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.
In 2015, I was inspired by the conversations happening at the ELGL (Engaging Local Government Leaders) Annual Conference, specifically the discussions around making local government more accessible. Though I couldn’t attend in person, I followed the event closely on Twitter – a space that, at the time, felt like a safe haven for open, thoughtful dialogue. One particular moment stood out: a panel of young, innovative government officials tackling the barriers that often make council meetings difficult for many citizens to access. Their ideas were both practical and refreshing, sparking a lot of reflection of my own experiences with community engagement.
Fast forward to 2025, and the need to make meetings more accessible is as critical as ever. While the core principles of accessibility and inclusion remain unchanged, digital tools have revolutionised how we connect with our communities. Platforms like Social Pinpoint now provide unprecedented opportunities to break down barriers, engage broader audiences, and create more inclusive experiences for all.
In this article, I’ll explore five updated strategies for ensuring your community meetings are accessible in 2025, with a focus on leveraging digital engagement tools.
Five Strategies for Accessible Community Meetings Using Digital Engagement Tools in 2025
Discover five effective strategies for hosting accessible community meetings by leveraging digital engagement tools to foster inclusivity and public participation in 2025.
Meet People Where They Are —Physically and Digitally
Eliminate Barriers to Attendance with Hybrid Options
Use Visual and Plain Language Tools Online and Offline
Facilitate Participation for All with Digital Tools
Leverage Local Expertise and Digital Communities
1. Meet People Where They Are —Physically and Digitally
Rather than expecting the community to come to you, bring the meeting to them—both in person and online. When I wrote these points 10 years ago, I suggested holding in-person meetings in accessible venues such as libraries, cafes, or parks. It was important to ensure these venues were accessible for everyone, including those with mobility challenges.
Now, with the rise of digital engagement, platforms like Social Pinpoint allow you to host virtual town halls, interactive forums, and surveys that meet people where they already spend their time: online. By combining physical and digital spaces, you can capture insights from a much wider audience at any time and from anywhere. This hybrid approach ensures greater inclusivity, allowing for both in-person and online participation.
2. Eliminate Barriers to Attendance with Hybrid Options
Make it as easy as possible for people to engage by offering multiple participation options. Digital engagement tools can help you achieve this in several ways:
Provide virtual access: Stream meetings live or record them for on-demand viewing. Platforms like Social Pinpoint can host these recordings, allowing participants to watch at their convenience and provide ongoing feedback.
Share resources: Upload documents, presentations, and videos to an accessible online hub where participants can review materials before and after the meeting. This ensures that everyone has access to the same information, no matter their participation method.
Enable real-time interaction: Use tools like Quick Poll, Question & Answer, and live comment features to encourage active participation. These tools ensure that everyone, regardless of their location, can have their voice heard and engage in meaningful dialogue.
Support physical attendance: For those attending in person, ensure support for specific needs such as childcare, transportation, and venue accessibility. Addressing these factors helps remove common barriers to physical attendance and fosters a more inclusive environment.
3. Use Visual and Plain Language Tools Online and Offline
Inclusivity begins with clear and accessible communication. Digital platforms can enhance this in several ways:
Colour-coded documents: Use colour to make resources more visually distinct and easier to navigate. On Social Pinpoint, you can organise materials into sets in the Document Library for easy access. For printed documents, consider using a different colour on the front page to make it easy to locate during in-person discussions.
Plain language: Avoid jargon in both digital and physical documents. Opt for clear, concise language that is easy to understand. Ensure text is legible by using a font size of at least 12 points, making materials accessible to a wider audience.
Interactive formats: Engage a diverse range of learning styles by offering videos, infographics, and interactive maps. Platforms like Social Pinpoint can bring static images to life with tools like Hotspot, allowing for a more dynamic experience.
Accessible formats: Ensure materials are available in multiple formats to cater to different needs. This includes providing resources in large print, audio files, and screen-reader-compatible formats. Sharing videos on YouTube via Social Pinpoint is an easy way to make multimedia content accessible to all.
4. Facilitate Participation for All with Digital Tools
Creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable speaking up is key, whether in person or online. Digital platforms offer powerful tools to make participation easier and more inclusive:
Remove shyness: Allow participants to submit questions or feedback anonymously if they feel hesitant to speak up in public. This can help create a more comfortable space for those who might otherwise stay silent.
Interactive features: Use tools like Social Pinpoint’s Social Map orConversation to gather input in a non-intimidating, fun, and interactive way. These tools foster engagement without the pressure of speaking in front of others.
Red card/green card system: Replicate the offline concept of flags and signals by allowing users to give feedback on comments or questions digitally. Tools like thumbs up or down can help indicate which comments need clarification or which questions need to be addressed. Facilitators can then respond in real-time or during follow-up sessions, ensuring concerns are properly addressed.
5. Leverage Local Expertise and Digital Communities
Tap into both physical and digital networks to enrich your community engagement. Digital tools can help you leverage local knowledge and gather diverse perspectives:
Identify local experts: Engage community leaders through online platforms or forums by giving them a role or creating private spaces where they can share their insights.
Crowdsource ideas: Encourage participants to suggest meeting locations or topics using Social Pinpoint’s Gather or Visioner tools. These tools allow the community to drive the conversation and contribute to decision-making.
Translate resources: Work with local community groups to create multilingual content, ensuring your message reaches a broader and more diverse audience. Platforms like Social Pinpoint can host translated materials for easy access, or, with the Translation block (available as a paid for add-on), you can directly send content to communities in their preferred language. For example, I once worked with local groups to translate a DVD into seven languages, for the cost of a single professional translation. Not only did they handle the translations, but they also shared the content within their own networks. With tools like Social Pinpoint, you can digitise these efforts, making them more efficient and widely accessible to diverse groups.
Why Digital Accessibility Matters
Accessible meetings go beyond logistical exercises—they are fundamental to building trust and accountability with your community. By integrating digital tools with inclusive practices, you create opportunities for broader participation, foster genuine engagement, and ensure that every voice is heard.
In 2025, let’s commit to embracing innovative and inclusive approaches that make our meetings—whether in person or online—a space where everyone feels welcome. The effort to make meetings more accessible is not just worthwhile; it’s essential for creating a more connected, engaged, and empowered community.
As the Head of Practice or Practice Lead, we work to understand what is happening in our field. In this case, predicting community engagement trends for 2025. Our role allows us to attend industry events and speak with current customers to learn more about community engagement.
But, once a year, we take a bold step and try to predict the upcoming trends in community engagement. So, as we move into 2025, here are five community engagement trends that we think will make a huge impact for the next 12 months.
Five Community Engagement Trends for 2025
Here are our five predictions for community engagement trends for 2025:
Rebuilding Trust Through Community Engagement
More Compensation for Participation Involvement
An Increased Level of Diversity in Community Engagement
Immersive and Hybrid Virtual Experiences
Watch Out for Pickleball
1. Rebuilding Trust Through Community Engagement
Rebuilding trust between governments and their communities will be a central theme in 2025. Governments can foster trust by prioritizing inclusivity and demonstrating a commitment to addressing community needs through transparency, accountability, and ongoing dialogue.
For instance, governments can build trust by following some of these approaches:
Actively listen to residents’ concerns
Involve them in decision-making
Demonstrate a commitment to addressing their needs
Conduct regular town halls, participatory budgeting, and problem-solving sessions to help citizens shape policies that affect their lives
This builds a sense of shared responsibility and creates a stronger united community for building long term relationships. Through these efforts, governments will restore trust in public institutions. They will also create a stronger and more active civic culture. This culture will truly reflect the values and needs of the people it serves.
