When it comes to public engagement, we all want great results representative of the entire community. However, time, budget and the process of developing relationships with hard-to-reach groups can mean that we end up engaging fewer people than we’d hoped.
What if PublicInput.com could help you do more in less time with better results?
Spoiler Alert: We can.
There are best practices you can use — right now — to create more insightful engagement with your community. We want to help you:
- Have more meaningful conversations with residents in less time
- Analyze data and create reports in a couple clicks (and without Excel)
- Easily follow up with your community by text or email
…all without leaving PublicInput.com.
If you’re new to the platform — or the support library — here are the top five support articles you should know about:
If you’ve ever wondered whether you can filter your survey results by age, or participant location, or any other qualifier…the answer is yes. Segments allow you to filter your results by showing only responses from specific groups of participants. This can be helpful if you’re looking to compare feedback from participants who live near a proposed project with feedback from participants who live outside the area, without restricting participation.
2. Creating a survey in another language (with language-specific link)
Using Google translate (and last-mile translation) allows you to create surveys that reach your whole community, regardless of what language they speak. Send custom links – like publicinput.com/myspanishsurvey – that’ll direct participants to a survey in their native language. All the data, regardless of language, gets collected in one location. How will you find out how many people took the survey in another language? When you create a custom link, you can create a segment at the same time. This allows you to know how many people in your community took your survey in a language other than English.
3. Creating an email with the email editor
Follow up with people who took your survey or attended your public meeting without leaving the PublicInput.com platform. Build custom branded templates, create new email campaigns, send newsletters and information, and much more with a CRM connected to email. This is a great way to keep your community engaged with ongoing projects or long-term plans.
4. Copying vs. reusing questions or surveys
Why reinvent the wheel? If you’re asking similar questions, you can copy them into a new survey – or copy the entire survey to create a new version. You can also re-use questions (or a whole survey) to collect updated data that will be stored with the original question. Reusing questions can be useful if, for example, you’re trying to collect data over time and you want all the results to be stored in a single location.
5. Permission management: Admin Roles and Access Levels
If you’re not the only one creating projects for your agency, learn how to grant access to new administrators and manage how much (or how little) control they have over agency projects. This is particularly helpful if you have consultant partners or interns who need limited access for a specific timeframe, or a team member who needs to create surveys for one department but only view data for another.
Don’t get stuck. Get help – even at midnight.
Maybe you haven’t done a project in a while. Maybe you forgot how the matrix question works. It’s OK. Our support library is online 24/7, and has more than 150 articles and videos to answer those frustrating, “Wait, how do I…?” or “Can PublicInput.com do that?” questions.
Bookmark our blog and our support library! We’re always adding new best practices and support articles. Don’t see what you need? Let us know. You can always reach us at support@publicinput.com, or via the chatbot in the bottom right corner of the PublicInput.com screen.
Bronlea Mishler is an Engagement Manager who brings more than a decade of government communications experience to her work with PublicInput.com. She’s a big fan of problem-solving and finding ways to be more efficient. She’s also pretty sure nothing is impossible – can it be done? CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
