Allowing multiple people from the same organisation to contribute to one response

Citizen Space has a 'save and return' feature, which is designed to enable an individual respondent to save their in-progress response partway through and return to it at a later time via a link they receive in an email.

Some Citizen Space customers make use of this feature to allow multiple people from the same responding organisation or household to contribute to a single online response. This can be achieved by the following steps:

1. The first person starts filling out a response and when they have done as much as they want to, they use the save and return feature and enter their email address.
2. They will receive an email with a link into the online response. They can forward the email on to, or share the link from the email with, anyone they choose to, who will then be able to access the incomplete response and fill it in.
3. The people contributing to the response should communicate among themselves to agree when the response is ready to be submitted, and then one respondent should progress through to the submission page.

Some caveats to bear in mind when using Citizen Space for this purpose:

• If more than one person has the same response open at the same time they can accidentally overwrite one another's work, so it is strongly advised that they communicate clearly about who will be accessing the response at which times and ensure that only one person is looking at the response at a time. We'd suggest that each contributor waits until the previous person lets them know that they have finished editing, saved their work and closed the page.
  • Note: To save their progress on a page, the respondent needs to have selected a button somewhere on that page — for example, the 'Continue' button, the 'Back' button, the 'First' page button or the 'Save and come back later' button. Citizen Space does not receive the data entered on a page until a button has been selected.
• Anyone who has access to the save and return link will be able to view and edit the incomplete response, so it is up to the people using this method to carefully manage the data protection risks and make sure everyone involved understands those risks.
• Once a response has been submitted it can no longer be edited, so all of the respondents should be made aware of this and not progress to the submission page until everyone is agreed that the response is complete.