As part of consultation planning, you and your team must understand what information you are asking from your community. This applies to designing your engagement activities as well.
Before any project launch, you should know:
What metrics you will measure
Key issues or themes you want to highlight
What demographic groups you need to consult with
If you’re looking for qualitative or quantitative data, or a mix of both
All this amounts to what kind of data you need for a successful consultation. When you know that information, you can start planning tools more effectively. Use these tips to help you:
Start by briefly defining the purpose of your engagement and outlining what you want to achieve by consulting your community.
Choose your tools depending on the type of data you need. If you have a consultation in which you need a lot of sentiment or need to know more about “why” people have opinions on an issue, then tools that provide qualitative data may be best. These include tools such as the Ideas, Stories, or Forum tool and open-response questions in surveys.
If you don’t use registration, or if your tools use unverified participation, then you must build any demographic questions you need into your tools; you can’t get this information retrospectively. For example, if you have an anonymous survey and need to know how different age groups feel about an issue, you should ask for an age range or birth year in your survey.
Make sure you use appropriate question types and language when including demographic questions. To continue the example of asking about age groups, whether you ask for a birth year or an age range depends on the data you want to capture. We generally recommend asking for the birth year because that will always be valid, while using an age range means the respondent will eventually age out of that demographic. However, an age range may be appropriate if you are only capturing demographic information for a specific period, such as in an anonymous survey.
You should understand the broad strokes of what you want to highlight in your reports, before you start your engagement. This may seem counterintuitive, and you shouldn’t assume what opinions your contributors will have but knowing what metrics you’re looking for will help you with writing tool descriptions and questions as you will have greater clarity of what information you need from your community.