement exercises require time to gather momentum; simply setting up a website in the hope that people will come to it achieves little. Sites might initially spark interest (provided there is sufficient publicity), but this is not sustainable enough to enhance public engagement and political efficacy. Consider too that media attention is likely to be negative if the content and interaction are poor.

For online engagement to be useful to government, stakeholders and citizens, certain criteria have to be met. Public expectations of online engagement often start out low, even if their ideals are high. Successful engagement tools can overcome these barriers through careful planning and the development of good content and flexible practices. A well thought through engagement tool can be used to co-ordinate sustained and in-depth engagement with stakeholders throughout the policy cycle, provided it meets the requirements for success that are typical of offline forms of engagement.

The guidance below has been developed iteratively throughout the three phases of Digital Dialogues and is drawn directly from the case studies described in the three reports and supported by background research. It is by no means exhaustive; its aim is to highlight the process of setting up, running and developing online engagement and to promote good practice. The steps have been divided into three sub-sections:

• Pre-launch;
• Going live;
• Closing.

Under each step, key considerations are outlined. These are deliberately designed to be broad and generic because we recognise that every situation is different and unique. These guidelines, therefore, cover a range of techniques, tools and users potentially involved in an engagement exercise.

Pre-launch

The first step is to clearly identify and articulate your aims and objectives. Without these, it is impossible to decide on an appropriate engagement strategy. During this stage, the key questions are:

• What is the objective of the exercise?
• What styles of engagement are you using and why? For example public/stakeholder; formal/informal; open/closed
• What are the desired outcomes of the project and what outputs are you intending to produce (such as consultation responses, awareness raising or policy documents)?
• What risks do you face (internal and external)?

Online engagement is a multi-disciplinary exercise. It is important to bring together policy, communications and IT teams to develop the processes and tools. Each can contribute to the development of the overall engagement strategy. Consider managing risk, such as that people will not participate; that they will be critical or hostile; that the exercise will attract negative press or no media interest and do not ignore potential internal risks, such as any inherent resistance to openness or innovation. Subsequently, sufficient resources need to be devoted to the exercise so that they can remain involved throughout: there is a role for each.

Once the exercise has been properly scoped and the key internal stakeholders engaged, it is important to think about how you will market the exercise and recruit participants. Promotional activity needs to reflect your goals for the project, suit your budget and follow established department and governmental procedure. In this context, a balance of direct marketing and media relations techniques works well.

Give consideration to how the marketing and publicity of the engagement exercise will continue throughout the process, not just at the beginning; marketing must be ongoing to sustain and generate interest. When considering recruitment, it is important to consider:

• What types of people you want to recruit – is there a specific demographic or skill-set or do you want to get a range of people together?
• Do you want to broaden and deepen your stakeholder base or focus in on expert practitioners?
• If you want to bring expert stakeholders and the public together in deliberation; will this be their first meeting and are there any extraneous issues that might damage, derail or negatively impact on your engagement exercise?
• Are your participants in a ‘hard-to-reach’ group?

As well as using conventional marketing methods, consider ways of raising your online visibility before launch. Page rankings in search engines give a sense of the penetration of your engagement exercise online; choose a domain name that will reflect the search words that the public and stakeholders will use to find the site. Sites that are highest in search engine rankings are those that link to other sites and receive reciprocal links. Consider creating networks with existing online communities and resources. Promote the website name in your other material wherever appropriate to build awareness of it.

At this stage, it is important to think about resource implications throughout the exercise. Moderation on government websites does not require much administration, given the low volume of posts; but moderators are required to facilitate discussion, generate content, respond to users and provide feedback about the policy process. Before considering these issues, it is important to decide how you are going to evaluate the website, and tie performance indicators in with those used in the broader exercise.

Useful indicators for online engagement exercises include registrations (where relevant), posts/comments, unique visitors and repeat visits. The indicators you use should be built into the design of your website. For example, if you are basing your internal evaluation on site traffic, it is important to ensure that you have a suitable statistics package incorporated within your website.

Good engagement is not about quantity and so it is more important to identify ways of learning about participants and the result of their engagement. Important issues to consider are:

• Whether online activity was drawn into consultation or policy development processes;
• How much involvement participants had in the eventual outcomes and engagement process;
• Whether the engagement exercise addressed their concerns;
• Whether the public was informed of the policy process?

With the abundance of Open Source Software (OSS), it is becoming possible for government departments to develop engagement sites in-house, should they desire to do so; many hire contractors and use proprietary software instead. Either way, it is important to identify functionality and engagement requirements (such as the statistics package, mentioned above) prior to build, to be clear about lead-in times, and to ensure the involvement of policy, communications and IT staff. Engagement is not about the technology per se but choosing the wrong technology or a tool with poor functionality and low usability will negatively impact on the project.

The best engagement exercises start small. Design needs to be appealing, easy to use and consistent with your own branding and accessibility standards; a lack of conformity in these matters can lead to public distrust and confusion. Content needs careful thought: successful websites are engaging because they use the right kind of language (textual and visual) to convey information and invite feedback. When designing content, there are several questions that need to be considered:

• What are the key messages and priority questions?
• Do these need to be adapted from a consultation/policy document for publication on the web?
• Who is responsible for managing online content and making sure that information and discussions are regularly updated?
• Are they experienced in developing web copy?
• Will they have autonomy or will they require sign-off?
• Can the site make use of contributions from key policy makers?
• Will most content be developed prior to or after launch?
• Do you have static content for your various web-pages (see Appendix B)?
• Is content dynamic and can users make changes to it (as is the case for a wiki)?

More often than not, background information will be required by participants to enable them to take part and to inform their participation. Language can easily exclude people who are new to the policy area and so there can be a requirement to provide summaries of important policy debates, whereas those seasoned in political engagement may want to read policy documents in full. The terms of engagement need to be clearly articulated to those taking part in online deliberations (see Appendix C for an example). Such information must be displayed clearly on dedicated pages or via links to other websites. Where necessary, one or all of the following questions should be considered in consultation with the departmental consultation team, web team and legal experts:

• Does the site meet the required standards in the Cabinet Office Code of Consultation?
• Does the site meet the required standards in the Ministerial Code?
• Does the site meet the required standards in the Civil Service Code?
• Does data capture meet Data Protection and Freedom of Information requirements?
• Who owns user generated comments and content and how can it be used?
• Are accessibility standards observed?

Technical problems can arise during an engagement exercise and users require contact details to report problems. These can be minimised by keeping a log of errors that emerge during live testing pre-launch. This should not be limited to checking for technical problems; wherever possible, testing through simulated exercises should involve those communications, policy and web teams who are scheduled to be involved when a site goes ‘live’.

Going live

Where demographic information is required of participants (for example, in pre-engagement surveys – see Appendix D), it is important to ensure that your handling, storage, analysis and reporting of responses meets data protection standards. Initially, moderators need to be on hand to deal with any initial issues users have with registration and posting a comment. For this reason, it is vital that users have a point-of-contact for feedback and that a process has been developed to ensure that any comments or feedback provided is responded to quickly, accurately and appropriately.

One role of the moderator is to publish participant contributions (where necessary), facilitate discussion and provide information and guidance (see above). Approaches to moderation will depend on the nature of the engagement exercise. Additional factors to consider when developing moderation guidelines (examples can be found in Appendix E) are:

• Will you be moderating posts before or after they go live?
• Who can contribute – anyone or only registered users?
• What kind of platform are you using?
• Who is using the site – have they been consulted before and has this taken place online?

Moderators must check for new comments at regular intervals (the frequency will depend on the level of traffic but during busy periods it will be multiple times per day). Transparency in moderation is a very important component of successful engagement online. The moderation policy (outlined at the start of Appendix C) should always be provided for participants to read and applied consistently. If comments are moderated and removed then the poster should receive an explanation as to why; treat this as an exercise in education, not one of control.

Facilitation is the single most important aspect of any online engagement exercise and requires input from policy and communications experts. In its absence participants can lose interest and become frustrated, which can create reputational risks. It is therefore important to be clear who is responsible for content production, facilitation, prompting and so forth.

Regular policy updates and debate summaries are useful, providing returning users with an opportunity to catch up on the discussions that are taking place. This helps the policy team to clarify issues that are being raised; as a guide, the more regularly they visit the deliberation (not necessarily always to participate) the more efficient and constructive the post-activity analysis will be. It is also good practice to offer participants an opportunity to review the summaries and make queries or suggestions for inclusion.

Closing

Your platform should automatically archive the user-generated content, participation data, and all accompanying analytics. However, it is important to consider how this automated archive will be taken offline, stored and accessed by your team and how the public will be kept informed. In addition, if the intention is to use the site again for a follow-up exercise, you must decide how it will be developed and who by and whether a new URL is required.

Online participation exercises gather a great deal of data – the submissions, the participant details, site and server analytics. This aggregation and ability to filter this data set is one of the foremost attractions of online engagement tools. It is important to consider:

• Who will be responsible for analysing the data, and how findings will be used;
• Whether the key performance indicators were useful in highlighting key issues and trends.

At the end of each exercise it is good practice to provide – as a package – transcripts, an executive summary and a statistical report. Consider asking participants to review the report. Provide a deadline and request comments on omissions or clarifications. Retain editorial oversight but do give genuine consideration to suggestions.

It is important as soon as the exercise closes to explain any next steps to the users. You do not need to present conclusions or definitive findings at this stage, but it is important to manage expectations. Provide information about when you are able to make a ‘final’ response, who will make it and where it will be distributed from.

It is good practice to conduct an evaluation at the end of any public engagement activity (see Appendix D for suitable questions); online engagement is no different and during these formative stages is crucial. The purpose of the evaluation is to look back at the aims and objectives you set for the exercise and ascertain whether or not these were achieved. The evaluation should pinpoint the factors contributing to the success or lack of it. For example:

• Was planning time sufficient?
• Was the application fit for purpose?
• Did the marketing transmit the purpose of the exercise to the target users?
• Were project costs adequately managed?
• It is acceptable that an evaluation can remain internal, but consider the value in also making the evaluation available to the public, or at least the participants. Other agencies, departments and ministerial offices are also likely to benefit from your experiences.
• Evaluation of the online engagement activity should be included within impact assessments of the broader engagement exercise.