Stay up to date with the latest features, improvements, and changes to the PlaceChangers platform.
Tap into strong foundations for planning and tracking outreach and promotion for your consultations. Now supports contact groups, outreach plans and delivery tracking, and clearer audit trails for reporting.
Public consultations can now support more flexible participant journeys, including question-first flows, saved journey ordering, completion tracking and clearer public routing from hubs and project pages.
Site Visit maps now support tablet-friendly sketch markups, coloured line observations and clearer report output for map markups, helping teams capture walkabout notes and visual evidence more naturally.
Public consultation publishing, QR links, unavailable-page handling, email calls to action and bottom action bars have been tightened so participants reach the right public experience more consistently.
Public consultation pages now better support branded title fonts, question numbers, image attribution, category styling, marker previews and question-first layouts across hubs, maps, lists and surveys.
App load speed has been optimised by rebuilding our dependency loads.
Sites now have a dedicated resources area for reusable consultation assets, with controlled visibility, upload review, search, filtering and archive controls.
Site and consultation search now understands linked organisations, making it easier to find work by end client, sponsor, delivery partner or other project organisation relationships.
Site team and organisation management has been refined so client, owner and delivery relationships are easier to understand and maintain across project teams.
Public consultation pages, hubs and guided tours now better respect project branding, with cleaner mobile behaviour and more consistent presentation across public-facing views.
Site Visit observations can now be adjusted visually on the map, helping teams capture where a photo or observation was taken from and what direction it was facing.
Site Visit reporting has been strengthened with clearer observation layouts, map-based outputs, export status handling and better support for report-ready visual material.
Project pages now support clearer section management, improved image handling, project area and statistics sections, stronger share previews and more reliable branding configuration.
Place Analysis data coverage has been extended with new indicators on dentist capacity and anti-social behaviour. The foundations for place analytics data were fully upgraded to support reliable early-stage evidence.
You can now upload Revit models with automated conversion into IFC via our 3D processing pipeline, reducing manual preparation work for teams working with BIM files.
Branding, contact details, and domain settings are now easier to manage from a new project configuration area, with more reliable save states, better mobile layouts, and improved logo inheritance across consultations.
You can now swap 3D models in the version editor without losing placement, rotation, height, or mirror settings, making model revisions much faster.
We’ve improved the mobile 3D consultation experience to reduce slowdowns and browser crashes on lower-powered devices.
Toolbar and in-app logos are now requested at higher resolution for sharper display across branded project views.
We’ve smoothed first-time mobile onboarding and added follow-up activation emails to help users pick up where they left off after creating a project boundary.
When editing consultation content, the editor now remembers your list position so you can return to exactly where you were.
Teams can now manage custom domains more easily with improved domain setup in branding settings and more complete automated configuration.
We’ve made further 3D performance improvements, including faster model loading, lower memory usage, better stability, and quicker guided tour initialisation on complex projects.
Site Visit now sends reminder emails for incomplete sessions and automatic emails when exports are ready, helping teams stay on top of fieldwork.
Billing now better supports country-specific VAT handling, plan pricing models, billing intervals, and future charging for Site Visit.
Tour start and end items now support richer text editing, making it easier to create more polished guided experiences.
We’ve improved public-facing page layouts with better toolbar options, logo display controls, and cleaner navigation placement on overview pages.
We released the PlaceChangers Open API, including user-managed API tokens, a dedicated api.placechangers.co.uk domain, versioned routes, and rate limiting to support more reliable integrations.
Consultation exports now come in a more consistent Excel workbook format, combining key data into clearer tabs and making reporting easier to share.
You can now edit the start and end items in guided tours more flexibly, making it easier to tailor introductions and closing messages.
We restored more core features in 3D consultations, including paths, areas, image overlays, and better tour focus behaviour for richer consultation experiences.
3D consultations now display terrain more reliably, improving the visual quality and accuracy of models and site layouts.
