Building Better Conversations Online — Three Lessons for Digital Public Engagement for a Global Pandemic
As the world continues through a global pandemic, we’ve seen many organizations and companies move their practices, products, and even ‘offices’ into digital spaces. Traditional, paper-based industries have now adopted e-signatures and cloud-based services. We’ve even seen people shift their relationships with friends and family online. Many people have begun to speculate which of these changes will be long-lasting, and which will quickly return to their pre-COVID, in-person rhythm.
The pandemic has emphasized the need to be nimble and responsive. For governments, nonprofits and organizations, this means leaning into online engagement. The need to consult the public hasn’t decreased — but the mechanisms through which we can do so have. This necessary shift spotlights the need to move these consultations online while maintaining avenues for meaningful conversations and feedback.
I have almost a decade of experience in this area. Having worked in the trenches of digital consultation with public sector clients across Western Canada, I have had the opportunity to learn from various municipalities, school districts and ministries. Together, we’ve engaged on health care issues, developing a vision for education, understanding public views on major events like the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and major infrastructure and transportation projects. Each project I’ve worked on has helped fine-tune my approach to online engagement. Whether this is the first time your organization has engaged constituents, team members or customers online or your fiftieth, I hope the following lessons will be helpful.
You aren’t going to lose the magic
One of the fears I often hear is that transitioning in-person engagement online diminishes the quality of the feedback you get. Although I understand where this thought comes from — that people provide such rich details through an in-person conversation, it would be hard to emulate — take it from me, online engagement does provide a forum for meaningful feedback.
In an online engagement we ran this spring, we heard from over 4,000 stakeholders over three weeks. We provided opportunities for people to give us both quantitative and qualitative feedback. We received thousands of well-informed, long-form, open-ended comments from participants. The trick to receiving meaningful feedback is two-fold. First, make sure that you provide enough information about the project embedded within the online platform. The experience should feel like a one-stop-shop. One of the things we quickly learned is that videos and infographics make information more accessible to participants. Second, make sure you pick a platform that allows participants to see what other people are saying and contributing. Online engagement is not the same as an online survey — you need to let people engage with both you and one another.
Hot tip: Check out platforms like Civil Space and Ethelo as excellent examples of platforms that enable visual communication and two-way conversations online.
Online doesn’t mean impersonal
We see some organizations shifting their engagement online because they think it will be quick and easy. Taking this approach, however, guarantees that you won’t get the most out of your participants. For online engagement to be successful, you need to plan it out just as well as you would workshops, town halls or pop-up events.
Teams need to take the time to frame their online engagement. What do you want to know? How will this information be used to inform your decisions moving forward? And how can you use language that is inviting, accessible and compelling? Avoid jargon, acronyms, and unnecessarily complex words — this is not a high school English class, and we should never be using a thesaurus.
Similarly, make sure that you sound like a real human. No one wants to talk to a robot — despite the occasionally useful bot on product sites. Use plain language that mimics conversational dialogue. This is doubly important as online conversations have become the norm for so many of us — especially as a result of the pandemic. Online text is no longer the place for impersonal, formal diatribes (if it ever was). People have come to expect comfort and ease in their online conversations — and will avoid formal (and for some, more stressful) language that a lot of traditional engagement uses.
Hot tip: Bring your communication team on board as you prepare — they’ll help you work through your key messages, project outcomes and outputs, and branding.
You still have to go the distance to talk with harder-to-reach communities
Engaging people online can vastly increase the number of people you hear from. With a carefully thought-out marketing and content strategy, we’ve seen engagement rates increase tenfold from in-person consultation. Don’t underestimate the importance of a strong communication strategy to amplify your engagement. This step is critical.
This is important for so many reasons. First and foremost, it means that you will receive more information and ideas from the public and your stakeholders. More than that, it helps build a culture of engagement. In a time when we’re seeing more and more people disengage from the decisions being made around them, you can contribute meaningfully to people’s interaction with the governments and organizations that serve them.
But there is a catch. There will always be communities that are harder to reach — and they will differ online and in person. Take the time to consider who you really need to hear from. Sort out what communication channels they’re using. And go there.
Hot tip: That may mean printing your online engagement materials and dropping them off and picking them up in high-traffic target participant spaces, finding engagement champions within harder-to-reach communities, or targeting particular demographics through a careful digital marketing campaign.
Online engagement, from here on out
Online engagement helps facilitate broader participation and valuable feedback. We’ve seen this over the last decade. As the world trends toward continued at-home dialogues, online engagement provides an opportunity to continue meaningful conversations. The last few months have shone a light on the need to develop and execute broad-based, carefully-framed and accessible consultation. And we have reason to think this approach will be necessary throughout the remainder of this pandemic.
But even without COVID-19, online consultation provides an integral avenue for bringing people into conversations that matter. It provides a forum for community-based collaboration, participant-fueled solutions, and ultimately, civic engagement proliferation.
To learn more about our approach to online engagement — and the communication and marketing techniques we use to amplify it — visit our website, www.spurcommunication.ca. We’re always eager for conversations with and perspectives from new people!
