Boosting Your Engagement Rates

In short, your engagement rate refers to how many people are submitting a contribution to your projects. You can use multiple methods to try and boost your engagement rates. Above all, your community members must understand:

You can use the tips outlined in this article to help you boost your audience’s understanding and engagement.

Sometimes, potential participants are hesitant to get involved with a project because they don’t see how it will affect them. As engagement professionals, we understand that while some consultations are more relevant to certain demographics, most issues have implications that are relevant to everyone.

Taking the time to explain a project's potential issues, opportunities, or implications will increase its value proposition for your community members.

Explain the project's impacts and opportunities and how the decision will affect community members to provide context, and you are more likely to have an engaged group of participants.

Similarly, your content should be clear and interesting. Long, overly complex, and jargon-filled project descriptions will only deter participants. Avoid 300-page documents detailing every aspect of your environmental strategy, and you may want to include a summary at the beginning of unavoidably long documents.

It is part of your job to condense long-form text into straightforward information so participants can easily understand what you’re asking and how they can contribute.

The project and tool descriptions have complete text editors to help you, including the tools to:

Don’t forget to end with a call-to-action and ask targeted and specific questions.

Always consider carefully how you want participants to provide feedback and ensure engagement methods are fit for purpose for the stakeholders you have identified in your stakeholder analysis. This requires considering which tool is right for your online project and how you can deliver in-person engagement activities in tandem.

For example, the Places tool may be appropriate for collecting feedback on public transport routes, but perhaps you can also place QR codes leading to a survey or poll to target those who use those routes. Or, if your community has a high population of low-internet-literacy people, you could consider placing hard-copy surveys in council offices, customer service centers, or libraries.

Any in-person or hard-copy contributions can be entered in by an admin to consolidate your data.

You should also consider which online tools are appropriate for the consultation. You don’t need to default to a survey, and if you use the right tool, you could gain richer feedback. Ask yourself:

When all your content is in place and you have chosen and created your tools, you must communicate the opportunity to the public.

Promote your consultation using appropriate channels, such as social media, newsletters, in-person meetings, traditional media, etc., and explain how you want to engage with them.

Tell them how they can participate, advertise any upcoming in-person events, and be specific about your consultation. Depending on your budget, you could also consider: