Growing Citizen Space in your organisation

Whether you’re new to Citizen Space or you’ve been using it for a little while now, you may be wondering how you can grow use of the platform within your organisation to get more value out of your subscription. Below are some simple suggestions to help you spread the benefits of the tool more widely among your colleagues.

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Have you mapped out all of the consultation and engagement activity happening across your organisation?

It may be stating the obvious but, as a starting point, we’d recommend identifying all of the people or teams beyond your own that need to create and manage consultations and other engagement activities. Then you can make a plan for who needs to be given access to Citizen Space and when is the best time to get them involved.

One of the main benefits of using Citizen Space is having all of your consultations and engagement activity in one place rather than having engagement activities spread across multiple different survey tool. Potential respondents know exactly where to go to participate in current surveys or find information about past activities. The department structure of Citizen Space means your organisation can still store data used by different teams separately and securely, ensuring that it’s only accessible to people who need to see it.

If any of your colleagues are still using another survey tool, we recommend checking that the other tool is compliant with the appropriate data legislation and accessibility guidelines. If it's not, this could help you persuade them of the advantages of using Citizen Space!

Are there any other processes you could move to Citizen Space, as well as consultations?

Some other customer organisations get even more value out of their subscription by moving other form-based processes onto Citizen Space – including feedback forms, training surveys, event registrations, award nominations, quizzes, competitions and more besides. Using Citizen Space for internal activity (such as staff surveys) also helps to make it more visible within the organisation, as colleagues are more likely to remember it and think to use it for their own public consultations.

You can see what other organisations get up to on Citizen Space by browsing the Aggregator site, though bear in mind that a significant portion of the extracurricular activity mentioned above happens via private surveys, which don't appear in the Aggregator.

How will colleagues outside of your team know that the tool exists?

You have probably already thought a lot about how to promote your Citizen Space site externally, to potential respondents and stakeholders, but it is also worth promoting it internally so colleagues know that it exists and is available for them to use when they need it.

Do you have an Intranet site where you could add some information about Citizen Space, and who to contact if someone would like to be set up with log-in details? Are there any internal channels of communication, such as a regular e-newsletter, that you could use to share some examples of good Citizen Space consultations and activities?

Talk to your customer success manager about setting up an awareness session to let your colleagues know more about Citizen Space, share ideas and inspiration and how it can be used to transform your organisation's public involvement.

Onboarding new users and internal procedures

It's a good idea to decide on what your on-boarding process will be for registering colleagues who would like to use Citizen Space as users and getting them up to speed.

For example, it might be helpful to prepare a welcome email or document with some useful information for new users, including links to this online Knowledge Base and best practice guidance on how your organisation uses Citizen Space.

You may also want to think about agreeing a process for reviewing and approving new activities before they're published to ensure a consistent standard of quality, and think about how that standard will be shared with new users so that they know how to build a good activity. Some organisations provide new users with a checklist to work through before an activity can be published, which helps to ensure they're aware of the internal policies around timeframes, approvals and how content should be presented.

We also have the option to restrict publishing rights on your site to just Site Admins or Site Admins and Department Admins, which some organisations find helpful as an initial approach while their colleagues are getting used to the platform.

How will new users be trained?

Decide who will be best-placed to train new users. Booking a training session with Delib is one option, particularly if you have several people who need training all at once. We often recommend a 'train the trainer' model, whereby a core group of users initially receives comprehensive training from Delib and is equipped to pass that training on internally to other new users over time.

Some level of basic training is important for making sure people feel confident using the tool and are therefore more likely to keep using it and retain that knowledge. However, you may feel it's appropriate to vary the amount of training you provide depending on the colleague's anticipated level of usage. For example, if they only plan to ever run one survey on Citizen Space, it may be more efficient for an advanced user to build the survey on their behalf rather than spending time training them.

How will queries and issues be resolved and information shared internally?

Similarly to the above, you'll need to decide who will be best-placed for answering any queries that colleagues have when using Citizen Space. Are there people you could ask to be internal champions or expert users to help field queries from their team or department, before the queries get escalated to a site admin?

Some customer organisations hold regular meet-ups or sessions for their internal admin users to learn from one another, so that may be something you want to consider further down the line. We also hold annual user groups in different regions where we have clusters of customers to help them share knowledge and best practice, so contact your customer success manager if you're keen to hear when the next one might be (or even provide a host venue!)

Would it be helpful to set some targets for the year?

It's not for everyone but some organisations find it helpful to measure the success of their roll-out and adoption by setting some targets. Some common examples include setting a target for how many internal users you'd like to have using Citizen Space by the end of the first subscription period, or a target increase in responses compared with response rates when using a previous tool.