In most cases, this also includes using community engagement to go beyond decision-making. This is by using community engagement skills and tools to build connections around collective goals and outcomes that actually empower citizens.
Strathbogie Shire’s Initiative | Port Adelaide of Enfield’s Initiative
This includes projects like Strathbogie Shire’s initiative, which involves community members to spend public money on public art. Or, another example – City of Port Adelaide Enfield’s Get Shady‘ initiative, which involves creating shade canopies across the city to help reduce heat and support the climate.
This also matches the theme for next year’s Global Community Engagement Day, on January 28. It highlights the importance of trust-building in community development. In addition, demonstrates how genuine and transparent engagement can lay the foundation for stronger, more cohesive societies.
2. More Compensation for Participation Involvement
In recent years, compensating participants for their involvement in community engagement has gained traction. This is by moving beyond a voluntary civic duty towards a more equitable and professional approach.
Programs like deliberative panels in Victoria and Citizens Juries in South Australia have successfully provided compensation, covering costs for time, travel, and other expenses. These programs help to boost face-to-face public participation.
Local governments in Australia are seeking innovative ways to use compensation methods to enhance community participation. Their goal is to increase inclusivity and to gather more diverse input for projects that often see less engagement.
Compensation offers several key benefits, including:
Promotes inclusivity by reducing financial barriers to participation
Ensures equitable representation from marginalised communities
Acknowledges time and effort that residents contribute as experts by experience
Helps boost engagement, especially among individuals who may be unable to participate because of work or personal commitments.
Professionalizes community engagement by setting a standard for valuing public input and ensuring that people view engagement practices as legitimate and respected.
However, there are challenges to consider, including resource constraints, equity issues, and sustainability concerns. Striking the right balance in incentives is essential to prevent dependency or biased participation. This is while also ensuring that compensation structures remain fair and transparent.
When thoughtfully implemented, compensation can be a powerful tool for fostering deeper, more meaningful community involvement. This makes the engagement process more inclusive, and ultimately building stronger, more resilient communities.
An example of this is the South Metropolitan Health Service in WA. They set up an Advisory Panel, where they paid $40 per hour for meetings. This initiative aimed to involve individuals from diverse backgrounds. It underscores the importance of compensating for time in fostering engagement with key objectives and projects.
3. An Increased Level of Diversity in Community Engagement
In 2025, increasing diversity in community engagement will be a key focus for local and state governments across Australia. This will be as they work to make decision-making processes more inclusive and representative of their communities. Certain groups have often led engagement efforts. These groups are usually more affluent, well-educated, or have the time and resources to take part.
However, governments are now prioritising the inclusion of diverse voices, including:
Indigenous communities
Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) groups
People with disabilities
Other underrepresented populations
This change is happening because more people are seeing that inclusive engagement creates fairer results and improves decision-making. Local councils and state agencies are increasingly using targeted outreach, accessible digital engagement platforms, and culturally appropriate methods to reach underrepresented groups. This ensures that their concerns and ideas are being acknowledged and incorporated into policies.
This trend is being reinforced by the broader push for equity and social justice, as well as the recognition that diverse communities often face systemic barriers to participation, such as language, accessibility, or economic challenges. By 2025, governments are expecting to continue developing strategies to remove these barriers. This includes offering financial compensation for participation, providing translation services, and holding events in more accessible locations or times.
Digital tools, such as engagement platforms and even social media, is being used to reach a wider audience. This is apparent especially for those who may face mobility or transportation challenges. With these initiatives, Australian governments aim to not only meet legal and ethical obligations but to create more vibrant, cohesive communities where all citizens have a say in the decisions that shape their lives.
In July 2024, we conducted an Engaging for Equity survey with community engagement practitioners that garnered over 600 responses. The results showed that two groups are underrepresented in global engagement. These groups are people with limited English (32%) and those who identify as Aboriginal or Indigenous (32%). The primary barriers were a lack of trust, alongside feeling uninformed or unaware due to language and cultural differences, which ranked highly as significant challenges.
Given the significant political shifts in the UK, USA, and Europe, alongside the fallout from the Indigenous Voice to Parliament vote in Australia over the past year, we believe that diversity in community engagement will increasingly become a key focus for achieving equitable outcomes.
4. Immersive and Hybrid Virtual Experiences
With the rise of virtual and augmented reality, organisations will increasingly leverage these technologies to create immersive, hybrid environments for connection. Whether for virtual town halls, online events, or educational programs, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will bridge the gap between online and offline spaces. This is because it will allow people to connect more naturally in virtual environments. For instance, this could include helping people visualise projects that includes urban planning and new playgrounds.
Integrating these tools creates hybrid engagement experiences. By combining digital and online community spaces, people can join meetings, planning exercises, workshops, or local events from home. This approach helps maintain a sense of real-world connection.
The Department of Infrastructure and Transport in South Australia has added a VR experience to its events. This is a recent development for future transport projects in the State. After completing a survey and receiving the results, people can immerse themselves in a VR experience. Individuals can explore future transport concepts using interactive maps, by zooming in and rotating to examine details more closely.
5. Watch Out for Pickleball
Pickleball is a sport played both indoors and outdoors, where players use paddles to hit a hollow plastic ball over a net. The game continues until one side either fails to return the ball or breaks a rule.
Invented in 1965 as a backyard game for children in the United States, pickleball was designated the official state sport of Washington in 2022. It’s been recognized as the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. for 2021, 2022, and 2023, and now boasts national leagues, including in Australia.
So why is it a trend in community engagement? In some consultations across North America, many municipalities are asking for feedback on new recreation spaces. It just so happens that pickleball fans have flooded these discussions about play areas and sports facilities.
Organized groups of pickleball enthusiasts have “hijacked” consultations by encouraging their members to repeatedly request that pickleball should be included in the development plans. This is often done by providing members with consultation links, suggested wording for submissions, and encouraging up-votes on other pickleball-related public submissions.
In 2024, we learned of an instance where a council in Victoria was overwhelmed by over 140 submissions on a Gather wall from pickleball enthusiasts, accounting for nearly half of all submissions. This trend highlights not just the involvement of pickleball players, but the growing influence of organized groups in community consultations.
As digital engagement has evolved in recent years, we anticipate that more organized campaigns and community groups will emerge around specific projects and potentially leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). This will likely lead to projects becoming targets for coordinated responses and submissions from determined groups that are seeking to influence or alter the decision-making process.
With AI’s assistance, this process will become significantly easier. AI can generate multiple similar responses and even automate their distribution. Users of digital engagement platforms should be more aware of the tools and processes they can use.
Community engagement practitioners must improve their skills in finding key stakeholders and potential disruptors. They must also incorporate strategies into community engagement plans to either engage these groups upfront or as part of the standard process. Whether it’s bird watchers, cat enthusiasts, or pickleball players, 2025 will be the year of organized groups shaping community engagement consultations.
Learning how to provide the right prompts and inputs for these tools can be a challenging process. That’s why we’ve created our ‘ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for Community Engagement’ – a handy guide to help you kickstart your journey in leveraging AI for streamlined content creation.
As we move toward 2025, community engagement will continue to evolve with a focus on inclusivity, innovation, and transparency. To stay ahead, practitioners must embrace these trends and adapt to the changing landscape, fostering stronger, more resilient relationships between governments and the communities they serve.