Public share links now show their expiry date more clearly in the app, helping teams avoid confusion when links stop working.
We introduced a more consistent set of map controls across public maps and editing views, including search, geolocation, zoom, and 2D/3D switching.
We reintroduced a more flexible non-satellite basemap with terrain, improving navigation and context across map-based workflows.
Site Visit map views now better support shared controls, live location, bearing display, and related workflows across fieldwork activities.
Site visit reporting functionality is now available to all users with beta indicators, enabling comprehensive analysis and documentation of site observations.
Improved site visit observation workflow with automatic navigation to notes field when adding photos, streamlining data collection processes.
Enhanced 3D model selection indicators with visual highlighting and improved rendering for mirrored models in the photorealistic 3D viewer.
Improved 3D viewer functionality with better model rotation handling, visual selection indicators, and enhanced site boundary support for more accurate project visualization.
Enhanced meeting scheduling integration and fixed website functionality to improve user experience and booking capabilities.
Updated 3D viewer mouse controls for more intuitive navigation and improved image overlay clipping to site boundaries for better project visualization.
Fixed 3D model placement keyboard shortcuts and enhanced model interaction capabilities for smoother project editing.
Fixed navigation accessibility issues on site routes, ensuring consistent user experience across all platform sections.
Enhanced guided tour functionality with proper finish buttons on final steps, improving user experience and tour completion flow.
Published the Hertfordshire Health Impact Assessment on the platform, expanding available case studies and resources.
Added draggable handles to tour items in the content editor and improved campaign page navigation with proper finish button functionality.
Completed backend implementation for theme pages in consultation editor, enabling proper persistence of theme page settings.
Enhanced theme setup functionality to show associated image overlays when selecting theme content items, improving content management workflow.
We’ve added support for now 3D model formats (e.g. GLB) and improved how they’re pre-processed for use in consultations or guided tours. This is in preparation for more powerful upgrades on 3D model support in consultations.
Switching from consultation to layout view (and back) is now much smoother, reducing redundancy and ensuring map selections or edits carry over seamlessly.
Age/gender, NEET, and deprivation indicators in Health Impact Assessments now compare your site with regional/national stats across Australia.
We’ve automated data ingestion for Victoria’s transport networks and enhanced greenspace visualisation using OSM, supporting better analysis coverage.
As part of our ongoing work towards a new consultation content manager, you can now create and manage themes and categories directly from the content editor—no need to hop into other views.
We are working on a new improved and consolidated consultation content manager to bring different types of consultation content (locations, grouped locations, theme content, areas) in line for easier setup. The roll out will still take a while for internal testing. Watch this space.
Sometimes you might not want to invite feedback via the interactive proposal map. You can now switch off map-based responses (comments and ideas) globally in consultations—ideal for read-only engagements or specific policy phases.
A new drag-to-resize feature on desktop improves access to detailed views like observation logs or Street View comparisons.
We now capture and store device information from photo Exif data—enhancing future analysis and file traceability.
Each new organisation now receives a free trial credit to explore all activity types—consultation, analytics, or appraisals.
We've added a smarter email template to support reviewers, summarising completion steps, linking evidence data, and map locations in Health Impact Assessments.
Map views in embedded widgets are now cleaner and more stable, making PlaceChangers look great in external sites.
Organisations can now manage activity usage via credits—making it easier to track what’s been used and allocate future sessions.
Participant surveys now offer better layout on small screens and more prominent chart placement on summary pages.
PlaceChangers automatically adapts to iframe contexts with fewer limitations—key for partner-hosted views.
You can now rely on additional speed and more reliability in the way how proposal maps operation, especially large ones. We are working on some fundamental changes to our backend and how information is stored to develop capacity for future upgrades.
Response options to multi- and single-choice consultation questions now show as list instead of drop down for additional clarity and ease of access to participants.
