Customer story: Norfolk County Council, UK

High response rates

Norfolk County Council take consultation extremely seriously.

They have an entire team dedicated to consultation, and regularly consult on complex issues targeted at broad demographics.

They needed a robust tool that would help them reach high numbers of respondents, as some of the consultations they needed to run would affect many or most Norfolk citizens. Citizen Space was the best tool for the job. Its simple, no-nonsense user interface meant it was easy for people to share their views, and its reactive design meant that people could respond on any device - computer, tablet or mobile.

Since they started using it, Norfolk County Council have released more than 250 consultations, on topics including the year’s budget, road restructuring, children’s centres and libraries. Many of these have had thousands of responses. Even with a dedicated consultation team, going through such a huge amount of data can be a huge undertaking.

A simple admin experience

Fortunately, Citizen Space has plenty of features that simplify the response analysis process. Responses can be tagged, meaning it’s easy to turn qualitative (for example, free text responses) into quantitative data. Admin users can easily filter data by question or response for at-a-glance information on who answered what. And responses received offline, e.g. on paper, can be scanned directly on to the consultation’s back end and tagged in the relevant category, so there is no need to spend time on manually inputting offline data.

All in all, the platform has enabled the consultation team to engage with a huge range of citizens, whose opinions have been used to inform everything from the margin by which Council Tax should be increased to what the future of elderly care in Norwich should look like.