Additionally, the rise of organised groups in consultations, driven by digital tools and AI, will require practitioners to adapt their strategies to ensure authentic, balanced input. As the practice evolves, these trends will shape the future of community engagement, fostering stronger, more resilient relationships between governments and the communities they serve.
At the start of each year, we dive into emerging trends in online community engagement, making predictions about what the next 12 months might bring. Now that 2024 is drawing to a close, it’s time to revisit those predictions and reflect on how they’ve panned out. By engaging with a broad range of clients, potential customers, and professionals across sectors—from local and state governments to industries and not-for-profits—we gain valuable insights into how community engagement is evolving and influencing decision-making processes.
Social Pinpoint’s close ties to the “frontline” help us spot trends early and anticipate shifts. Let’s take a closer look at how our top predictions for 2024 played out.
Here were our top five online community engagement predictions for 2024:
Hyperlocal Engagement
Elevated Data Transparency
AI Adoption at the Organisation Level
Community Empowerment in (Private) Digital Workspaces
Low Barrier Engagement
1. Hyperlocal Engagement
As mentioned in our 2024 community engagement trends blog, communities are becoming more familiar with public engagement. Since COVID, they have become increasingly hyperlocal in their thinking and acting.
In 2024, we predicted that organisations would need to adapt by offering tailored information and conducting consultations to better engage specific communities on hyperlocal projects.
While we don’t think we’ve seen the biggest shift yet to hyperlocal consultations (e.g., at a street level), we have noticed a growing trend, particularly within local government in Australia. These organisations aim to help communities gain a clearer understanding of what is happening in their local areas while encouraging residents to participate in engagement activities to foster trust—giving people the chance to raise issues or questions with their local ‘neighbourhood officer.’
By using a digital community engagement platform like Social Pinpoint, several councils, including those from cities such as the City of Melbourne (VIC), City of Adelaide (SA), and City of Port Adelaide Enfield (SA), as well as regional councils like Alpine Shire Council (VIC) and Gladstone Regional Council (QLD), have embraced the growing trend of neighbourhood portals or community hubs.
This involves creating a project space dedicated to specific neighbourhoods, wards, or communities. In most cases, by using our Project Map tool, organisations can showcase projects happening in local areas and connect people with local staff, such as neighbourhood or placemaking officers working in those communities. This trend appears to have been initiated by the City of Melbourne, which uses ongoing data collected to create a knowledge database benefiting the entire city council.
2. Elevated Data Transparency
Similar to the above, while it’s difficult to observe publicly and at the scale we initially anticipated, we have seen a noticeable increase in requests for API access in Social Pinpoint. This helps organisations leverage and utilise the data collected on the platform in various ways.
Organisations in Australia, like the Cities of Melbourne and Casey are just a handful of Social Pinpoint users who have continued to access high levels of data via our open API. They use this data to feed into PowerBI tools, creating custom dashboards for internal use and charts on their project pages, particularly when closing the loop.
Reporting back after a consultation has closed—or ‘closing the loop’ as we affectionately call it—is certainly a big driver for this trend and is key for building trust. Customers like the City of Port Adelaide Enfield clearly highlight in their engagement summary reports, using the Facts tool, things like who they heard from, how many responses they received, the themes they took away from the data, and relevant quantitative data showing how decision-making processes were made.
While the Northern Beaches Council uses the data they collect to manually update a submission response number on open projects, which we think creates a bit of FOMO for those who have not yet participated, it also clearly shows the community the number of people they are engaging.
3. AI Adoption at the Organisation Level
We stated earlier this year that AI is here to stay and evolve, and so far, we believe we’re right. Following the rapid adoption in 2023, 2024 has focused more on strategising and asking key questions about who, what, why, where, when, and whether it is safe.
Organisations have been evaluating the risks and benefits of AI applications, with some of the groups we work with even developing policies to define what can and can’t be used, and for what purposes. Although we can’t see this publicly, we’ve observed it through the increase in requests to our support desks and customer success teams. These requests focus on how we’re doing with our products and AI, as well as which potential plug-ins are compatible with both Social Pinpoint and Consultation Manager.
We’ve seen a significant increase in product requests related to reporting options and how we’re adopting AI to enhance capabilities such as qualitative summarising, theming, and auto-tagging.
Without explaining too much, our product roadmaps for 2025 will focus on reporting, particularly within Social Pinpoint. This will likely include updates to features like our assisted analysis capability, as our Product Manager has recently spoken with several customers who emphasised the need to simplify their work processes.
4. Community Empowerment in (Private) Digital Engagement Workspaces
We predicted growth in open dialogue models being applied in both private and semi-private workspaces to facilitate citizen panels, strategic planning and budgetary processes. Again, while we can’t show you how this happens, as it’s private, we do know that the private and password-protected functionality in Social Pinpoint has seen a significant increase in use.
Mini Frankston City Initiative | Frankston City Council
We’ve seen many Social Pinpoint users continue to leverage private projects to create mini-collaboration and empowerment spaces that are specific to one issue or community group. This includes favourites like Mini Frankston City, a city-wide representative group to more specific use cases around drug and alcohol recovery groups with some of our Local Health District customers. We have also seen an increase in questions about how to do this from current and potential customers looking to add deliberative groups to their engagement processes.
The private functionality is also helping more customers support decision-makers within the organisation. We’ve specifically heard from councils using it with newly elected members and landscape boards/natural resource management boards using it with their elected boards. This is important as it means users can share data from public consultations within one system easily and also have decision-makers use tools the community members are using for public participation.
5. Low Barrier Engagement
At Social Pinpoint, we expected this to be a trend in 2024, and we were certainly right. Organisations have shaken of the shackles of the last few years under COVID restrictions and have started to offer a much wider array of ways to engage—not just online. This mixture of digital, hybrid, and in-person engagement options, and indicating how much time each will require, has helped lower the barrier to entering a community engagement process.
We have seen more projects using timing on their digital tools, as well as advertising events such as pop-ups, where those with more time or those who prefer face to face interaction can come along and have their say on the project that interests them.
There’s been a growing trend towards presenting bite-sized, relevant information to help people quickly grasp the key aspects of a project, without the need to download large, cumbersome documents. The use of design tools that enhance the flow of a project page, such as our Block Quote tool (used in innovative ways to guide the narrative), is becoming increasingly popular. Additionally, short video introductions have also gained traction as an effective way to engage audiences and provide an overview of a project.
Community Vision Review Initiative | City of Darebin
This is clearly demonstrated by the City of Darebin’s Community Vision Review, where they utilised one of our coaching sessions to enhance the project’s user experience. The artwork on their site was created specifically for the project and is featured in the project banner, video flows, hotspots, and the survey
By using the Tabs and the Block Quote tool, we get great flow through the project, while Darebin also offered those in the community several low-barrier options to get involved. You can read a case study about this project, showcasing how our coaching sessions helped show a positive impact by increasing and empowering meaningful engagement.
Final Reflections
While not every prediction hit the mark, many of the key trends we anticipated have become more evident in 2024, contributing to the success of community engagement efforts. Hyperlocal engagement and greater data transparency have gained significant traction, with initiatives like neighbourhood hubs and visual ‘closing-the-loop’ projects helping to empower communities and build trust.
Though some trends, particularly those in private digital workspaces, remain difficult to fully validate publicly, we’re confident these shifts are taking shape. As we look ahead, it’s clear that the landscape of online community engagement continues to evolve, and these trends will play a crucial role in shaping the future of how we connect, collaborate, and make decisions together.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable rise in individuals receiving compensation for their participation in community engagement initiatives.What used to be seen as just a voluntary or civic duty has now become a more nuanced approach that truly recognizes and values the contributions of community members in meaningful ways.