Place analytics now runs with multiple workers (e.g. multiple analytics steps are done in parallel). In some cases, this enhances reliability and speed.
A data source update including attributions has been completed so you can tap into most recent data for your place analysis or health impact analysis statement.
Based on requests, we have made enhancements to the Health Impact Assessment tool. It will now pull in planning application reference number if set, and you can assign and state the internal reviewer.
We tweaked how content in consultations can be cross linked using the '@'+content item search to cross reference consultation content within your consultation (e.g. from guided tour to specific locations).
Satellite base maps on PlaceChangers now have more mark up so it is easier for participants to identify specific streets or points of interest in consultations.
You can now rely on improved visual display and reliability when using 3D consultations with multiple 3D models. Highlights on map focus are more consistent and clearer.
You can now configure images for response options to questions on PlaceChangers to give participants additional visual queues for the options provided.
We fixed some bugs so that bearing is correctly stored with Street Views.
You can now quickly generate tracked short links and QR codes from within PlaceChangers to measure open rates and interactions for consultation leaflets.
You can now access additional support videos for consultation setup via the support bar within the PlaceChangers app.
You can now delete specific or all contacts in contact manager. You can also send all or specific contacts a short email update from '[email protected]' or showing as respond-to the project email you set for respondents to use.
When starting a consultation from scratch, the setup editor will now use the standard view for creating new activities, including settings which project and layout the consultation is on.
The log-in system has been completely overhauled and so we've worked on further bug fixes and tweaks to multi-factor authentication based on user requests.
PlaceChangers platform now supports multi-factor authentication setup for user accounts using one-time passwords generated by commonly established authenticator apps. Organisation admins can choose to enforce MFA across all associated users in their organisation.
The main page navigation now highlights the section that's in the user's view.
We have been busy applying tweaks, bug fixes to enhance project pages for projects with multiple consultation activities and stages.
Enhancements so to improve speed and reliability of generating health impact assessments. PlaceChangers platform now auto-suggests relevant analytics / evidence on relevant relevant criteria.
Further consolidation and enhancements of custom brand and font style settings for consultations. Tweaks to ensure all styles are pulled through consistently.
We worked to make customer support easily accessible to users. All support items (link to knowledge base, help centre, email and live chat support) are now consolidated in a single support bar.
Improved life cycle handling for consultations, which now have status of 'draft', 'live', or 'completed'. For health impact appraisals you can now assign author, status and state those on print outputs.
Updated datasets including age, ethnicity, housing affordability for study areas. Bonus: total population count for your study area.
See all your sites and projects on a map. Access projects easily.
Improved identification of topics in consultation responses and duplicates in open annotation consultations so to cut time analysing and finding duplicates.
Your open idea consultations now auto-identify the street and postcode details for ideas generated in your consultation.
Place analytics reports now provide benchmarked overviews of energy efficiency for all properties within your study area.
You can now easily generate anonymised reports for consultations which collected personal details (e.g. name, address).
Add topic tags to ideas generated in your project and accelerate your analysis of your responses
Substantive upgrades to place analytics. Planners can now tap into a wider range of place insights in one place:
Based on feedback a number of tweaks were made to enhance the user experience. Guided tours now have a defined start and end point. Guided tours now point to the participant survey on the last tour step.
We added a new progress indicator to summarise the overall progress pulling in analytics and completing analytics jobs.
PlaceChangers are leaders in interactive consultations using proposal maps. For instances where you prefer not to show a map, PlaceChangers consultations now support consultation pages linked to guided tour steps.
New base map including street names and satellite imagery. Satellite is great for some projects. Added street names help users with orientation.
We've done some magic (e.g. updates to our infrastructure) to load 3D models and 3D proposal maps faster than before. Load times should have improved 10x in some cases.
New in place reports: Generate analytics on existing homes in a few clicks. Generate insights such as property types, tenure, number of bedrooms for homes in your study area. Bonus: See benchmarks so you can quickly see over or under provision of specific housing.
