At the day job one of the things we work on is engaging audiences to bring their insight into the organisation. This helps us develop policy, methodology and understand how we’re performing. Traditionally we had done a lot of this through face to face engagement. Often a set piece meeting in London with 50-60 attendees, discussing a few topics in depth.
These types of events are great, they give you an opportunity to develop a relationship with the people you’re engaging with, have conversations that allow you to go in to detail, and gives your engagement a human face.
But at the end of the events attendees go home, the conversation stops. So while we’re continuing this type of engagement we wanted to explore providing a space where conversations can continue and more people can engage with us, basically so we can get more insight from the audiences we serve.
Digital crowd sourcing platform
So we went for a digital engagement platform. Just launched at the end of last month, we’re using this to explore how we can have the valuable two way, in depth conversations we’d have in a face to face event, but ongoing and at scale.
It’s early days but so far there have been some positives:
- Sign ups have been positive, just over 1300 so far!
- We’re generating content for users to engage with
- People are sharing their views
The big question for us is, when you’ve got someone to sign up how can we encourage them to keep logging on and sharing their views. We’re going to be working on techniques to achieve this ongoing engagement over the next couple of months. Will let you know how it goes.
And if you want to check out the site it’s here.
Samuel Wallace 