Deliberative panels across Victoria, Citizens Juries in South Australia, and the Queensland Plan deliberation all included equitable payments or compensation for travel, accommodation, meals, and time, which helped boost participation. Now, local governments across Australia are discussing how these compensation methods, successfully used in large-scale projects, could be applied to support projects that typically see lower participation.
This shift highlights a broader trend towards prioritizing inclusivity, equity, and professionalism in community engagement, with the goal of enhancing both the quantity and quality of participation data. As a practitioner in this field, it’s crucial to understand the benefits and challenges of compensating individuals for their time and efforts in community engagement initiatives.
The Benefits of Compensating Community Engagement
Before we delve into the benefits of compensating community engagement, let’s set a scenario to help provide an example.
Community Engagement Scenario:
Now, consider a local council initiating a consultation process to develop a series of pedestrian crossings. In their community engagement plan, they identified the need to gather ideas via an online social map to help pinpoint potential locations for new crossings within the council area. Additionally, they planned to hold pop-up chats at key pedestrian traffic hotspots and organize a representative meeting with community members in the mid-afternoon. This meeting would include participants from various pedestrian groups, such as individuals with disabilities, parents with strollers, the elderly, and children.
Five Benefits of Compensation in Community Engagement
Using the scenario above, let’s explore five benefits of using compensation in community engagement.
Inclusivity
Equitable Representation
Acknowledgement of Time and Effort
Increased Engagement
Professionalisation of Community Engagement
1. Inclusivity
One major positive aspect of compensating people for participating in community engagement is that it promotes inclusivity. By providing financial compensation, we can ensure that individuals from diverse socio-economic backgrounds can actively engage in community activities without facing financial barriers.
For instance, looking at our scenario, some individuals might be unable to attend the proposed meeting due to travel expenses. However, by offering compensation, such as covering taxi or Uber fares, the local council can make it easier for participants to attend by arranging transportation bookings for community members.
2. Equitable Representation
Compensation helps achieve equitable representation in community engagement initiatives. It encourages individuals from marginalized communities to participate, by ensuring that their voices are heard and their perspectives are considered in decision-making processes.
Building on the above example, if people use a wheelchair and cannot access transport due to costs, pre-booking a wheelchair-accessible taxi can allow people with chronic health impairments to travel to the meeting without worrying about any expenses.
3. Acknowledgment of Time and Effort
Compensation recognizes the time, effort, and expertise that community members contribute as experts by (life) experience. It validates their contributions and encourages continued involvement by showing appreciation for their commitment. Compensation is not a benefit of participation and should not be discussed as such. It is a way to honour the time and energy of the community.
Using the example above, providing travel compensation ensures participants are not out of pocket and makes attendance easier for representatives of individuals with accessibility needs. However, they may also need to take time off work to travel and participate in the meeting. By offering financial compensation, you acknowledge and value the participant’s time and effort.
4. Increased Engagement
Financial incentives can lead to increased engagement levels. When people are compensated for their participation, they are more likely to be able to prioritize and dedicate time to community activities, leading to more meaningful and sustained involvement. Continuing the example, our participant has their travel covered, are being acknowledge with a payment and is able to do so at a time of day that overlaps with work hours.
Some members of the public with disabilities may work extra hours each week to earn overtime pay needed for their care expenses. This can prevent them from participating in civic activities they are interested in. Despite their eagerness to contribute, their involvement is often limited to filling out surveys, leading to frustration. However, by offering compensation for participation, they can afford to take time off work, allowing for increased engagement in initiatives of interest.
5. Professionalisation of Community Engagement
Offering compensation contributes to the professionalisation of community engagement practices. It sets a standard for valuing the work of community members and promotes a culture where community engagement is seen as a legitimate and respected field.
Finally in the example above, while budgets are generally small in the community engagement process, by adding in an element of compensation, budgets should be increased and shared across project partners to help compensate more participants.
Professionalism increases and community engagement becomes more representative as, in our scenario, people with high interest are able to successfully contribute thanks to the compensation that’s been received.
Challenges and Considerations
Considering that compensation for participation in community engagement has numerous positives we must also look at and consider the obvious challenges that also comes with it. Below we have listed five challenges and considerations.
Resource Constraints
Perceived Motivations
Equity Issues
Sustainability
Balancing Incentives
1. Resource Constraints
One of the challenges of compensating community engagement is the potential strain on resources. For instance, organizations may face budget limitations, especially in the area of community engagement, which makes it challenging to offer financial incentives to all participants.
2. Perceived Motivations
There can be concerns about the motivations of participants when compensation is involved. Some may worry that people participate solely for monetary gain rather than genuine interest in community betterment. Or potentially, there could be a bias toward telling the engagement officer what they think they want to hear. (i.e. being paid to be ‘agreeable’)
3. Equity Issues
While compensation promotes inclusivity, there’s also a risk of unintentionally creating inequities within the community if it’s not implemented thoughtfully. So, ensuring fair and transparent compensation structures is crucial. But, also in the issue of compensation, consideration must be given to the impact it has on those on benefits/pensions. Research what amounts, forms, and methods of compensation might be most appropriate for certain groups.
4. Sustainability
Sustaining compensation programs in the long term requires careful planning and ongoing funding. Organizations must consider the feasibility of maintaining such initiatives beyond short-term projects.
5. Balancing Incentives
Finding the right balance between offering enough compensation to incentivise participation without creating dependency or overshadowing intrinsic motivations is a delicate task that requires thoughtful design and evaluation. In these cases, tokenistic payments with gift vouchers or prize draws to illicit submissions should not be considered compensation.
Another crucial aspect to consider is minimizing meeting barriers during the initial stages of planning community engagement. Offering amenities like meals, childcare, transportation, translation services, wheelchair access, virtual alternatives such as Social Pinpoint, and providing masks/sanitizers, before even discussing compensation greatly enhances equity, inclusivity, and a sense of belonging among participants.
The rise in compensating people for participating in community engagement can be attributed to several factors. Firstly, there is a growing recognition of the value that community members bring to the table as experts by experience. Their insights are seen as essential for creating more effective and inclusive solutions to complex social challenges. Secondly, there is a heightened awareness of the need for equitable practices within community engagement, ensuring that everyone, regardless of background or circumstance, has a fair opportunity to participate and contribute meaningfully.
Lastly, the professionalisation of community engagement as a field has led to a shift in mindset, where compensating participants is viewed as not just a gesture of appreciation but also as a strategic investment in building stronger, more resilient communities and relationships both in the short term for one off projects and the long term where panels are developed to provide advice to organizations more broadly than for a specific project mandate.
We are in the enviable position of collaborating with hundreds of organizations worldwide and innovating together to drive community and stakeholder engagement forward. Our clients range from local and state governments to industry and nonprofits that use and rely on engagement in their decision-making processes. This experience allows us to take a pulse of engagement strategies and outcomes across a variety of fields and reflect on emerging online community engagement trends for 2024.
Here are our top 5 online community engagement predictions for 2024:
Hyperlocal Engagement
Elevated Data Transparency
AI Adoption at the Organization Level
Community Empowerment in (Private) Digital Workspaces
Low Barrier Engagement
1. Hyperlocal Engagement
Communities are very familiar with public engagement, and since COVID, they have become increasingly hyperlocal in their thinking and acting.
