Citizen Space deployment requirements

Preparing your Citizen Space site to go live to the public is a two-stage process:

Deployment: the term we use for the technical aspects of setting up your Citizen Space site; and
Preparation: the things you need to do after deployment to get your Citizen Space site ready to go live to the public.

Stage one: Deploying your Citizen Space site

There are a number of things we need from you in order to deploy a Citizen Space site. Once you have gathered these, please email them to your customer success manager:

1) Citizen Space URL

As each Citizen Space site has its own web address (URL), you will need to set up a URL for this purpose. There are two options for the URL that your Citizen Space site can have:

It can have a similar web address to your main site, or a project name, for example: 'haveyoursay.clientname.gov.zz' or 'clientnameprojectname.com'. If you would like this type of URL, you'll need to ask your IT team to register the subdomain and create a CNAME record (this is the technical name for something on our web server that points to another location). We will provide the CNAME address for your technical team to use for this. Please see our article explaining setting up a DNS CNAME record.
If you prefer to use our Citizen Space domain (eg. 'clientname.citizenspace.com'), you will need to let us know what you would like the ‘clientname’ part of the address to be.

2) Site admin details

When we deploy the site we will set up your first user and give them Site Admin permission, i.e. the highest level of access across the site. This person will then be able to register anyone else from the organisation who needs access to Citizen Space. Thus, we need their full name, email address, work contact phone number and job title before deploying the site.

3) Department name

Please choose the name for the first department on your site. This is the department your first site admin user will belong to. Citizen Space uses a department-based structure to enable you to manage users' access to the data they need. It's important to realise that department names also appear in the URL of every activity, e.g. https://example.citizenspace.com/department-name/activity-title

4) A corporate logo

You will need to supply us with a high quality logo for your Citizen Space site. Ideally, logo dimensions should be no taller than 100px and preferably no wider than 250px.

5) Brand colours

The colour of your Citizen Space buttons, heading text and title blocks can be customised to match your desired corporate colour(s). Ideally, if you can send your brand guideline colours to us this will allow us to choose the most appropriate ones for your site. If this isn't possible, please provide your colour choices as hex values, such as '#CC9966'. If you do not know the hex value of your colour, please supply us with the website address where we can find the colour(s) you want to use. Please note that we must take into account colour contrast ratios from web accessibility guidelines when setting the colour of text and other items.

6) A favicon (optional)

A favicon is a tiny image which sits in the browser bar and tab heading when someone is on your site. If you can send us your preferred favicon image, we will apply this to your site. If this isn't possible, then we may be able to take the image from other sites you own.

7) The site-wide background wallpaper (optional)

You can have a full-width wallpaper image on your site, which really makes your site come alive.

To choose a good image, think in terms of wallpapers which usually have repeating elements and still look good if the sides, top or bottom are cut off. Avoid images with text, logos or specific focal points. This is because the image is used as a background image and what you can see of the site-wide wallpaper will be different on different sized devices. There is no guarantee a user will see any specific part of this image as it sits behind other items on the page.

Please supply an image that is around 3000px wide by 1000px tall. This allows us to crop and resize the image as required. Please note that this is not a set image size as the height of the image depends on how much text you have on your site homepage. Our recommendation is to keep the hub text succinct and use the 'About' page for further detail about how your organisation approaches consultation and engagement.

8) If your subscription includes Geospatial (this is optional and not included in all Citizen Space subscriptions as standard)

If deploying Geospatial for Citizen Space you will also need your organisation’s Ordnance Survey API Key (if applicable). You (or a relevant colleague from your organisation) will add these directly into your Citizen Space so please do not send them to us. You will need them for stage two when you are preparing your site to go live to the public.

A few extra things to note:

Mail delivery

Your Citizen Space site will send some automated emails, such as an email to respondents who have requested to receive a confirmation of their response on submission. These emails will come from no-reply@mail1.citizenspace.com. Replies to these emails are not received to any mailbox.

SSL certificate

You don't need to provide an SSL certificate. We will organise and purchase one on your behalf. We will need to know your Citizen Space site's URL (see item 1 above) prior to this taking place. You can learn more about SSL certificates here.

Citizen Space Aggregator site

We provide an Aggregator site which gathers together all of the public activities happening across Citizen Space sites around the world and puts them all in one place for other organisations to browse. This site is publicly accessible and will only ever show activities that are already in the public domain. Please let your customer success manager know before your site is deployed if there's any reason why you would prefer for it not to appear on the Aggregator.

Stage two: preparing your Citizen Space site to go live to the public

After deploying your site, we will have a set-up call with you. This is really important as it allows us to run through a variety of options and features which can be enabled or disabled depending on your needs, e.g. publishing permissions, security configurations, etc.

However, there are some other things you will need to do before your Citizen Space is ready to use and which you may want to start thinking about immediately.

1) Write and add copy for your editable pages

Some areas of Citizen Space require text that you'll need to add in:

Home page introductory text: This is a few lines of text (with links if desired) displayed on the homepage to introduce your Citizen Space site to the public.
Privacy policy text: We provide fixed non-editable copy that sets out Delib's privacy policy for Citizen Space. It's especially important that you add your own organisation's privacy wording to the Privacy Policy page. When you add this it will go above our wording so it appears first on the page
Cookie policy text: We provide fixed non-editable copy that sets out how Citizen Space uses cookies (it uses only essential cookies). However, if you plan to use Google Analytics, you will need to add information to the cookie policy wording to reflect this. This will appear below the main cookie wording.
Terms of use: We provide an optional Terms of Use page linked from the footer of your site for you to provide your own terms and conditions and provide information about the relationship between your organisation and the end-user. You may wish to link to existing Terms of Use on your corporate website. If you leave this page blank on your site, the Terms of Use link will not appear in the footer.
Help/feedback: This page is fully editable. There is some default text provided by us but this can be fully edited and replaced with alternative text. We encourage you to add more guidance here if appropriate.

2) Add Departments and Users

Departments must be set up, as both activities and administrative users must be assigned to a Department when they are added. We have some further information and top tips about creating your department structure that are worth a read.

Users are your admin users who will manage the site and create and manage activities.

3) Interests, Audiences, Areas (optional)

If you choose to have Interests, Audiences and Areas on your Citizen Space site, then before any activities can be published, Citizen Space will require you to enter these sets of information:

Interests: an Interest is a searchable topic which can help your participants find activities that relate to their interests.

Audiences: an Audience is a specific respondent group. By adding these you allow respondents to search for activities you have tagged as applicable to certain audiences.

Areas: Areas, if you decide to use them, must be set up and then assigned to activities so that respondents can find activities by postcode or ward area. Areas are applicable for local government organisations, rather than national bodies.

You can read the following articles for information on how to set up these details:

4) For Citizen Space Geospatial only - think about the default valid map area and your tilesets

If deploying Citizen Space Geospatial you may choose to set a default valid area on your base map (your GIS Team or similar should be able to provide you with this as a GeoJSON file). You will also need to decide if you would like to restrict the tilesets that your admins will be able to use. Your customer success manager can talk you through these things during your post-deployment call.

5) Integrate Citizen Space into your existing website (optional but recommended)

Please read this article for information on how to do this.

6) Setting up your first activity

It is useful to start thinking about your first activity once your Citizen Space has been populated with items 1-3. For step-by-step instructions on how to do this, please see the article How do I set up a new activity?