Understanding how much engagement to expect from your online projects is an essential part of reporting and evaluating the success of your consultations.

As with most things, it's hard to predict just how much engagement you will receive on any given project.

Moreover, levels of engagement are highly dependant on a number practice related things, not least;

Each of these items will have some bearing on the amounts of engagement you can expect with your projects. 

With this in mind, you will notice that our engagement metrics are built around Aware, Informed and Engage numbers. To learn about these go here.

Often, the ratio between these three numbers is taken as a measure of success of a consultation, depending on the stage of the project.

For example, stage one of a consultation may be about informing the public, stage two may be seeking contribution and stage three asking for things that might have been missed.

It is up to you to determine what success looks like for the project at each stage. 

A recent snapshot across all EHQ sites found that the average ratios of A:I:E are 60:30:10. In other words, of a 100 visitors, 60 looked but did not do anything. 30 clicked on something and another 10 went on to become engaged in one of the tools. 

This in itself is arbitrary because these measures are used on a project by project basis and each project should be measured differently. 

Over time and with regular monitoring you will develop your own measures and benchmarks to help you gauge your levels of engagement. 

But 60:30:10 is a good place to start in setting you expectations.