In most cases, this would be defined along the lines of geography. For example, a street, a neighbourhood, and a suburb. But it could extend to digital groups such as defined groups, panels, and boards. Organizations will need to and are adapting to this shift with appropriate information and consultations targeted at specific communities on hyperlocal projects.
For example, most local governments across Australia run tree planting schemes on a street-by-street basis where old trees and non-native species are replaced – this is known as Street Tree Renewal projects. Usually, the engagement around this is specific to the residents of that street only where trees are being replaced. This process limits the local government to maybe a handful of streets a year if they follow a process of mail-drop, feedback, and tree planting one street at a time.
By using a digital engagement platform like Social Pinpoint, consultations like this can be run concurrently or consecutively at a very hyperlocal level to scale engagement. These spaces can be built out to discuss and help local governments manage the process in an agreeable timeline, collaboratively with their communities.
Resort Municipality of Whistler, Canada | Municipal Facilities Feedback
An example from Canada, the Resort Municipality of Whistler is hosting two tandem engagement projects – one more general and one hyperlocal. The more general project is collecting broad feedback on Municipal Facilities, while the more focused and hyperlocal engagement is collecting feedback from youth and parents surrounding a specific Youth Centre. By dividing these into separate consultations, they’ve been able to create engagement strategies that reflect the need to bring younger and more diverse voices into decision-making processes.
City of Melbourne, Victoria | Neighbourhood Portals
At the City of Melbourne, hyperlocal has been on the agenda for a while now. Their Neighbourhood Portals allow community members to find projects in their neighbourhood and provide feedback using a variety of tools, including adding comments on maps. The data collected is then fed into a knowledge database for the various City of Melbourne staff teams to access and benefit from in the long term. This helps to cut down on engagement fatigue and repetitive questioning. In some cases, we know it has also had a big impact on giving a participation boost to ‘less attractive’ projects by associating them with the ‘more attractive’ ones.
City of Melbourne, Victoria | Urban Forest
Likewise, the City of Melbourne’s Urban Forest project has focused on reviewing Urban Forest Precinct Plans as implementation guidelines that underpin their wider Urban Forest Strategy. The 10 very specific precinct levels are where people can provide hyperlocal feedback by commenting on a Social Map. The project started in 2023 and will continue at least until 2025.
2. Elevated Data Transparency
Similar to the above, we’ve seen a growing expectation from the public for transparency on how their input is being actioned. They’re asking for greater detail on how engagement data is analysed and used for smarter decision-making. They want to feel that their opinion is valued.
Today, organizations are receiving larger data sets, not just from traditional in-person activities, but also digitally from platforms like Social Pinpoint and social media. With that, managing data has become increasingly important and using the data appropriately even more so.
Many organizations use tools, like Consultation Manager, to track stakeholder interactions in one place, cross-reference data across projects and use data beyond a single project. At the project level, they use Social Pinpoint to further analyse sentiment using AI, create thematic word clouds and highlight comments using visualization tools like maps, charts and graphs. The recent integration between these two solutions is helping engagement professionals save time and take their analysis to the next level. Still, others are turning to dedicated BI tools using our open API.
In Australia, the Cities of Melbourne, Wyndham and Casey are just a handful of Social Pinpoint users now accessing high levels of data via our open API to feed into PowerBI tools to create amazing custom dashboards for internal use and charts, some even sharing live feedback with their communities. This use case is on the rise as organizations want to show how data is working for them and their community.
West Hollywood, California | Target Vision Zero Action Plan
Having recently completed the public feedback portion of their Target Vision Zero Action Plan, the City of West Hollywood in California is now using its Social Pinpoint project page to close the loop and push the results and conclusions from that feedback back to the public. With an overview of the process, they use Social Pinpoint’s Tabs tool to break down their feedback into easily digestible sections. For example, under the Community Outreach tab, they use a screenshot of their final Social Map and under the Crash History tab, they review historical data.
While the plan has now been adopted by the City, they are still encouraging anyone who lives, works or spends time in West Hollywood to review the plan and provide feedback. This ongoing feedback will inform the next stage and the implementation of the proposed safety improvements recommended in the plan.
Hobsons Bay City Council, Victoria | Tourism Strategy
In 2024, we will certainly see more organizations transparently sharing engagement results online, like Hobsons Bay City Council. They close the loop on projects using a variety of content tools, likeFacts andHotspot in their Social Pinpoint toolkit, to share what they heard back to the community. They also use the data beyond the single project to promote smarter use across projects.
We are already seeing growth in data transparency and smart use this year, whether it’s sharing data internally for others to benefit from across departments (like the City of Melbourne’s, Neighbourhood Portals) or by including older yet still relevant data in project decision-making.
3. AI Adoption at the Organization Level
AI is here to stay and grow, hopefully with us. In 2023, early adoption was all about the ‘wow’ and exploring what AI could do for us as individuals. We saw no formal training, no rules and quickly developing products. Now, as we move into 2024, what we predict is that the ‘wow’ factor will fade and we’ll see serious adoption to enhance speed and efficiency at the organizational level.
Organizations have been working to explore the organizational risks and benefits of applications like ChatGPT and Dall-E, slowly trying out different systems and prompts to improve internal processes around survey writing and data analysis.
While data privacy and reputational risk remain major stumbling blocks to more mainstream application of AI in government, we anticipate that organizations will spend the next year developing robust internal systems and norms to establish acceptable use of these tools specific to the government context and even choosing preferred tools and creating “closed loop” AI systems.
The intersection of AI and community engagement offers a promising horizon. AI introduces efficiencies, personalisation and data-driven insights that can redefine the participation experience. Yet, balancing this technological prowess with the intrinsic human touch that has always underpinned interpersonal relationships is crucial. For more, see our blogs on ‘Will AI Replace Community Engagement’ and ‘10 Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Community Engagement’, including a downloadable prompt guide below.
For AI to be used responsibly and ethically in a way that fosters positive and inclusive community engagement, organizations will need to create systems that ensure data privacy, avoid biases in AI algorithms and maintain transparency. It will be interesting to examine the differences in how different parts of the world, with varying data protection laws, approach the normalization of AI tools – perhaps a topic for next year’s trends article.
4. Community Empowerment in (Private) Digital Engagement Workspaces
“Empower” has now been on the IAP2 Spectrum for 34 years and in 2024, we expect social empowerment in digital engagement workspaces will become more popular as a tool to aid deliberation, collective impact and ongoing relationship building. In particular, we predict growth in open dialogue models being applied both in private and semi-private workspaces to facilitate citizen panels, strategic planning and budgetary processes.
We’ve seen many Social Pinpoint users leverage private projects to create mini-collaboration and empowerment spaces that are specific to one issue or group. This can range from a birdwatching group to a greenway cleanup coalition, to a collection of nonprofits working in refugee resettlement.
Our Recovery is an example of a semi-private workspace hosted on Social Pinpoint – it combines public-facing transparency about members and the work of various groups. It facilitates private discussion spaces that empower those committees to work together during recovery after a natural disaster, using a place-based, community-led approach to ensure projects, grants and support programs developed are the right fit for the community.
City of Pittsburgh, United States | Oakland Plan
5. Low Barrier Engagement
This is a trend that has slowly been gathering steam globally over the last few years and covers the ability to offer your community the opportunity to engage in a project with little barrier to participation but maximum impact. In digital engagement, this means creating a pathway for engagement that reduces clicks, offers rapid feedback opportunities and avoids text-heavy documents. The idea is that you can carve out a path to engagement that reaches those who have very little time or capacity and a parallel path for those who have more time or capacity – yet both sets of input are aggregated and equally valued in the final decision-making process.
