Balancing Act Integration

Learn how Balancing Act integrates with EngagementHQ and what settings we recommend you choose.

Gayathri Rajendiran avatar
Written by Gayathri Rajendiran
Updated over a week ago

Balancing Act is a budget simulation tool that engages stakeholders to help leaders make tough choices. It is available through our Marketplace.

Overview
Financial transparency made easy, this interactive, easy-to-set-up tool helps you communicate financial information to residents and get their informed feedback.

Features

  1. Data Import
    Import data easily with spreadsheets and fine-tune all your questions to get meaningful input. Budget Simulation is available in multiple languages.

  2. Meeting Mode
    Use it in face-to-face and online meetings with our Meeting Mode, which turns the simulation into a facilitation tool.

  3. Research Compatible
    A research version is available for use with representative samples to give you 'sincere preferences data' that surpasses any survey.

  4. Reporting
    As your budget simulation unfolds, check in with our detailed reporting that provides user-level data on resident priorities.

If you have added Balancing Act to your EngagementHQ license, you will most likely want to integrate it into one, or multiple, of your project pages.

TL;DR

Balancing Act simulations can be engaged within EngagementHQ. Here is a quick checklist to get your simulation and EngagementHQ page ready to go:

  1. Build your simulation in your Balancing Act account

  2. Publish your Balancing Act simulation

  3. Grab the simulation link and get in touch with our support team to help you embed it into your EngagementHQ project page.

  4. Prepare your EngagementHQ project page for launch.

  5. Launch!

Our integration is visual in nature, meaning that at this point in time there is no data sharing between both tools for privacy and security reasons. Nevertheless, you can integrate Balancing Act into EngagementHQ to achieve a seamless experience for your participants.

Balancing Act as an EngagementHQ Tool

We can help you integrate Balancing Act visually so that it appears as another tool in the project page tool tab, alongside any other engagement tools in EngagementHQ. We do this by re-purposing a Guestbook tool to show the Balancing Act instead.

In the above project, the "Build Your Own Budget" tab hosts Balancing Act. You can see the live example here. Upon clicking into the tool, Balancing Act will open in its own standalone page, just like most other EngagementHQ tools.

This integration currently requires some help from us to achieve a seamless look and feel. Please get in touch with us for assistance when you are ready to launch the page.

Recommended Settings

Since you are managing EngagementHQ and Balancing Act through two separate portals, there are two sets of settings to be considered.

EngagementHQ

You can very much manage your page as normal, just keeping in mind that a project page needs to have the Guestbook tool available to host Balancing Act. We can't see any circumstance in which you would want to maintain a Guestbook alongside Balancing Act, so this should be safe.

Secondly, the project page can either be in Public, Panelled, or Protected visibility.

Third, the participant type of the Guestbook tool is ignored for the integration, but the Guestbook has to be published or archived for this to work.

Balancing Act

While there are a lot of different options in the Balancing Act to customize the community's experience, there are no specific options that you would need to have enabled for the integration to work.

When you are ready to start engaging on your budget, make sure to publish the simulation and use that link when embedding the simulation back into EngagementHQ. Do NOT use the preview link!

As a way of example, this is the link you will need to provide to our support team to help with the embed.

If you have any questions or would like to explore more ways to integrate Balancing Act, please get in touch with us via chat or email support@engagementhq.com.

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