Get easy and quick visual feedback on the make up of housing in a particular area by visualising housing characteristics by UPRN location.
We've enhanced performance of 3D consultations with multiple models. For example, you can now choose to mirror 3D models to save bandwidth. The 3D viewers were upgraded and we optimised load times.
If your project has multiple consultation stages, PlaceChangers now provides a single contact list which consolidates contacts for respondents across multiple consultation stages.
You can now export to popular file formats that work in graphics design tools. Draw on powerful analytics and generate visual assets for your brief documents, that you can edit in your graphics design programme.
After multiple user requests, we are please that the consultation reports now provide you with a map of participant postcodes, if they were included as a question in your consultation. It makes it super simple to understand the geographic coverage of responses.
We have overhauled the app navigation for consistency, predictability, and ease of access. The navigation menu is now the same across all aspects of the app and provides a new 'mini' menu which keeps main app views in reach at all times.
3D consultations have been optimised to support large 3D building models. 3D consultations now support diverse 3D model formats in the same consultation (e.g. FBX and IFC). You can also now define if a consultation opens in 3D or 2D by default.
Sometimes even apparently simple things take time: You can now mark projects, layouts, and consultations as deleted. Deleted items are removed.
Draw on critical indicators that enable you to plan in health improvements and prioritise interventions in the local area.
This month, we've taken everything we know about how you use the consultation dashboard and revised the consultation dashboard. The dashboard is now speedier, and able to deal with large volume of response. The detailed report is now replaced by a list of each individual proposal, and a separate detailed report for each.
A single place to moderate any ideas that need moderating.
A single place to moderate any ideas that need moderating.
For complex projects, you can now add theme sections. Locations on proposal maps can be linked with themes, so that participants see only what's relevant to a theme.
Idea submissions on the map can now be held for moderation so that you can choose which ones will be presented publicly. This is great for the production of local lists where submissions will require further vetting and review.
As admin, you now receive timely email notifications once consultations are published or due to close. Consultation participants now receive handy reminders 2 days before consultation close dates provided they consented to notifications. This means everybody is kept up to date.
PlaceChangers toolkit now lets you configure personal data items (name, address, telephone) so that projects with certain statutory reporting needs can collate evidence on respondents.
If you are on our Premium consultations package, you can now specify a custom subdomain for your project, e.g. "yourproject.placechangers.co.uk"
Responses to custom questions on locations are now available via the spreadsheet export and on consultation report dashboards.
Some of the updates include: Tweaks to confirmation emails and tweaks to menu on consultation pages. We also smashed a bug which meant that the project editor would show an out of date site boundary.
You can now set up a data use consent dialogue. If it is set up, respondents to your consultation need to provide consent for the use of their responses before being able to respond.
You can now share consultation drafts with clients for review.
This is a big feature update. Ask your architect to export your building design in the open IFC standard and use those models as part of interactive 3D consultations on PlaceChangers
PlaceChangers Engagement tool now lets you assign custom question sets by proposal or location category. Use it to ask specific questions in relation to a specific area. Equally, you could ask respondents the same set of questions for, say, all green spaces to help appraise site options!
Plug in your site boundary and get detailed access analysis to these key local services.
Uploading large image files is now no longer a problem. Where previously you might have seen an error. The app now auto-reduces file sizes to a suitable size automatically.
Based on popular user request, PlaceChangers Engagement tool now temporarily saves responses on the users local device as 'drafts'. Users can then submit those drafts whenever they are ready to do so.
PlaceChangers engagement and consultation tools now automatically use the site boundary to configure initial consultation areas, so you don't have to.
We brought the navigation for the consultation setup editor in line with the rest of the platform to raise consistency.
The platform now references all dates and times across the platform correctly against Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Consultations now close correctly at 11.59 pm of the the respective end date regardless of where in the world the consultation takes place.