At Social Pinpoint, we see an increasing number of organizations designing participation strategies in this way and we expect this to trend up in 2024. Organizations will, for example, offer different digital, hybrid and in-person engagement options and indicate how much time each will require.
If you have 5 minutes, leave an idea via theVisioner board;
If you have 15 minutes (or more!), visit us in person at the pop-up at this place, on this date and at this time.”
There’s also an opportunity here to use various content tools to break down large text-based documents into bite-size relevant information to help people access the key elements of a project without the barrier of needing to download a heavy-weight document. A popular tool being used here is theFacts Card.
In 2024, we think we will see a big increase in the skill of producing low-barrier engagement. The ability to offer participants a choice of engagement opportunities based upon their self-determined interest and capacity is not an easy thing to do or manage, but an important part of bringing in more diverse voices. With the support of a high-level Customer Success Team, like the one at Social Pinpoint, we anticipate a move away from the question-heavy survey and associated survey fatigue and a shift towards more deliberative and interactive tools likeGather andSocial Map.
What do you think? Were we right with our review of 2023 in part one, and do you think our predictions for 2024 will be correct?
Before we look forward and reveal our predictions for the top 2024 trends in online community engagement, let’s look back. 2023 was the year that saw some very clear trends, especially in the digital community space. We saw hybrid engagement come of age, we saw really clear stages in engagement, and we even saw the rise of AI. Below, we’ve listed the five trends we have mapped as the top 2023 online community engagement trends.
The Solidification of Hybrid Engagement
Staged Engagement
Community Development and Going Beyond the Project
Participatory Budgeting
The Initial Adoption of AI in Community Engagement
1. The Solidification of Hybrid Engagement
We predicted this two years ago and it was certainly de rigueur for most when planning community engagement over the past year. Various forms exist, but many projects showcased a mix of online and offline engagement strategies.
City of Port Adelaide Enfield, South Australia | School Idea’s Pitch Project
The City of Port Adelaide Enfield represented this trend well with their ‘School Idea’s Pitch’ Project, which saw students act as elected members and make mock Council decisions on various issues offline. Their ideas were then shared online for community comment and support through upvoting, with some ideas being taken to the Council’s chamber for discussion. This was a great way to get younger members of the community engaged in what local government does at an early age and a good example of the value of hybrid engagement.
City of Clarington, Canada | Parks, Recreation and Culture Master Plan
On the Canadian side, Clarington in Ontario implemented a robust hybrid engagement strategy for their Parks, Recreation and Culture Master Plan, which included pop-up open houses around town, online meetings at various times of day, asynchronous digital engagement surveys, and even in-person kiosks at City Hall. The kiosks in particular saw great positive feedback on bridging the digital divide and high levels of engagement throughout the second half of 2023. It will be exciting to see how the kiosks are used going forward, and how peer municipalities learn from Clarington’s example.
2. Staged Engagement
When we say staged, we don’t mean fake news. Instead, what we mean are consultations with multiple stages of engagement from early engagement, even pre-engagement, through to closing the loop. Using a digital engagement platform makes staged engagement even easier and facilities a more robust process.
Strathbogie Shire, Victoria | Public Art Project
This was perfectly presented in Strathbogie Shire’s ‘Public Art’ Project, which started with pre-engagement to engage the community before the project had officially begun to see what community members were feeling, and ended with closing the loop to ensure that the participants were able to see the results of the project once it was concluded and so they could see their influence on the outcome.
Island County, Washington | Comprehensive Plan
With large and long-term planning projects, a similar goal can be achieved by using the same project space over time. Island County, Washington (USA), recently launched their Comprehensive Planning process with the intention of collecting ideas in the visioning stage, before later moving into the plan development stage. This will allow participants to influence the process while it’s still being developed and to find upcoming engagement opportunities both in- person and online.
3. Community Development and Going Beyond the Project
Late in 2023, at a conference in Canberra one of the speakers said, “people don’t live in projects, they live in places.” We couldn’t agree more. In the online space, what we have seen in the last year is the ‘traditional’ online community engagement starting to go beyond the project and transitioning to include more ongoing relationship and community development type projects. This will certainly continue into 2024 as it adds more value to the online space and also helps maintain and engage the online community.
City of Port Adelaide Enfield, South Australia | Get Shady Project
In 2023, a stand out project in Australia was the City of Port Adelaide Enfield’s ‘Get Shady’ project which engaged the community long term to distribute over 3000 native species of trees to help create a shade canopy to tackle climate change. This simple yet important project has helped the local government develop its relationship with the community on an issue that is on everyone’s minds while not providing a strict timeline.
Village of Deforest, Wisconsin | Birds of Deforest and Houses for Them
We also saw elements of this ‘beyond the project’ style work in North America in towns like Deforest, Wisconsin, where they are using Social Pinpoint to capture community spirit and a little bit of Citizen Science around birdwatching and acknowledging the role of community advocates to preserve and support this activity.
4. Participatory Budgeting
Participatory Budgeting started in Brazil in the 1980s, and it was used across Europe as a recovery tool to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It is now growing in use throughout Australia and North America. It’s not surprising that we are starting to see a big increase in the use of Social Pinpoint’s Fund It tool.
Now a popular tool, Fund It is certainly seeing more use in local government budgeting processes. It’s also often used in funding community projects; for example, participatory budgeting and tradeoff exercises can be used to engage the public in choosing everything from building elements of playgrounds and dog parks, to voting on the final designs for public art and mural projects.
Bayside City Council, Victoria | Library of Things
A favorite of ours is Bayside City Council’s ‘Library of Things‘ because it encapsulates the local government’s desire to spend public money on items for the library, like lawn mowers and kitchen utensils. But it takes away the stigmatic cost element by first asking the Community to choose items using points in the Fund-it tool and secondly by asking them to provide their own ideas via the Gather tool. While there is no project decision here to be made, the community is using participatory budgeting to own its Library of Things.
In Monterey, California, they deployed the Fund It tool to assess community values around distribution of housing units (instead of dollars or points!). The question posed was: “We need to accommodate X many additional housing units in Monterey over the next X many years, how would you distribute those units among the following neighborhoods?” The Fund It tool gave project managers space to explain the tradeoffs involved in choosing different neighborhoods while still keeping the budgeting exercise simple enough to be accessible to a broad cross-section of interested community members.
5. The Initial Adoption of AI in Community Engagement
While we are only just really learning the possible impacts (good and bad) of AI in community engagement, ChatGPT set the world alight earlier in 2023 with talk of how AI could help us with our everyday lives. If you attended any conference between September and December 2023 in the community engagement space, you would have surely encountered at least one workshop, session or keynote on the subject. Earlier last year, IAP2 North America even hosted a six-part series on the role of AI in public participation while at least three sessions at the IAP2 Australasian Conference were about AI.
What we have learnt is that there are both advantages and disadvantages to early adoption with AI. Speed and efficiency are great at an organizational level; however, the human element is often critical in a community engagement context, and data privacy and reputational risk must be carefully considered in the deployment of AI tools. Are your communities and stakeholders ready for it, even if you are?
We were excited to see these trends advance the field of community engagement in 2023. While some of these trends, such as hybrid engagement, continued to build from previous years, we expect many of these trends, like the growth of AI, will certainly continue to take shape into 2024.
