Planning communication services

Online community engagement and consultation

PlanningConsultation, Chelgate's planning consultation tool, was a finalist in the Communications category of the Sustain Magazine Awards 2011.
                   

Chelgate has developed a new internet tool to facilitate more effective community and stakeholder engagement. With any challenging project, there are always the same problems: only those vehemently opposed to a project are motivated enough to express their opinions; rumour and hearsay are rife and largely unchecked; and it is difficult for the community to find reliable sources of information about what is proposed.

                                   

Chelgate’s internet tool addresses those problems directly: it is the communications hub of the project, providing a reliable and comprehensive source of information on what is proposed; the easy availability of this accurate information counters any rumour or hearsay; and it allows people to express their views from the comfort and privacy of their homes.

                                       

Located at www.planningconsultation.com, the website also has features to ‘interact’ with the local community and stakeholders, and to make effective use of their comments and suggestions. The website allows people to ask questions, to lodge comments and to register for updates. It holds all comments in a database allowing full evaluation including ‘mapping’, with many of the results able to be made public, if helpful to the project aims. It enables the project prinicpals to see the issues that have been raised expressed in terms of their frequency and location, and how they have changed over time or in response to interventions.

                                       

We have used PlanningConsultation as the focus of community and stakeholder engagement programmes, supplementing the other elements such as meetings, exhibitions and media relations. Its use so far has demonstrated that it assists in making the engagement more meaningful, having greater penetration into the community, thus ensuring the entire community engagement exercise is effective. Above all, it gives a voice to the silent majority of local opinion otherwise rarely expressed – those neutral, those willing to wait-and-see, and those in favour of change.

                                     

To view a current project using the Chelgate tool, please click here.