We have listened to user feedback and our own user testing. Guided tour now more fully featured than ever. Configure a series of proposals as a guided tour. Public consultation views will show participants a location preview and buttons to easily toggle between proposals. Take your participants on a tour and ask for feedback on places that are relevant.
Emails to consultation respondents now include confirmation on the number of responses they left as well as links back to the consultation they participated in.
Based on popular requests, the consultation reports' detailed view now shows the date when a suggestion or comment was made and the respective session ID.
You remember this functionality with which consultation respondents leave suggestions anywhere on the map. Previously this worked by a simple click on the map. At times, this interfered with Zoom actions. We've now placed a simple 'add idea' button to the bottom bar. A click on it, enables participants to leave an idea anywhere.
If you have an existing website, it's best to provide a simple embed to link to a campaign. On click or move, the embed widget now shows a hint to open the campaign in a separate tab.
Map pop ups now perform better across both Android and Apple devices.
Public consultation views have been tweaked for usability on smaller mobile devices. The response dialogue on map views is now consistently part of a location preview box, instead of being a separate element on the map.
You can now set up organisations and add your colleagues. Inviting your team members to collaborate on setting up engagement campaigns and consultations will now be even easier.
We added a bunch of things that improve the user experience for members of the public. Locations that can be responded to now pulsate. It's now possible to jump to a location in the list view to the location on the map. All input elements have a new style to make it clearer where comments can be left. We also tidied up the participant questions view.
Based on user feedback, we've spent April with some essential house cleaning and dusting. In the process, we squished bugs that bugged our users for a while. Setting up projects and reporting should now be smoother all around.
We have worked hard to improve the way locations are handled. This change allows for greater flexibility in handling user-generated locations associated with responses.
The project editor now saves changes to multiple features correctly.
PlaceChangers engagement and consultation tools now automatically use the site boundary to configure initial consultation areas, so you don't have to.
We brought the navigation for the consultation setup editor in line with the rest of the platform to raise consistency.
The platform now references all dates and times across the platform correctly against Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Consultations now close correctly at 11.59 pm of the the respective end date regardless of where in the world the consultation takes place.
We have listened to user feedback and our own user testing. Guided tour now more fully featured than ever. Configure a series of proposals as a guided tour. Public consultation views will show participants a location preview and buttons to easily toggle between proposals. Take your participants on a tour and ask for feedback on places that are relevant.
Emails to consultation respondents now include confirmation on the number of responses they left as well as links back to the consultation they participated in.
Based on popular requests, the consultation reports' detailed view now shows the date when a suggestion or comment was made and the respective session ID.
You remember this functionality with which consultation respondents leave suggestions anywhere on the map. Previously this worked by a simple click on the map. At times, this interfered with Zoom actions. We've now placed a simple 'add idea' button to the bottom bar. A click on it, enables participants to leave an idea anywhere.
If you have an existing website, it's best to provide a simple embed to link to a campaign. On click or move, the embed widget now shows a hint to open the campaign in a separate tab.
Map pop ups now perform better across both Android and Apple devices.
Public consultation views have been tweaked for usability on smaller mobile devices. The response dialogue on map views is now consistently part of a location preview box, instead of being a separate element on the map.
You can now set up organisations and add your colleagues. Inviting your team members to collaborate on setting up engagement campaigns and consultations will now be even easier.
We added a bunch of things that improve the user experience for members of the public. Locations that can be responded to now pulsate. It's now possible to jump to a location in the list view to the location on the map. All input elements have a new style to make it clearer where comments can be left. We also tidied up the participant questions view.
Based on user feedback, we've spent April with some essential house cleaning and dusting. In the process, we squished bugs that bugged our users for a while. Setting up projects and reporting should now be smoother all around.
We have worked hard to improve the way locations are handled. This change allows for greater flexibility in handling user-generated locations associated with responses.
The project editor now saves changes to multiple features correctly.