In recent years, we’ve observed the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), and it shows no sign of slowing down, particularly in the foreseeable future. Notably, it’s consistently reshaping our behaviors, decision-making processes, and the way we interact with one another. Yet, with the ongoing development and increased integration of AI into our daily lives, a crucial question arises: Will AI replace community engagement?
Community engagement has played a crucial role in being responsible for societal progress, fostering connections, shared visioning, and better placemaking. However, as AI technologies evolve, there’s been a growing curiosity and an increasing amount of uncertainty about if and how it can change the way people engage in communities.
Within this article, we will explore the benefits and challenges of AI while discovering ways to strike a balance between technology and human connection for community engagement.
The Benefits of AI in Community Engagement
The relationship between AI and community engagement offers a promising horizon. It introduces efficiencies, personalization, and data-driven insights that can redefine the participation experience. It’s crucial to balance this technological prowess with the intrinsic human touch that has always underpinned customer relationships. Here are 5 advantages of using AI in your community engagement strategies:
1. Speed and Efficiency
2. Consistent Moderation
3. 24/7 Availability
4. Reducing Human Error
5. Helping in a Repetitive Job
1. Speed and Efficiency
Successful community engagement projects, particularly when online tools are used, can lead to massive volumes of data. While quantitative datasets can be easily visualized using colourful graphs to garner instant insights, analyzing qualitative data can be daunting and time consuming. This is where AI can drive speed and efficiency.
For instance, you can use Social Pinpoint’s Analysis Assistant to analyse vast amounts of unstructured, qualitative data in real-time. This means that you can utilise your engagement data to quickly gather sentiments, themes, and insights.
2. Consistent Moderation
Through programming, AI can enforce consistent community guidelines and moderation to ensure that all users are treated fairly and equally. By utilizing AI driven moderation such as Social Pinpoint’s anti-SPAM technology, you can leverage AI to automatically identify and address any potential violations and harmful content, which results in a safer and more inclusive digital environment.
3. 24/7 Availability
AI never sleeps, allowing AI-driven humanized chatbots and virtual assistants to provide round-the-clock community support to residents in real-time. AI possesses the capability to accommodate diverse time zones and work schedules, enabling you to promptly address various needs and concerns, ultimately enhancing the overall user experience for community members. This 24/7 support contributes to a more engaging and accessible platform for users worldwide.
If you look at FranklyAI for example, you can move away from surveys and forms and effectively chat with AI who is actively listening using user led conversations. It’s more conversational that the standard chatbot that will normally find out information from you to then provide information back, normally with choices.
4. Reducing Human Error
While mistakes are bound to happen, you can harness AI for community engagement to reduce human errors. While human moderation will always be highly valuable, AI has automated processes that can consistently analyze data and interactions, reducing the risk of oversight or mistakes in content moderation. Additionally, AI algorithms can adapt and learn from patterns, ensuring a more accurate and efficient identification of issues, further enhancing the overall reliability of community management.
5. Helping in a Repetitive Job
To help assist you with tedious repetitive tasks, AI can also help you by automating repetitive procedures so that you can concentrate on more intricate and other creative areas of your work. So, not only will it accelerate particular workflows, but it also has the ability to reduce the likelihood of humans feeling fatigued, to help promote a more sustainable and fulfilling work environment.
Let’s turn our attention to the challenge of using artificial intelligence for community engagement now that we have explored what benefits it can bring.
The Challenges of AI in Community Engagement
AI, however, lacks the human touch to create an authentic connection. While AI offers numerous advantages, it is important not to overlook the value of human interaction in building and maintaining thriving community engagement. Some key aspects that AI cannot fully replicate include:
Emotional Intelligence
Body Language
Active Listening
Building Rapport
Adaptability
1. Emotional Intelligence
Emotions hold significant importance in community engagement, particularly in handling sensitive or emotionally charged situations. While AI can replicate and simulate emotional responses to some degree through data and algorithms, it is unable to truly ‘feel’ emotions, as it lacks essential biological systems.
Humans, on the other hand, possess the ability to understand and empathize with emotions, making them better suited to navigate such situations than AI. This is why human interaction and moderation will always be valuable in community engagement, with support from AI to respond to more common comments and to flag areas of concern.
2. Body Language
Communication is more than just words. It also entails expressing our genuine emotions and thoughts through body language. In fact, body language contributes to over 90% of the information we convey. Nonverbal cues like gestures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and tone of voice also plays a crucial role in conveying meaning.
Despite AI’s diverse capabilities, it becomes more of a challenging task for it to understand elements like sarcasm. Humans, however, possesses the ability to interpret body language, which allows individuals to gain insights into others’ true feelings, enabling context-aware communication in various interpersonal interactions.
3. Active listening
While some AI models claim to have active listening capabilities, that’s obviously with the data that is shared. In a human situation, whether in a room or online, additional and off-topic comments can be as valuable as during a community engagement session.
4. Building Rapport
Genuine, human connections foster trust and relationships among community members, which in turn helps to create a supportive and engaging environment. Incorporating human intuition and empathy into community interactions can help Council’s to understand the needs and desires of their residents and effectively handle their concerns. In addition, genuine connections can contribute to a sense of belonging and strengthen the bonds that go beyond the capabilities of AI-driven communication.
5 Adaptability
Community engagement professionals can adjust more easily to unique circumstances by identifying and responding to the evolving needs and preferences of their communities. Individuals are able to cope with such situations with greater sensitivity by understanding and addressing the needs and concerns of their community members through personalised and tailored approaches through human touch in their involvement in the community.
Striking the Perfect Balance: AI and Human Collaboration
The integration of AI in community engagement poses challenges and opportunities. Achieving the optimal balance between AI and human interaction allows you to leverage the strengths of both, fostering a more efficient, supportive, and engaging environment for participants. With the correct approach, AI becomes a powerful tool that enhances, rather than diminishes, the distinctive human connections fundamental to any community engagement process.
However, it’s essential to use AI responsibly and ethically. In order to promote positive and integrated community engagement, it is essential that key factors be taken into account, such as data protection, avoidance of bias in artificial intelligence algorithms or the preservation of transparency in AI-driven processes. The potential of AI to improve the community’s involvement and strengthen connections with users is going to increase as it evolves.
Achieving the full advantages of AI in online communities, while maintaining the human touch, hinges on striking the right balance between technology and human interaction. Here are a few ways you could strike this balance:
Hybrid Model
AI as an Assistant
Continuous Improvement
1. Hybrid Model
Employ a combination of AI-driven tools and humans for things like moderation and analysis. Use AI to handle routine tasks, such as basic moderation, sentiment analysis and answering FAQs, while reserving more complex or sensitive issues for human intervention. Social Pinpoint has a wide range of participation tools, including optional moderation levels and the ability to turn the assisted analysis on and off when needed.
2. AI as an Assistant
Artificial intelligence virtual assistants, like chatbots and ChatGPT, contribute to improved interaction between humans and AI, by utilizing data-driven insights to make better-informed decisions. Consequently, this can also help address concerns within communities and enhance a council’s community engagement strategy. To see how AI can help you, our team created a ‘ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for Community Engagement’ so you can get started on utilizing AI to streamline content creation.
3. Continuous Improvement
It’s important to regularly evaluate the performance of your AI tools and to make adjustments when necessary to maintain a harmonious balance between AI and human engagement. By doing so, you can ensure that technology will compliment and augment human capabilities rather than overshadowing the essential aspects of genuine community connection.
