Online consultations should not eclipse offline engagement activities and should instead complement them.
Both environments can and should fit into your engagement strategy. Your organization will determine the most appropriate methodology and tools for each engagement. Each engagement activity should aim to suit the purpose of your stakeholder groups and community.
To fully integrate these spaces, you must develop a strategy to run online consultations in parallel with offline activities. When developing your strategy, focus on methodology and planning for deliberative dialogue and deeper engagement. You can:
Establish the role of online consultation in your overall strategy. Are you using your online engagement platform to gather ideas or test proposals and plans?
Determine what data you need to progress with the project
Plan the rollout of online tools to match the offline strategy
Determine the resources you can provide for online and offline consultation
Develop guidelines for participation and moderation and make it easy for participants to find
Spend time developing questions and tools to elicit good quality responses
Consider how you will consolidate your contributions to streamline your reporting
Remember, you must be consistent with online and offline enquiries, responses, and closing the loop to help build trust. Neither online nor offline spaces are more important than the other, and they should be run in tandem as each has value to offer.