Digital engagement has become a standard part of community consultation, giving more people than ever the chance to share their views and influence decisions that affect their community.
This increased participation is a huge opportunity for more inclusive, representative decision-making, but it also brings new challenges.
Even well-managed engagement platforms can see repeated, duplicate, or coordinated submissions – whether from individuals, interest groups, or AI-generated content. Distinguishing genuine diversity of opinion from bulk or copycat responses is essential to maintaining the credibility and integrity of the consultation process. Failing to manage these issues can compromise the reliability of your engagement data, skew results, and erode trust between the community and decision-makers.
So how can organisations keep digital engagement inclusive and transparent, while ensuring that the feedback collected is meaningful, genuine, and actionable? In this post, we’ll explore practical strategies to protect the integrity of your consultation process and make the most of digital engagement.
Require Sign-In and Verify Residency
Requiring users to sign in before submitting feedback is a simple but effective way to ensure each submission is tied to a unique individual. This helps maintain the integrity of your consultation data and prevents duplicate or anonymous submissions from skewing results.
Depending on your project, you may want to collect location-based information, such as a postcode, suburb, or neighbourhood. This helps verify that contributors are genuine stakeholders and that their input is relevant to the area or project being consulted on.
Most engagement platforms allow you to set these details as mandatory member attributes during the sign-up process. It’s important to be transparent about why you’re collecting this information and how it will be used. Clearly explaining this to participants not only protects privacy but also reinforces trust in the consultation process.
Activate reCAPTCHA to Block Bots
Using a tool like reCAPTCHA is an effective way to prevent automated scripts and bots from flooding your surveys or comment tools. It adds a simple, low-friction layer of protection that doesn’t create barriers for genuine users, helping ensure that the feedback you receive is coming from real people.
Implementing reCAPTCHA is straightforward. Most engagement platforms allow you to enable it with just a few clicks. Once active, it helps safeguard the integrity of your consultation by automatically filtering out suspicious automated submissions, giving you confidence that the data reflects authentic community input.
Monitor IP Addresses for Unusual Activity
Most digital engagement platforms log IP addresses, which can provide valuable insight into submission patterns. Regularly reviewing this data can help you identify unusual activity. For instance, dozens of submissions coming from a single address in a short period, or addresses located outside the area relevant to your consultation.
While it’s normal to see multiple submissions from the same networks, such as households, libraries, or offices, patterns that deviate from expectations can be flagged for review. By identifying and investigating these anomalies, you can remove or clarify suspicious submissions and explain your moderation decisions in your project reporting. This adds transparency to your process and helps maintain trust with participants.
Set Strong Terms of Use (and Enforce Them)
Clearly outlining acceptable behaviour in your platform’s Terms of Use and Community Guidelines is essential, and it’s equally important to enforce them at the project level. You can also include project-specific rules to provide additional guidance for participants. A strong foundation of rules allows you to remove or moderate submissions that are inappropriate, repetitive, or spammy – particularly when interest groups attempt to influence results with mass copy-and-paste content.
As AI-generated submissions become more common, your Terms of Use should explicitly cover what is and isn’t acceptable when using AI to craft responses. Clearly stating how you will respond if patterns emerge or attempts are made to disrupt the process ensures you’re prepared to take action when necessary.
Transparency is key when enforcing these rules. For example, if you remove 83 near-identical submissions from a group advocating for a new pickleball court, communicate this briefly and clearly in your project report. Doing so preserves the credibility of your consultation, shows respect for participants, and reinforces your approach for your next project.
Be Transparent About What Is and Isn’t Negotiable
Being transparent and clear about your project is crucial for giving community members guidance on what types of submissions are acceptable. This helps participants focus their feedback on areas where their input can genuinely make a difference.
A good way to achieve this is by clearly defining what is and isn’t negotiable. Which parts of the project can the community influence, and which are out of bounds? Explain the reasons behind these decisions. You can also clarify the extent to which you will accept submissions generated by individuals or groups using AI.
For example, if you’re running a project to re-imagine a playground, specify which equipment can be changed and which significant trees must remain as part of the landscape. This avoids confusion and prevents participants from submitting suggestions that simply aren’t feasible, ensuring that the feedback you receive is meaningful and actionable.
Adjust Moderation Levels to Match the Project
Not all projects require the same level of moderation. For low-risk engagements, generally those with a clear positive outcome for the community – such as a new playground – post-moderation is usually sufficient. For more contentious or high-profile topics, however, it may be wise to enable pre-moderation and even self-moderation. In these cases, comments and submissions are reviewed before being published, either by the platform’s moderators or your own team, who have greater context and understanding of the project.
Projects that tend to spark stronger debate – such as Domestic Animal Management Plans, waste management initiatives, cycling infrastructure, or car parking which can often increase the passion in debate amongst members of the community, and these may benefit from higher levels of moderation.
Being intentional about the level of moderation, being transparent about which approach you will use upfront, and clarifying whether AI-generated submissions will be treated differently, ensures your team is prepared to manage issues if they arise.
Engage with Organised Groups Early
Many interest groups are well-intentioned. They’re passionate and want their voices heard. However, when a single project receives hundreds of near-identical submissions from one group, it can skew the results and reduce the value of the broader consultation.
High-volume submissions can take different forms. For example, one person may generate multiple AI-driven submissions, or a group leader may write a single submission and ask 100 members to submit the same text. Determining how to handle these situations ethically is important – you want to respect the views of participants while maintaining the integrity of your consultation.
That’s why engaging key stakeholder groups early in the process is critical. Where appropriate, consider accepting a coordinated group submission with signatures or endorsements, rather than allowing hundreds of copycat responses. This approach respects participants’ input while keeping your data clear and meaningful.
Mapping your stakeholders before a project starts is essential. Identify both your key influencers and those with a high level of interest. Using a stakeholder relationship management (SRM) system, such as Consultation Manager, can help you manage this through the project and beyond.
Take A Balanced Approach
Ultimately, preventing spam and repeated or duplicate comments – including those generated by AI – in digital engagement isn’t about locking people out. It’s about finding the right balance between access and accountability. You want to make it easy for genuine community voices to be heard while protecting the integrity of your consultation.
With a few smart settings, such as tailored moderation levels, proactive communication with participants, and clearly defined boundaries, you can create a safer, more reliable space for authentic feedback. Being intentional about these measures ensures that both your process and your data are credible and trustworthy.
At the end of the day, integrity matters – not just in the data you collect, but in the engagement process itself. By striking the right balance, you build trust, encourage meaningful participation, and make your community consultation more effective.
Want help setting up a secure, inclusive digital engagement space? Let’s chat about how to tailor your platform settings and moderation approach to the unique needs of your community and your projects.