In summary, AI can serve as a valuable tool for aiding community engagement professionals with capabilities like data and sentiment analysis, communication automation, and to save you time. However, it is not likely that AI will replace community engagement. This is because within community engagement, authentic human touch and interactions remains essential for cultivating stronger relationships with residents, which is something that cannot be replicated by technology alone.
In a recent study released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in October 2023, it was revealed that 42.9% of Australians aged 16–85 had experienced a mental health disorder at some point in their lives. Specifically, within the last few years, predominantly during the pandemic years from 2020 to 2022, it indicated that 21.5% of individuals aged 16–85 had a 12-month mental disorder, while 37.9% had a selected physical condition. Comparing this to the 2017-18 data, there was an increase from 20.1% to 17.5% in 2014-15 for Australians with a mental or behavioural condition.
Concerning this surge in mental health disorders, we spoke with a well-known mental health agency to understand the implications for engagement levels between individuals and agencies post-pandemic.
When it comes to mental health engagement, a local focus is preferred. Those accessing mental health services tend to favour local services with regional knowledge, often avoiding online relational engagement tools. Mental health services predominantly engage online by sharing resources and facilitating support groups, including reference groups comprising individuals with specific mental health conditions and groups involving their families and caregivers.
Present engagement activities primarily involve surveys conducted by various agencies, while face-to-face grassroots engagement occurs at the local level through offices, established meeting places, or social media where data management and analysis are challenging.
Despite agencies utilising social media for organic content and advertising outreach, engaging service users with privacy and confidence remains a challenge.
Considering the ongoing outreach, feedback, and engagement, why not explore the use of a digital engagement platform to consult individuals, involve groups, and promote resources and outcomes from these collaborations, especially at a local level?
Five Benefits of Utilizing Digital Engagement for Mental Health Professionals
Here are five benefits of utilizing digital engagement for professionals in the mental health field when the focus is on staying local:
Enhanced Local Connections
Increased Accessibility
Tailored Support Services
Reduced Stigma at a Local Level
Collaborative Local Initiatives
1. Enhanced Local Connections
Digital community engagement facilitates mental health professionals in establishing stronger connections within their immediate geographical area. This approach fosters a sense of community and solidarity, exemplified by the City of Melbourne’s successful Neighbourhood Portals on Social Pinpoint.
Peer Support Groups – Facilitating online peer support groups where individuals can connect, share experiences, and provide mutual support. Peer support has shown to be effective in reducing feelings of isolation and promoting a sense of belonging.
2. Increased Accessibility
Digital community engagement platforms broaden the reach of mental health professionals, connecting with a more diverse audience locally. This accessibility extends support to individuals who may face barriers to traditional in-person services due to geographical limitations or disabilities. Social Pinpoint’s bespoke translation tool enhances engagement diversity across different languages in your locality.
Crisis and intervention resources – Ensuring that the platform includes easily accessible crisis intervention resources, such as helplines and mental health crisis services is vital. Having immediate access to support in times of crisis is crucial.
3. Tailored Support Services
Professionals can use digital engagement platforms to collect local information, offering support services and resources tailored to the unique needs of their community. Social Map simplifies data collection for a more effective understanding of local challenges.
Interactive Assessments and Screening Tools – Include evidence-based mental health assessments and screening tools to help individuals self-assess their mental health. These tools can guide users to appropriate resources based on their needs.
4. Reduced Stigma at a Local Level
Engaging with digital communities allows mental health professionals to address stigma directly. By participating in local conversations about mental health, they can break down stereotypes and promote open dialogue, ultimately reducing stigma on a community scale. Social Pinpoint’s Conversation tool facilitates open discussions in groups or privately.
Psychoeducational resources – Provide evidence-based psychoeducational resources on various mental health topics. This can include articles, videos, and infographics that offer practical tips and information for managing mental health challenges.
5. Collaborative Local Initiatives
Digital platforms provide a space for mental health professionals to collaborate with local organizations, government agencies, and community leaders. This collaborative approach ensures that solutions are well-suited to the local context. Social Pinpoint’s Private Project functionality allows professionals to work together confidently before launching any initiatives.
Community initiatives – Engaging the community in collective challenges or initiatives that promote a sense of unity and purpose. Collaborative efforts can contribute to a supportive community environment.
In summary, digital community engagement offers mental health professionals a range of benefits, including enhanced local connections, the ability to tailor support services, reduced stigma at a local level, collaborative local initiatives, and targeted outreach and services. These advantages empower professionals to make a significant impact on the mental health and well-being of their local communities.
As the festive season dawns upon us, it’s tempting to assume that community engagement should take a back seat while individuals revel in the holiday cheer away from home. Community engagement during the holidays goes beyond decorations and celebrations; it’s about building connections and plans that last. Therefore, it’s precisely during this time of joy that nurturing engagement becomes even more vital.
Let’s explore how community engagement can be adapted during the festive period, considering the travel and festivities that often pull residents away from their usual life cycle routines.
Three Strategies for Festive Community Engagement
In the spirit of the holiday season and nurturing connections, here are three strategies that can be utilized to boost your upcoming community engagement for the festive season.
Closing the Loop
Planning Ahead
Celebrating the Wins
1. Closing the Loop
Closing the loop in community engagement involves creating a feedback system that ensures once everyone’s voice has been heard, they get to hear how their input has influenced an outcome. The festive period often brings a sense of reflection, making it an ideal time to address projects that have advanced or closed throughout the year.
By actively closing the loop on community feedback, residents will feel valued and heard, fostering a stronger sense of belonging. With Social Pinpoint and Consultation Manager’s in-built emailer, you can use it to showcase all the excellent projects that you have closed, much like a family Christmas newsletter.
2. Planning Ahead
While the festive season is a time for joy and celebration, it’s also a crucial period for planning your community engagement initiatives for the year ahead. Therefore, use this time to gather input on potential projects from colleagues around the organization, possible events you could support, and improvements that can be made from what you have learned in the past 12 months.
Hosting visioning sessions or collaborative workshops both with colleagues and community groups can help identify community priorities. Planning ahead not only ensures a smoother execution of future initiatives but also demonstrates a proactive commitment to better community engagement.
By utilizing the data you have collected on tool use and participation levels in Social Pinpoint and/or reports on issues learnt and interaction types in Consultation Manager, planning how best to engage next on that sticky upcoming project should be well informed and easier than pulling a Christmas cracker when the time comes to deliver.
3. Celebrating the Wins
Reflecting on the achievements and positive changes within the community after a successful project is essential for morale and motivation not only for the community who participated but also the staff that have spent many hours planning, executing and delivering. Take the time to celebrate the wins, both big and small.
Whether it’s completing a project, reaching an engagement goal, or fostering positive stronger and bigger relationships, ensure you acknowledge and share these successes. Celebrating these wins not only boosts morale but also inspires a sense of pride and accomplishment, encouraging continued active participation. With over 30 content tools in Social Pinpoint, showing these wins off in a high visual and active way is simple. It’s like putting the icing on the Christmas cake.
As we immerse ourselves in the festive spirit, let’s not forget the power of community engagement. While we certainly don’t advocate doing any engagement over the Christmas period – unless it’s something fun like City of Canada Bay’s Christmas Window competition or helpful like City of Pittsburgh’s Snow Angels, using this time for closing the loop on feedback, planning ahead for the future, and celebrating the wins are three key components that can elevate your practice during this joyous season.
By fostering connections, being actively prepared for the next 12 months, and recognising achievements, organisations and communities can lay the groundwork for a thriving and engaging future together. Happy holidays!
