Measure what matters for successful community consultation is increasingly about an expanded set of community consultation success measures. Modern planning consultation platforms, like PlaceChangers, allow you to document these measures consistently.

Community engagement in planning projects allows local authorities, housing associations, and developers to exchange information with residents and evaluate proposals. Digital engagement and consultation go beyond raising participant numbers and can promoting a qualitative improvement in design responses. This approach helps identify key issues and ideas early, ensuring the long-term success of the project.

The UK Government White Paper of 2020 acknowledged that those affected by a development decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process. That engagement should include digital tools to ensure maximum inclusion of local stakeholders. This transparent process informs residents how their input will be utilised in the decision-making process.  

A note on community consultation success measures in planning and construction

Community engagement practices can vary widely. Smaller projects often face limits in the extent and depth of consultation, and there are few commonly agreed-upon measures for success.

Sebastian Weise, founder at PlaceChangers, added:

“Many organisations don’t have defined KPIs for engagement yet. The most common success measures we see stated in Statements for Community Involvement for housing projects are the number of people at a consultation event, or the number of surveys received. These indicators typically provide a very limited view on engagement success.”

As a general note, the rationale for engagement should be clearly stated from the beginning. This includes things like the choices available, how community feedback can be provided, and what is negotiable versus fixed. Starting with a hidden agenda will negatively impact the consultation process and ongoing satisfaction with the proposed development or changes in the community.

Planning organisations, councils, developers each need to find their own policy on what success means and outline community consultation success measures they wish to support.

Sebastian Weise, founder at PlaceChangers noted:

“With adoption of digital planning tools, we can start to look at expansive success criteria, such as the value our community engagement has had to actually affect tweaks to a site layout and other details, such as types of homes, and impact mitigation plans.”

Expanded Set of Community Consultation Success Measures for Planning and Construction

The planning consultation tool within the PlaceChangers planning toolkit supports numerous consultations across various proposals and locations. Digital consultation tools enable an expanded set of community consultation success measures. Below are observations from us and our clients on various metrics that can be used to evaluate online engagement performance.

You might also be interested in our article on planners measures of success from community consultation. What do town planners see as a successful planning consultation?

Promotional reach

Successful consultation relies on reaching the intended audience. Promotional reach measures how many people see or hear about the consultation. Advertising firms use metrics like OTS (opportunities-to-see) to quantify visibility. For consultation, list promotional efforts using trackable QR and short links to understand the engagment rate with print materials for instance. This allows tallying engagement and responses against how people heard about the consultation opportunity.

Response rate

Response rate is about the share of responses as a percentage of views. It is not uncommon to receive response rates of 8% and 12% in a planning context (PAS discussion forum). The response rate tells you how engaged the audience is with the consultation. The response rate also depends on the ease of accessing the planning consultation. Another significant factor influencing responses rates is the mode of promotion. Consultations advertised on social media, generate broader attention, but also lower response rates. 

Diversity and representativeness

Individuals and businesses will have different views, making it important to identify the demographics of respondents. Ensuring that CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) communities are equally engaged is essential, especially in city spaces and estate regeneration projects. This may require consultations in various languages to reduce marginalization. Collect demographic data and compare it against local census information to ensure inclusivity.

Number of responses and coverage

Track the number of responses received per planning proposal or topic, and the number of pins and comments added to the consultation map. An engaged audience will actively share thoughts and ideas and engage in ongoing conversations. User-generated content is a key measure of audience engagement. Fine-grained analytics can reveal which issues respondents interact with the most, highlighting topics that generate excitement or concern among residents.

Engagement over time

For long complex projects, you might want to establish a good relationship with residents over a long timeframe. Here, registrations or ‘sign ups’ for email updates are an essential component as it allows to continue the conversation and understand if respondents reengage. However, it is still necessary to enable people anonymity if they prefer to respond as guests rather than registrants. Even guests can be asked to complete some demographic information or whether they have been involved in earlier stages.  

Balance of sentiment

Real-life consultations will rarely see undivided support. A successful consultation invites critical voices, too. Balance of sentiment is an exciting component of the consultative process. With the advance of technology in artificial intelligence and machine learning, grouping similar views provide a way to quantify these qualitative elements and "humanise" the reporting. Close analyses of the responses can also help identify outliers or duplicate responses; even where unique email addresses are required, people are adept at finding ways to influence outcomes they care about. 

Actionable responses

The share of actions attributable to community consultations is the ultimate success factor for meaningful consultation. Consultation platforms, such as PlaceChangers, make it easy to keep track of queries you get on your project and help you see any areas that aren't clear, need more explanation or need improvement. A consultation process can serve to assess the process itself and the ease of communication between the authority or firm and the community. It will also highlight how well the project team can communicate their ideas and proposals to the public. 

Conclusion: Going further with clear public consultation success measures

Evaluation of consultations with community consultation success measures is necessary to assess the performance of the community engagement against its desired objectives. It also serves the purpose of continuous improvement of community engagement practices.

Online consultation platforms for planning consultations automatically establish information about the success of your planning consultation and help organisations to provide more refined success criteria for their community engagement programmes. 

Sebastian Weise, founder at PlaceChangers added:

“Clearer and expanded success measures are good for everybody. Developers and councils can document the impacts their engagement has had. Planners and architects find it easier to finalise their designs. Community members and residents can see that consultation has a purpose.”